Stefan Martiko: MEMORIES BEGIN TO TAKE SHAPE
- 3 hours ago
- 2 min read
On the other end of the phone, a voice will no longer answer me. The voice of my friend Myslym Maska has fallen silent, and little by little, what we used to say to each other until yesterday is beginning to turn into memories. The life of one of the most distinctive voices marked by a literature crafted with refined stylistic care has come to an end. For us, his writer friends here in Athens, this is a great and irreplaceable loss. Many articles have been written about him, offering objective evaluations of his poetry, his prose, and everything he left behind as a literary legacy. Now that he is no longer physically among us, grief joins the respect we hold for the writer and the man.
Surrounded by many friends, he would always become a respected and often-cited voice for the values his literature brought to the community of Albanian writers here in Greece. He published several books of poetry and short stories, as well as a novel. He was a lyric poet of deep artistic sensitivity. Yet with the stories published in several volumes, he went beyond the boundaries of an ordinary storyteller. Myslym Maska’s prose delved deeply into the hidden layers of the human soul, moving through an artistic labyrinth where the living were always intimately intertwined with the dead, and vice versa. He was a disciple of Dostoevsky and Gogol his most beloved writers. I do not wish to make such comparisons, but the seeds of literature sprout everywhere, depending on the winds that scatter them into the soft soil of the human spirit.
Reading Myslym Maska’s work becomes not merely an aesthetic pleasure, but an encounter with what he reveals: the conversion of life into death and of death into life, and the drama a person experiences in the face of self-judgment seeking liberation from evil and painfully drawing the devil out of oneself.
With his last book, now being published under the care of his friend Ilir Mborja, we will encounter new surprises, even though, sadly, Myslym did not live to see it in print. Stories filled with surreal daring, seeking their subjects in the depths of the soul precisely where the most profound human dramas unfold. Through what he has left as a literary legacy, we believe Myslym Maska deserves to become the subject of critical and aesthetic studies, for with deep artistic awareness he sought to walk on untrodden paths.
With his passing, we must find ways to fill the void he has left behind. A man who lived with dignity and devoted his entire life to his burning passion for literature. From our almost daily conversations, now only the ashes of memories begin to gather forming a kind of presence in absence.
It should also be said that he was one of the closest friends of Fjala e Lirë, with which he maintained continuous collaboration until shortly before departing from this life.
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