United Growing Books of the World - Kosovo

Ali Podrimja (Gjakova, Kosovo, 28 August 1942 – Lodève, France, 21 July 2012) was an Kosovo Albanian poet. After a difficult childhood due to the death of his parents, Ali Podrimja studied Albanian language and literature in Pristina until 1966. In 1961 he published his first collection of elegiac verse, Thirrje ("The calls", Pristina). 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. Ali Podrimja was the most typical representative of modern Albanian verse in Kosovo and was certainly the Kosovo poet with the widest international reputation. His work and life were inseparably connected with a movement for independance and selfdetermination of Kosovo.

I, your son, Kosovo

I, your son, Kosovo I know your silent desires,

I know your dreams, winds slept over centuries,

I know your sufferings, joys, deaths,

I know your white births, burned goals;

I know your blood that boils in your chest,

the surf that hits you on the sleepless nights,

and as a vulcano to explode it wills: -

I know you Kosovo, better than anyone else.

I your son.