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SPONDE: Časopis za jezike, književnosti i kulture između dviju obala Jadrana / Rivista di lingue, letterature e culture tra le due sponde dell’Adriatico / A Journal of Languages, Literatures and Cultures between the two Adriatic coasts, Vol. 5 No. 1, 2026.

Original scientific paper

https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.15291/sponde.5159

Drawing, Singing, Translation: For a Rereading of Ibrahim Kodra’s Work Between Italy and Albania During the Years of the Resistance

Deianira Amico orcid id orcid.org/0000-0002-4841-155X ; Polytechnic University of Milan, Italy *

* Corresponding author.

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Abstract

The article reconstructs and interprets the group of drawings produced by Ibrahim Kodra between 1944 and 1945, which has so far remained at the margins of the artist’s critical reception, largely centered on his postwar post-Cubist production. Starting from a survey of the corpus, now only partially reconstructable through the sheets preserved at the Fondazione Kodra and in the Mario De Micheli collection at the Museo della Permanente in Milan, the essay adopts a methodology that combines historical-documentary reconstruction, comparative formal analysis, philological reading of the inscriptions, and attention to processes of critical transmission. What emerges is a trajectory in which Kodra’s arrival in Italy through the diplomatic channels of Fascism, his passage from the Roman milieu to his Milanese formation, the climate of Brera and Corrente, his participation in the Resistance, and his relation to the Albanian and Balkan area all sediment into a language that holds together figurative invention and documentary value. The drawings of the Resistance years stand out for the centrality of the vulnerable body, the fracture of form, the ethical use of black and white, and the renunciation of any heroic iconography, within a broader visual koiné shared with some artists of the Corrente generation. Of particular historiographical significance is the inscription, in the margin of the sheet Le nostre madri (1945), of a partisan song in Albanian, which makes it possible to read the work as a space of interference between image, orality, and translation. The essay also traces the subsequent trajectory of this fragment: from a song broadcast by Radio Belgrade to a text translated and reinterpreted by Mario De Micheli, then refunctionalized as the Song of April 25, and finally incorporated into the repertoire of Dischi del Sole. From this perspective, Kodra’s case makes it possible to rethink the Adriatic as a space of cultural and political translations unfolding through successive and non-linear passages, according to a logic of continuous rewriting.

Keywords

Ibrahim Kodra; Resistance; Corrente; modern art; cultural translation

Hrčak ID:

349255

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/349255

Publication date:

14.7.2026.

Article data in other languages: italian

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