page_title: Migjeni
section_title: Poetry
hierarchical_section_title: Migjeni / Career / Poetry
caption_attribution_description: Realised with funding from Fran Gjoka. Implemented from the sculptor Ardian Pepa in 2016.
context_page_description: Millosh Gjergj Nikolla, commonly known by the acronym pen name Migjeni, was an Albanian poet and writer, considered as one of the most important of the 20th century. After his death, he was recognized as one of the influential writers of interwar Albanian literature.
  Migjeni is considered to have shifted from revolutionary romanticism to critical realism during his lifetime. He wrote about the poverty of the years he lived in, with writings such as "Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread", "The Killing Beauty", "Forbidden Apple", "The Corn Legend", "Would You Like Some Charcoal?" etc., severely conveyed the indifference of the wealthy classes to the suffering of the people.
  The proliferation of his creativity gained a special momentum after World War II, when the communist regime took over the full publication of works, which in the 1930s had been partially unpublished.
context_section_description: His slender volume of verse (thirty-five poems) entitled Vargjet e Lira ("Free Verse") was printed by Gutenberg Press Publisher in Tirana in 1936, but was banned by government censorship. The second edition, published in 1944, was missing two old poems Parathanja e parathanjeve ("Preface of prefaces") and Blasfemi ("Blasphemy") that were deemed offensive, but it did include eight new ones. The main theme of Migjeni was misery and suffering, a reflection of the life he saw and lived.
  Migjeni made a promising start as a prose writer. He is the author of about twenty-four short prose sketches which he published in periodicals for the most part between the spring of 1933 and the spring of 1938.
  He possessed all the prerequisites for being a great poet. He had an inquisitive mind. Though his verse production was no more voluminous than his prose, his success in the field of poetry was no less than spectacular in Albania at the time.
  The main theme of Free verse, as with Migjeni's prose, is misery and suffering. It is a poetry of acute social awareness and despair. Previous generations of poets had sung the beauties of the Albanian mountains and the sacred traditions of the nation, whereas Migjeni now opened his eyes to the harsh realities of life, to the appalling level of misery, disease, and poverty he discovered all around him. He was a poet of despair who saw no way out, who cherished no hope that anything but death could put an end to suffering. "I suffer from the child whose father cannot buy him a toy. I suffer from a young man who burns with unslaked sexual desire. I suffer from the middle-aged man drowning in the apathy of life. I suffer from the old man who trembles at the prospect of death. I suffer from the peasant struggling with the soil. I suffer from the worker crushed by iron. I suffer from the sick suffering from all the diseases of the world... I suffer with man." Typical of the suffering and of the futility of human endeavor for Migjeni is Rezignata ("Resignation"), a poem in the longest cycle of the collection, Kangët e mjerimit ("Songs of poverty"). Here the poet paints a grim portrait of our earthly existence: somber nights, tears, smoke, thorns and mud. Rarely does a breath of fresh air or a vision of nature seep through the gloom. When nature does occur in the verse of Migjeni, then, of course, it is autumn.
  If there is no hope, there are at least suffocated desires and wishes. Some poems, such as Të birtë e shekullit të ri ("The sons of the new age"), Zgjimi ("Awakening"), Kanga e rinis ("Song of youth") and Kanga e të burgosunit ("The prisoner's song"), are assertively declamatory in a left-wing revolutionary manner. Here we discover Migjeni as a precursor of socialist verse or rather, in fact, as the zenith of genuine socialist verse in Albanian letters, long before the so-called liberation and socialist period from 1944 to 1990. Migjeni was, nonetheless, not a socialist or revolutionary poet in the political sense, despite the indignation and the occasional clenched fist he shows us. For this, he lacked the optimism as well as any sense of political commitment and activity. He was a product of the 1930s, an age in which Albanian intellectuals, including Migjeni, were particularly fascinated by the West and in which, in Western Europe itself, the rival ideologies of communism and fascism were colliding for the first time in the Spanish Civil War. Migjeni was not entirely uninfluenced by the nascent philosophy of the right either. In Të lindet njeriu ("May the man be born") and particularly, in the Nietzschean dithyramb Trajtat e Mbinjeriut ("The shape of the Superman"), a strangled, crushed will transforms itself into "ardent desire for a new genius," for the Superman to come. To a Trotskyist friend, André Stefi, who had warned him that the communists would not forgive for such poems, Migjeni replied, "My work has a combative character, but for practical reasons, and taking into account our particular conditions, I must maneuver in disguise. I cannot explain these things to the [communist] groups, 
caption: A monument of Migjeni in Pukë.
exif: {"Image ImageDescription": "", "Image Make": "Xiaomi", "Image Model": "Redmi Note 4", "Image Orientation": "0", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "MediaTek Camera Application", "Image DateTime": "2017:05:11 15:47:39", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Co-sited", "Image Tag 0x0220": "0", "Image Tag 0x0221": "0", "Image Tag 0x0222": "0", "Image Tag 0x0223": "0", "Image Tag 0x0224": "0", "Image Tag 0x0225": "", "Image ExifOffset": "414", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "1268", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "33280", "Thumbnail YCbCrPositioning": "Co-sited", "EXIF ExposureTime": "903/1000000", "EXIF FNumber": "2", "EXIF ExposureProgram": "Unidentified", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "105", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0220", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2017:05:11 15:47:39", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2017:05:11 15:47:39", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "0", "EXIF MeteringMode": "CenterWeightedAverage", "EXIF LightSource": "other light source", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire", "EXIF FocalLength": "7/2", "EXIF SubSecTime": "31", "EXIF SubSecTimeOriginal": "31", "EXIF SubSecTimeDigitized": "31", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "3120", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "4160", "Interoperability InteroperabilityIndex": "R98", "Interoperability InteroperabilityVersion": "[48, 49, 48, 48]", "EXIF InteroperabilityOffset": "918", "EXIF ExposureMode": "Auto Exposure", "EXIF WhiteBalance": "Auto", "EXIF DigitalZoomRatio": "1", "EXIF SceneCaptureType": "Standard"}