Posted
May 4th, 2011
by
The Accident by Ismail Kadare
Translated by John Hodgson
In The Accident, Kadare turns to contemporary Eastern Europe to examine the fractures inherent in a post-Soviet political landscape, and the complex personal relationships that both are defined by and challenge inherited political and social mores. In startlingly direct prose, Kadare examines the issue of how to come to terms with genocide and the path towards justice. Set against the tumultuous backdrop of war and its aftermath in the Balkans, The Accident intimately documents an affair between two people caught in each other’s webs. The investigation into their death uncovers a mutually destructive obsession that mirrors the conflicts of the region.
Published by Canongate, August 2010
Ismail Kadare was born in 1936 in Gjirokastër, southern Albania. He studied both at the University of Tirana, and later at the Gorky Institute for World Literature in Moscow. First a poet, publishing collections such as Youthful Inspiration (1954), he then became a journalist, only turning to novel-writing in the early 1960s. His first novel was The General of the Dead Army (1963), a study of post-war Albania, and the first to appear in English was A Chronicle in Stone (1987). The political nature of his writing under an oppressive Albanian regime meant that he was forced to smuggle his work out of the country to his French publisher for safe-keeping.
Kadare’s novels have been translated in more than forty countries. In 1990, he was granted political asylum and left Albania for France. From there, he became a member of the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences and in 2005 he was awarded the first Man Booker International Prize.
John Hodgson was born in England in 1951 and studied English at Cambridge and Newcastle. He has taught at the universities of Prishtina and Tirana. Hodgson has written about Albania, Kosova, the British Balkan traveller Edith Durham, and the novelist John Cowper Powys. He now works as an Albanian-English translator and interpreter, and previously translated Kadare’s Three-Arched Bridge.
Originally posted with the url: www.englishpen.org/writersintranslation/recentlysupportedtitles/theaccident/
