Who Will Slay the Wolf: Poetry from Kosovo

by Ali Podrimja, Robert Elsie (Translator)

The Kosovo Albanian poet, Ali Podrimja (1942-2012), is considered by many to be the most typical representative of modern Albanian verse in Kosovo and is certainly the Kosovo poet with the widest international reputation. His verse is compact in structure, and his imagery is direct, terse and devoid of any artificial verbosity. Every word counts. The present selection of verse is designed to provide the reader with an overview of the poetic evolution of Ali Podrimja. It touches upon the early years of dynamic optimism in the 1960s, visits the haunts of anguish and personal solitude in the 1970s and 1980s, and brings the reader inevitably to the apocalyptic 1990s in Kosovo during which the recusant voice of the poet was more indispensable than ever.

Genres: Poetry

164 pages, Paperback

First published May 27, 2015

About the author

Ali Podrimja (born 1942) is a distinguished Albanian poet. He was born in Gjakova, Kosovo, at the time part of Italian-controlled Fascist Albania.
After a difficult childhood, he studied Albanian language and literature in Pristina. Author of over a dozen volumes of cogent and assertive verse since 1961, he is recognized both in Kosovo 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 Kosovo and is certainly the Kosovo poet with the widest international reputation.
Podrimja’s first collection of elegiac verse, Thirrje ("The calls", Pristina, 1961), 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 ("Lum Lumi", Pristina, 1982), which marked a turning point not only in his own work but also in contemporary Kosovo 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.

Reviews

[Dolf van der Haven · Rating 5 out of 5]

#100: Kosovo 🇽🇰.
My parents went to Ohrid in Kosovo on vacation ages ago and already encountered the local nationalism when saying "good evening" in Serbo-croatian rather than Albanian. This spirit of national awareness breathes very strongly through Ali Podrimja's poems. Almost all of them are about loss somehow: loss of freedom, loss of family, loss of his son.
The English translation reads as if the poems were originally written in English, so naturally they flow. Excellent poetry.

[Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Country: Kosovo