Arshi PIPA
BIOGRAPHY
Writer and scholar, Arshi Pipa (1920-1997) was born in Shkodra
where he attended school until 1938. His first poetry, composed
in the late 1930s in Shkodra, was collected in the volume Lundërtarë,
Tirana 1944 (Sailors). Pipa studied philosophy at the University
of Florence, where he received the degree of "dottore in
filosofia" in 1942 with a dissertation on Henri Bergson
(1859-1941). He thereafter worked as a teacher in Shkodra and
Tirana. In 1944, he was editor of the short-lived Tirana literary
monthly Kritika (Criticism). Unwilling to conform after
the radical transition of power at the end of the war, he was
arrested in April 1946 and imprisoned for ten years. After his
release in 1956, he escaped to Yugoslavia and emigrated to the
United States two years later. He held teaching posts at various
American universities and until his retirement was professor
of Italian at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. Pipa
digested his ten years of horror in the prisons and labor camps
of Durrës, Vloçisht, Gjirokastra and Burrel in Libri
i burgut, Rome 1959 (The Prison Book), a 246-page collection
of verse. He has published two other volumes of poetry in Gheg
dialect: Rusha, Munich 1968 (Rusha), and Meridiana,
Munich 1969 (Meridiana), the latter being a collection in the
romantic and nostalgic vein of Giacomo Leopardi.
Of greater impact were Pipa's scholarly publications, in particular
his literary criticism. Among such works are the three-volume
literary study Trilogia albanica, Munich 1978, and a monograph
on Montale and Dante, Minneapolis 1968. He also published
a controversial sociolinguistic study on the formation of standard
Albanian (gjuha letrare) as the official language of Albania,
entitled The Politics of Language in Socialist Albania,
New York 1989; a collection of fifteen political essays entitled
Albanian Stalinism: Ideo-political Aspects, New York 1990;
and a study on the Albanian literature of the socialist realist
period, Contemporary Albanian literature, New York 1991.
In later years, he edited the short-lived periodical Albanica
in Washington, D.C., where he lived with his sister in retirement. |
Albanian Literature in Translation
Modern
Authors from Albania (late 20th - 21st centuries)
