Lasgush PORADECI
BIOGRAPHY
Lasgush Poradeci (1899-1987) had lived the final years of
his life in his beloved town of Pogradec on Lake Ohrid, not far
from the Macedonian border, tending his garden and studying the
ever-changing moods of the lake. The rhythmic and gentle lapping
of the waves had always been among the fundamental sources of
his pantheistic verse.
Poradeci, pseudonym of Llazar Gusho, was born in Pogradec
on 27 December 1899 - being only three or four days older
than the twentieth century, as he once remarked. He attended
a Romanian-language school in Monastir (Bitola), Macedonia, from
1909 to 1916. In the middle of the First World War, his father,
despite the tenuous relations between Albanians and Greeks in
southeastern Albania at the time, sent the adolescent Llazar
to Greece to continue his schooling, on the condition that he
not study at a Greek-language institution. Llazar therefore enrolled
at the French-language Lycée des Frères Maristes
in Athens where he remained until 1920. For health reasons, however,
the last two years of his stay in the Greek capital were spent
not at school but in a sanatorium to which, despite his desperate
financial situation, he was referred with the assistance of Sophia
Schliemann, widow of the famed German archaeologist, Heinrich
Schliemann (1822-1890). Although not completely recovered, the
twenty-year-old Llazar was expelled from the sanatorium prematurely
in 1920 after having been caught in flagranti with a nurse.
The following year we find the budding poet in Bucharest, where
he joined his brother. Llazar wanted to study at the Academy
of Fine Arts, but registering proved to be difficult, since the
Romanian government, in a wave of anti-semitism, had imposed
restrictions on study by all non-Romanian nationals. After much
tribulation, however, he succeeded in enrolling. The poet’s
stay in Bucharest was to have a decisive influence on his literary
development. It was here that he met and befriended the romantic
poet Asdreni, whom he replaced as secretary of the Albanian colony
in 1922, short story writer Mitrush Kuteli (1907-1967), and numerous
Romanian writers and poets. He also began publishing verse in
various Albanian-language periodicals: Shqipëri’
e re, an illustrated national weekly published in Constanza,
and Dielli of Boston among others. His verse of this period
was already revealing a certain theosophical affinity to the
Romanian lyric poet Mihai Eminescu (1850-1889).
A scholarship provided by the Fan Noli government in 1924
enabled him to continue his studies abroad. Poradeci immediately
left for Berlin, where he hoped to study under Austrian Albanologist
Norbert Jokl (1877-1942). The chair appears to have been vacant
at the time and Poradeci continued on to the University of Graz
in southeastern Austria where he registered at the Faculty of
Romance and Germanic philology. The poet spent a total of ten
years in Graz which he counted as the most enjoyable of his life.
In May 1933 he finished his doctorate there with a dissertation
on Der verkannte Eminescu und seine volkstümlich-heimatliche
Ideologie (The unappreciated Eminescu and his native folk
ideology). The following year, Poradeci returned to Albania and
taught art at a secondary school in Tirana where he remained
during the war. From 1944 until 1947, the first turbulent years
of communist rule, he was unemployed, and lived with his wife
in Tirana on the latter’s meagre salary as a teacher. After
brief employment at the Institute of Science, forerunner of the
University of Tirana, he got a job translating literature for
the state-owned Naim Frashëri publishing company where he
worked, keeping a low profile, until his retirement in 1974.
He died in absolute poverty at his home in Tirana on 12 November
1987.
Lasgush Poradeci is the author of two extraordinary collections
of poetry. Vallja e yjve (The dance of the stars) and
Ylli i zemrës (The star of the heart), published
in Romania in 1933 and 1937 respectively, are indeed just as
much a revolution in Albanian verse as was Migjeni’s Vargjet
e lira (Free verse). Vallja e yjve was published at
the Albania Press in Constanza from funds collected in 1932 with
the help of Asdreni and a group of Albanian students in Bucharest.
It contains verse first written and published in the years 1921-1924.
The second volume, published with the assistance of Poradeci’s
friend, prose writer Mitrush Kuteli, contains not only later
work but also many of the poems of the 1933 edition in amended
versions. It is a synthesis of the best of his lyric production
and offers some of the most melodious and metrically refined
poetry ever written in Albanian.
Poradeci’s position in Albanian literature has never
been satisfactorily defined. He had little in common with his
contemporaries: the romantic Asdreni, the political Fan Noli
or the messianic Migjeni. He imbued Albanian letters with a quite
exotic element of pantheistic mysticism, introducing what he
called the metaphysics of creative harmony. What other Albanian
poet of his period would have devoted his energy to the study
of Sanskrit in order to comprehend the Veda? Poradeci’s
verse creates a metaphysical bridge from the psychic states and
trying moods of earthly existence to the lofty spheres of the
sublime, to the source of all creative energy.
Primordial to the work of Lasgush Poradeci are the waters
of Lake Ohrid on the Albanian-Macedonian border. It was in the
town of Pogradec that he spent his youth, not far from where,
at the foot of the ‘Mal i Thatë’ (Dry Mountain),
the River Drin takes its source, and but a few kilometers from
the famed mediaeval monastery of St Naum’s just over the
border. And there in retirement, he also spent his last summers
in a run-down little house of Balkan architecture, tending his
garden and strolling along the lake with his dog. Lake Ohrid
never ceased to fascinate and enchant him. He studied its hues,
the reflection of light both upon its waves and in the depths
of its sparkling waters, and observed the surrounding mountains
cast their shadows over it.
Apart from the two main poetry collections of the thirties,
Poradeci published some verse in literary journals of the late
thirties and forties, in particular in Branko Merxhani’s
cultural monthly Përpjekja shqiptare (The Albanian
endeavour). With the rise of Stalinism, however, the venerable
quill of Lasgush, as he was to be affectionately known to posterity,
began to run dry. Though secretly lauded by many a critic and
connoisseur, this romantic aesthete, devoid of any redeeming
ideological values, never enjoyed the approbation of post-war
Marxist dogmatists. They were not able to understand his works
and the poet himself is reported to have preferred to break his
pencil in two rather than write the kind of poetry ‘they’
wanted. A few works did appear from time to time in the Tirana
literary periodicals Drita (The light) and Nëntori
(November), carefully perused beforehand by party censors,
but Poradeci’s main field of activity in the socialist period
was, nolens volens, translation, a safer haven for literary heretics.
Aside from verse on nature and that in a metaphysical vein,
reworked and republished in numerous versions, Poradeci was also
the author of much love poetry, as well as of some verse on national
themes, all in all about one hundred poems. He loved archaic
words and expressions but also delighted in neologisms and a
novel juxtaposing of substantives to create unusual effects.
The result was startling, breathtaking at the time, and he was
immediately acclaimed. The age of romantic nationalism, which
had been fostered by a myriad of Rilindja poets of varying quality,
had now drawn to a definitive close.
Poradeci’s subjects, his structures and language were
very much attuned to southern Albanian oral literature, in particular
to Tosk folk verse from which he drew a good deal of his inspiration.
Mitrush Kuteli, who edited his Ylli i zemrës, called
him "the only Albanian poet to think, speak and write only
in Albanian." Lasgush Poradeci is at the same time an artist
of truly European stature. He combined the verbal sensuousness
of Charles Baudelaire, the aesthetic philosophy of form and the
discerning elegance of Stefan George, the humanity and philosophy
of Naim Frashëri, and the cosmic immortality of his master,
Mihai Eminescu. Scholar Eqrem Çabej said of him that he
was the "poet whom Albania would one day bequeath to the
world," and although Poradeci’s verse does not lend
itself particularly to translation, time may prove Çabej
right. |
Albanian Literature in Translation
Classical
Authors (19th - early 20th centuries)
