THE DENIED WORD: THE HERMETIC AND TRANSLATIONAL WORK OF ZEF ZORBA BETWEEN CENSORSHIP, SILENCE AND POETIC MEMORY

Abstract

This paper examines Zef Zorba as both a hermetic poet and a translator, highlighting his creative path within a context of censorship and cultural repression. His poetic work—largely unpublished and preserved in what can be described as a form of “drawer literature”—emerges as a subtle yet firm act of resistance. Marked by a profound and deliberate hermeticism, Zorba’s writing seeks refuge in silence, ambiguity, and compressed expression. Deeply influenced by the Italian hermetic poets—Montale, Ungaretti, and Quasimodo, whom he translated with remarkable fidelity and sensitivity—Zorba’s verse reflects a poetics of concealment. His lyrical voice constructs a layered and intertextual palimpsest, where beneath the surface of restrained language traces of memory, quiet dissent, and a resilient faith in poetry and translation as ethical acts are laid. This study considers how his hermetic style and translations operate as dual gestures of survival and transmission—offering poetry as an invisible archive and translation as a way of bearing witness across languages and histories.