Lasgush Poradeci

Lasgush Poradeci was born on 27 December 1899 in the town of Pogradec at the western coast of the Lake of Ohrid in what was then part of the Ottoman Empire, now Republic of Albania. In his native town he properly received his primary formal education at an Albanian primary school and attended a Romanian school in Monastir upon his completion from 1906 to 1916. During the First World War, Poradeci's father, despite the tenuous relations between Albanians and Greeks in southeastern Albania at that time, directed him to Greece to continue his education, on the condition that he won't study at a Greek institution. He therefore attended the French Lycée Léonin in Athens until 1920. In Athens, he spent his last two years in a sanatorium due to health reasons to which, despite his desperate financial situation, he was referred with the assistance of Sophia Schliemann. A statue dedicated to Lasgush Poradeci in Pogradec on the Lake of Ohrid. Although not completely recovered, Poradeci migrated to Bucharest after one year and rejoined his brother. There he enrolled at the National School of Fine Arts and became involved with the Albanian patriotic movement, befriending Asdreni, whom he replaced as secretary general of the Albanian colony. He also met the young Mitrush Kuteli; the Romanian environment influenced his literary formation. He started publishing poems in the Albanian periodical Shqipëri’ e re, a weekly national magazine with illustrations published in Constanța, and in Dielli of Boston. His poems of this period already showed a theosophical affinity with the Romanian lyric poet Mihai Eminescu. In the summer of 1924 the Noli government granted him a scholarship and he enrolled at the University of Graz "Karol Francik" in the faculty of Romance-Germanic philology. In May 1933 he defended his doctoral thesis with the topic Der verkannte Eminescu und seine volkstümlich-heimatliche Ideologie (The misunderstood Eminescu and his popular-native ideology). The following year he returned to Tirana and taught art at a secondary school. After the Italian occupation, he was a member of the Institute of Albanian Studies. During the years 1944-'47, he was unemployed and lived in the capital with his wife. After a short employment at the Institute of Sciences, the predecessor of the University of Tirana, he started working as a translator at the state publishing house "Naim Frashëri" until he retired in 1974. Always appreciated for his work, people of power like Isuf Kambo, and of culture during the dictatorship like Ismail Kadare, Llazar Siliqi and Vehbi Bala helped him and stood by him. He died on 12 November 1987 in Tirana. He was buried in Pogradec. He wrote early but published his poems from the beginning of the 1920s. Lasgushi did not tolerate being called either a symbolist or a modernist with the argument that poetry expresses the human soul and is humanist. Vallja e Yjeve (1933) has this cyclical structure: I. (In place of a preface) Zog i Qiejve, II. Vallja e Qiellit, III. Vallja e Dherit, IV. Vallja e Yjeve, V.Vallja e Përjetësisë, VI. Vallja e Vdekjes, VII. Kur nuk ndjehesh fare mirë. [1](^1^) [2](^2^) [3](^3^)