Pjetër BUDI
BIOGRAPHY
Pjetër Budi (1566-1622), known in Italian as Pietro Budi,
was the author of four religious works in Albanian. He was born
in the village of Gur i Bardhë in the Mati region of the
north-central Albanian mountains. He could not have benefited
from much formal education in his native region, and trained
for the priesthood at the so-called Illyrian College of Loretto
(Collegium Illyricum of Our Lady of Luria), south of Ancona
in Italy, where many Albanians and Dalmatians of renown were
to study. At the age of twenty-one he was ordained as a Catholic
priest and sent immediately to Macedonia and Kosova, then part
of the ecclesiastical province of Serbia under the jurisdiction
of the Archbishop of Antivari (Bar), where he served in various
parishes for an initial twelve years. In 1610 he is referred
to as ‘chaplain of Christianity in Skopje’ and in 1617
as chaplain of Prokuplje.
It was in Prokuplje in southern Serbia, a year earlier, that
a meeting of various national rebel movements had been held to
organize a major offensive against the Turks. In Kosova, Budi
came into contact with Franciscan Catholics from Bosnia, connections
which in later years proved fruitful for his political endeavours
to mount support for Albanian resistance to the Porte. In 1599,
Budi was appointed vicar general (vicario generale) of
Serbia, a post he held for seventeen years. As a representative
of the Catholic church in the Turkish-occupied Balkans, he lived
and worked in what was no doubt a tense political atmosphere.
His ecclesiastical position was in many ways only a cover for
his political aspirations.
Pjetër Budi was filled with an ardent desire to see his
people freed of Turkish bondage and he worked actively to this
end. He is known in this period to have had contacts with figures
of influence such as Francesco Antonio Bertucci and with Albanian
rebels seeking the overthrow of Ottoman rule. But Budi was no
narrow-minded nationalist. As far as can be judged, his activities,
then and later, were directed towards a general uprising of all
peoples of the Balkans, including his Muslim compatriots.
In 1616, Pjetër Budi travelled to Rome where he resided
until 1618 to oversee the publication of his works. From March
1618 until ca. September 1619, he went on an eighteen-month pilgrimage
to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. Back in Rome in the autumn
of 1619, he endeavoured to draw the attention of the Roman curia
to the plight of Albanian Christians and raise support for armed
resistance. On 20 July 1621, he was made Bishop of Sapa
and Sarda (Episcopus Sapatensis et Sardensis), i.e. of
the Zadrima region, and returned to Albania the following year.
His activities there were often more political than religious
in nature. One of his interests was to ensure that foreign clergymen
were replaced by native Albanians, a step which could not have
made him particularly popular with some of his superiors in Italy.
In December 1622, some time before Christmas, Pjetër Budi
drowned while crossing the Drin river.
Budi’s first work is the Dottrina Christiana or
Doktrina e Kërshtenë (Christian Doctrine), a
translation of the catechism of Saint Robert Bellarmine (1542-1621),
which was published in Rome in 1618. Of more literary interest
than the catechism itself are Budi’s fifty-three pages of
religious poetry in Albanian, some 3,000 lines, appended to the
Christian Doctrine. It constitutes the earliest poetry in Gheg
dialect. Much of it was translated from Latin or Italian, though
some is original.
Among Budi’s other publications are: 1) the Rituale
Romanum or Rituali Roman (Roman Ritual), a 319-page
collection of Latin prayers and sacraments with comments in Albanian;
2) a short work entitled Cusc zzote mesce keto cafsce i duhete
me scerbyem (Whoever says Mass must serve this thing), a
16-page explanation of mass, and; 3) the Speculum Confessionis
or Pasëqyra e t’rrëfyemit (The Mirror of
Confession), a 401-page translation or, better, adaptation of
the Specchio di Confessione of Emerio de Bonis, described
by Budi as "some spiritual discourse most useful for those
who understand no other language than their Albanian mother tongue."
Both the Roman Ritual and the Mirror of Confession are supplemented
by verse in Albanian.
At first glance Pjetër Budi can be regarded as a translator
and publisher of Latin and Italian religious texts. His significance
as a prose writer, however, goes beyond this. His various prefaces,
pastoral letters, additions and postscripts, amounting to over
one hundred pages of original prose in Albanian, betray a good
deal of style and talent. His language is authentic and refreshingly
idiomatic when compared to Gjon Buzuku before him and Pjetër
Bogdani half a century later. Though not as elaborate and abstract
as Bogdani, who possessed a greater vocabulary, Budi remains
the most spontaneous and prolific writer of the age.
Pjetër Budi is also the first writer from Albania to
have devoted himself to poetry. His works include some 3,300
lines of religious verse, almost all in quatrain form with an
alternate rhyme. Though Budi’s religious verse is not without
style, its content, being imitations of Italian and Latin moralist
verse of the period, is not excessively original. He prefers
Biblical themes, eulogies and universal motifs such as the inevitability
of death. What is attractive in Pjetër Budi’s verse
is the authenticity of feeling and genuine human concern for
the sufferings of a misguided world. |
Albanian Literature in Translation
Early
Authors (16th - 18th centuries)
