THE SIEGE WAS FIRST PUBLISHED IN 1970 when Kadare was still living in Albania and it was governed by the last Stalinist in power, Enver Hoxha. The author revised it after he moved to Paris in 1991, adding references to the Albanians' Christianity, an
d it was then re-published in the bilingual (Albanian and French) edition of his collected works. It is from the French version that David Bellos has made this translation.
Normally translation at, as it were, second hand takes a book one remove further from the original, as was the case with some of the first English versions of Dostoevsky's novels, translated from the French, not the Russian. But this is different. Kadare himself supervised the French editions of his novels, and Bellos has worked in close collaboration with him while rendering them into English. So his translation may fairly be considered as authentic as it is elegant and vivid.
The novel is set in the 15th century, when Albanian resistance to the advance of the Ottoman empire was being led by the national hero Skanderbeg (also known as George Castrioti). Skanderbeg is to Albanians as William Wallace is to us – but because he was, correctly, regarded as the defender of Christendom against Islam he also became a European, as well as Albanian, hero – there is a Piazza Skanderbeg in Rome, for instance. Skanderbeg was a nom de guerre: it means Lord Alexander, deliberately linking him to Alexander the Great, whom Albanians regard as one of their own. In the novel he is off-stage, talked of as campaigning in the mountains, never actually encountered.
The Siege is mostly written from the point of view of the Ottomans, gathered to attack an Albanian city, over the citadel of which flies the two-headed eagle, while a cross – "a mere instrument of torture", in the view of the pasha commanding the besieging army – stands on top of the citadel's church. There are linking chapters ostensibly written by a monk in the citadel, but otherwise we learn little about the besieged.
The diverse personalities in the Ottoman army are vividly presented, as are the horrors of war from that army's point of view. The descriptions of the failed assaults on the stronghold are brilliant, but the accounts of the battle conferences held by the pasha are equally compelling. You may have difficulty sometimes in remembering who's who in the large cast, but you will never question the authority with which Kadare reveals them.
The novel is not for the faint-hearted. There may be glamour in the descriptions of the various units of the Ottoman army, but there is no glamour at all in its actions. This is war at its most inventive and its nastiest. Hoping that the besieged are dying of thirst, the doctors open up the body of a captive, before he is dead, to see if he has been drinking water. Boys are beheaded for showing too much curiosity. Rapes are frequent. Cages of diseased rats are fired into the citadel. At one point the quartermaster, who has another more sinister assignment, discusses whether it is possible to exterminate a whole population. The relevance of this argument to the 20th century is inescapable.
So also is a discussion about the unprecedentedly powerful cannon being deployed for the first time. The engineer reveals that his predecessor who was also his master had refused to make these cannon because they "would become a terrible scourge that will decimate the human race". "'But I have a different view of the matter,' the engineer explained. 'I think that if we give in to scruples of that kind, then science will come to a stop. War or no war, science must advance. I don't really mind who uses this weapon, or against whom it is used. What matters to me is that it should hurl a cannon-ball along a path identical to my calculation of the trajectory. The rest of it is your business.'" Or, as a Tom Lehrer lyric puts it: "'Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down / That's not my department,' said Wernher von Braun."
Kadare is a bold writer. Living and working in a totalitarian state he pushed the freedom allowed him to the limit. As Bellos says in his introduction: "The use of show trials, of banishment to 'the tunnel', the unquestioned authority of the Pasha and the shifting chain of command under him – all these details make the Ottoman world, ostensibly the very image of the People's Republic that Kadare could not possibly tackle directly." So the characters "come to resemble figures out of modern rather than medieval history".
That said, you don't have to make the connection between the world portrayed here and Hoxha's Albania to find this novel engrossing, or to be awed by the scale of Kadare's ambition and achievement
The full article contains 829 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
