This is the poem Lasgush Poradeci wrote while gravely ill

By Kristaq Jorgo

A few days ago Mrs Marie Lasgush Poradeci published the autograph manuscript of a poem by Lasgush Poradeci, written in French at the age of 17.

At that time – we are talking about the distant year of 1916 – the poet was in Athens, where he was attending classes at the French Lycée. Gripped for weeks and months by a severe form of pulmonary tuberculosis, he was admitted to a sanatorium several times and lived through extreme states between life and death.

Not because it may be the master's first creation. There is evidence that Lasgush's poetic beginnings go back even earlier. Nor because it represents a work of any very special value, compared with the true marvels he would later give us. On the contrary, we are dealing with a restrained and very short poem, elementary one might say, with only 5 lines, although formally 8, since three of them appear twice.

The poem entitled "Quand je t’ai vu, ô rêve immense", which we have rendered into Albanian as "Kur të kam parë, O ëndërr’ qiellore" (When I saw you, O heavenly dream), bears witness, in our view, to an extraordinary moment in the soul, life and work of the young man.

On that knife-edge between life and death, the poet must have experienced a moment of divine vision, an epiphany, an illumination or a revelation, similar to what saints or geniuses experience. He saw an "immense dream", and the "Great Mystery" was revealed to him and made his soul tremble.

This is the moment – the poem allows us to surmise as much – of Lasgush Poradeci's initiation into the Sublime, the Sacred, Beauty, Love, the Secret, of his encounter with the supreme being, the moment in which – to use a Christian expression – "the scales fell from his eyes" and he suddenly began to see, feel and understand what is granted only to the very rare chosen few.

That is also why this seemingly tiny and very simple little work can be described as his master poem: because it bears witness to the moment of the genius's birth.

It is the moment of the Big Bang, from which the magnificent Lasgushian universe would come to life.

What follows is a translation – with more than a few liberties and shortcomings – followed by the French original.

When I saw you, O heavenly dream
When I saw you, O heavenly dream,
A great mystery trembled in me:
I was in the flower of my youth
When I saw you, O heavenly dream.
Love, with its maddening lips,
Clasped my bitter heart;
When I saw you, O heavenly Dream,
A great mystery trembled in me.

Athens, 1916

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QUAND JE T’AI VU, Ô RÊVE IMMENSE
Quand je t’ai vu, ô Rêve immense,
Frémit en moi le grand mystère:
Ce fut en pleine adolescence
Quand je t’ai vu, ô Rêve immense.
L’amour aux lévres de garance
Pressa mon coeur de solitaire;
Quand je t’ai vu, ô Rêve immense,
Frémit en moi le grand mystère.

Athènes, 1916