TIRANA, July 23 – The sudden death of modern poet Ali Podrimja has left the public both in his native Kosovo and Albania shocked. Podrimja, 70, was found dead last weekend in southern France after going missing for days, according to organisers of a poetry festival he was attending.
“The festival has just been notified by the police that the body was found this afternoon in a wooded area 4km from Lodeve,” the Voix de la Mediterranee festival said in a statement.
Local prefecture officials said the body was found in the early afternoon near a stream, bearing no signs of violence. French doctors confirmed later this week the Kosovo poet died of natural causes.
The festival organisers’ last contact with the poet was on July 18 morning when a festival official reached him by phone, one day after he had delivered a lecture.
The Albanian-language poet was born in 1942 in Gjakova, now a city in western Kosovo by the Albanian border, according to the website of his French publisher Cheyne.
He had published over 20 books of poetry and “was considered one of the greatest figures of contemporary Albanian poetry,” the festival said.
“His death is a great loss for the family, his numerous friends, and readers who loved him, the Academy and all Kosovo institutions, the Albanian culture and literature,” said the Kosovo Academy of Sciences in a statement.
Ali Podrimja wrote about the Kosovo of suffering and sorrow, the Kosovo of big hopes and the Kosovo of ideals of freedom. “The era of Kosovo and Albania in the second half of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century was also the era of Ali Podrimja. His voice was special and unrepeatable in Albanian poetry, it was a voice which expressed the existence of resistance and survival of our people. With the death of Ali Podrimja, Kosova lost its poet, who like no one recognized and articulated its suffering. His verse ‘Kosovo is my blood that is not forgiven’ tells what nobody else said about his people and country.”
Albanian artists and poets also expressed condolences to Podrimja’s family and highest authorities in Kosovo.
“In the memory of all Albanian readers Ali Podrimja will remain carved with his outstanding artistic talent, admiring poetic technique and his special profile full of human virtues, inspiring generations of poets and writers in all Albanian-inhabited territories,” said outgoing President Bamir Topi in his message of condolence.
The National Library in Tirana also opened a book exhibition in honour of Podrimja, displaying around 70 books by Podrimja from the library’s collection.
Ali Podrimja
Ali Podrimja (1942-2012) 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. (Biography by Robert Elsie, specialist in Albanian studies)
