The File on H. by Ismaíl Kadaré Read Free Book Online Page A

if he wanted to glean any inkling of the plot. It had been written by Bill Norton.
    I remember that boring afternoon when I slouched on the sofa not knowing what to do, and switched on the radio. It seems so
far away, like in another world. The program I tuned in to was just as boring
—
Professor Stewart, giving the old routine on Homer, the dispute that’s been going on for three hundred years, with version A versus version B, and version C to cap it all — oh boy, was that dreary! Was Homer really the author of the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey,
or was he just some sort of redactor, or more precisely the chairman of a committee set up to write it all down.? “Of course, if we prefer to use contemporary language
…
,” and right on cue, the interviewer chuckled to keep the professor company. Boring! I was going to get up to turn the volume down, I even thought, That’s a program that might just impress a team of accountants, when, at that very moment, the classicist answered one of the interviewer’s questions with a digression. A blessed digression that stayed my dial-turning hand: “Is it silly to wonder if there’s a country or region in the world today where such epic poetry is maybe still being invented?” “Well, no, your question is not silly at all,” Professor Stewart replied. “Quite the contrary, it is a very interesting question….” And to my amazement (if not the amazement of accountants), the classicist explained that such an area did indeed exist, that it was not a very large area, and it was the only one in the world where
that kind of poetry was still cultivated. He said exactly where it was: in the Balkan peninsula. More precisely, it covered the whole northern zone of Albania hut extended also into parts of Montenegro and reached a few parts of Bosnia, inside the Yugoslav border. The radio professor explained; “This region is the only place in the world where poetic material of the Homeric kind is still being produced. In other words, I would say that it is the last surviving foundry, the last available laboratory, if I may use a modern expression, which can still bring back …
    The governor nodded. So let’s see what comes next, he thought.
    The following pages described how this broadcast had amazed Bill Norton. This was where the two fools first expressed their fear of arriving "too late,"
    Small wonder that someone like me, a mere post-doc from Ireland who came to New York with my friend Max Ross in the (far from certain!) hope of adding something new to the old debate about Homer, was dumbfounded. The last available laboratory, I kept saying over to myself The last surviving foundry. I was rather disoriented and kept mulling the words over as if my intellect refused to take in their meaning. On
the radio, the voice droned on, but I wasn’t listening anymore. "The last available laboratory in the world,” I said aloud at last, as if that would shake my brain out of its daze. Very soon that foundry would disappear. It was already threatened. It had to be made use of before it was too late. Before it fell into ruin, before it was buried under the sands of time, before it was forgotten
.
    I was startled to realize that I was pacing up and down the room. I would have preferred to think of the whole business in a state of calm, but that was out of the question. Good God, we must hurry! I thought. We must get over there as quick as we can. Discover that ancient laboratory. That thousand-year-old foundry of verse. Study it close up, as through a microscope; listen, as if we had stethoscopes, to the way in which Homeric matter, the Homeric marrow, is produced, and with that under our belts, it would be no trouble at all to unravel the mystery of Homer himself.
    But shh! I warned myself. Not a word to anyone. Except Max Ross
…
    â€œThe only area …” I
kept on saying to myself The only area still able to give birth to