The Lost Couplets of Pir Iqbal the Impaled

The one whose gaze sets moths aflameWill not look at me.So blackened is my hanging corpse, So deformed the tree.There is little record of the life of the Albanian poet known as Pir Iqbal the Impaled. The survival of his verses is due to Hilmi Abdyl Maliqi (1856-1928) of Rahovec, who considered them worthy of transcription into the small notebook discovered in 1999 by Prof. Nikoll Krasniqi of the University of Pristina. There Maliqi writes of him: "Iqbal was a solitary dervish, originally fr...