Lasgush Poradeci

He developed and maintained close liaison with Asdreni, Ernest Koliqi, Gjergj Fishta and Mitrush Kuteli, all of whom became amongst the most outstanding Albanian writers of that time. Poradeci is best remembered for his poetry collections Vallja e yjve and Ylli i zemrës inspired by the traditions and peculiarities of Albanian life. His style is characterised for its stylistic and technical achievement, its form and content as well as its engagement with nature, eroticism and philosophy. He notably translated several major English, French, German, Italian and Russian works into Albanian.

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 the Romanian High School of Bitola (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 would not 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 for health reasons to which, despite his desperate financial situation, he was referred with the assistance of Sophia Schliemann. Although not completely recovered, Poradeci migrated to Bucharest after one year and rejoined his brother. In Bucharest, he enrolled at the University of Arts and entered the Albanian association for the Albanian diaspora of Romania later being elected its secretary. It was in the city that he met his fellows Asdreni, Mitrush Kuteli and numerous other Romanian poets and writers. In 1924, Fan Noli awarded Poradeci a scholarship to continue his higher education abroad. He immediately left for Berlin, where he hoped to study under Albanologist Norbert Jokl, and continued on to the University of Graz whereas he attended the Faculty of Romano-German philology and finished a doctorate there in 1933. In the 1930s he is purported to have had an affair with the painter Androniqi Zengo Antoniu. Poradeci voluntarily returned to Albania the following year to teach arts at a secondary school in Tirana. From 1944 to 1947, he subsequently became unemployed within a period characterised by the end of the Second World War and the beginning of the Communism in Albania. He lived with his wife in Tirana on the latter's meagre salary as a teacher. After brief employment at the Institute of Science, forerunner of the University of Tirana, he translated literature for the state-owned Naim Frashëri publishing company until his retirement in 1974. He died in poverty at his home in Tirana on 12 November 1987.