The Death of Young Don Quixote

Literature tells us:
Don Quixote, having read books,
Rushed out of his library
And entered his own existence.

His endless adventures
Belong to literature, to the sublime,
Not to life.

Don Quixote has a house full of books,
The biggest one in this town.
He has a stentorian voice:
He talks all the time, without ever hearing
The truth!

And the books on the shelves
Bite their tongues
And keep silent.

Exhausted by their own weight,
They break the shelves
-And fall onto the head of young Don Quixote,
Burying and suffocating him.

The obituary in the newspaper read:
'He died at his desk.'

[Vdekja e Don Kishotit të ri, from the volume Leja e njohtimit, Prishtina: Rilindja, 1985, p. 79.
First published in English in An Elusive Eagle Soars, Anthology of Modern Albanian Poetry,
London: Forest Books 1993, p. 185. Translated from the Albanian by Robert Elsie]