Ali PODRIMJA
BIOGRAPHY
Ali Podrimja (b. 1942) was born in Gjakova at the foot
of the so-called ‘Mountains of the Damned.’ After a
difficult childhood, he studied Albanian language and literature
in Prishtina. Author of over a dozen volumes of cogent and assertive
verse since 1961, he is recognized both in Kosova and in Albania
itself as a leading and innovative poet. Indeed, he is considered
by many to be the most typical representative of modern Albanian
verse in Kosova and is certainly the Kosova poet with the widest
international reputation. Podrimja’s first collection of
elegiac verse, Thirrje, Prishtina 1961 (The calls), was
published while he was still at secondary school in Gjakova.
Subsequent volumes introduced new elements of the poet’s
repertoire, a proclivity for symbols and allegory, revealing
him as a mature symbolist at ease in a wide variety of rhymes
and meters. In the early eighties, he published the masterful
collection Lum Lumi, Prishtina 1982 (Lum Lumi), which
marked a turning point not only in his own work but also in contemporary
Kosova verse as a whole. This immortal tribute to the poet’s
young son Lumi, who died of cancer, introduced an existentialist
preoccupation with the dilemma of being, with elements of solitude,
fear, death and fate. Ali Podrimja is nonetheless a laconic poet.
His verse is compact in structure, and his imagery is direct,
terse and devoid of any artificial verbosity. Every word counts.
What fascinates the Albanian reader is his compelling ability
to adorn this elliptical rocky landscape, reminiscent of Albanian
folk verse, with unusual metaphors, unexpected syntactic structures
and subtle rhymes. |
Albanian Literature in Translation
Modern
Authors from Kosova, Macedonia and Montenegro (late 20th
- 21st centuries)
