Arshi Pipa was born on 28 July 1920 in Shkodër and attended school there until 1938. Pipa received a BA equivalent degree ("Laurea") in philosophy at the University of Florence in 1942.[2] After he completed his studies he was a teacher of Italian language in different schools in Albania.[3]
The first poetry Pipa composed in late 1930, Lundërtarë [Seamen], was published in Tirana in 1944. When he was in prison he thought out and actually wrote some parts of his best-known collection of poems, Libri i burgut [The Prison Book], published in 1959.[7] His epic poem Rusha (1968), composed in 1955 during his imprisonment, describes love between Albanians and Serbs in the late 14th century.[3]
Pipa claimed that the unification of the Albanian language was wrong because it deprived Albanian language of its richness at the expense of Gheg.[8] He called the unified literary Albanian language a "monstrosity" produced by the Tosk communist leadership, who conquered anti-communist north Albania and imposed their Tosk Albanian dialect on the Ghegs.[9]
^Elsie, Robert. "Arshi Pipa". Robert Elsie. Archived from the original on December 1, 2011. Retrieved January 9, 2012. Writer and scholar, Arshi Pipa (1920–1997) ... studied philosophy ... published ... poetry
^Elsie, Robert. "Arshi Pipa". Robert Elsie. Archived from the original on December 1, 2011. Retrieved January 9, 2012. in Shkodra where he attended school until 1938. ..Pipa studied philosophy at the University of Florence, where he received the degree of "dottore in filosofia" in 1942.
^ abKvanbeck, Martha (1997). "1997–98 UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA (No. 1) UNIVERSITY SENATE MINUTES". University of Minnesota. Archived from the original on July 14, 2010. Retrieved January 11, 2012. he taught at Georgetown, Columbia, and Berkeley before being appointed in 1966 to our University's Department of romance Languages
^Books abroad. University of Oklahoma. 1971. p. 556. Retrieved January 10, 2012. Arshi Pipa, an Albanian poet now living in the United States, is best known for his Libri i Burgut (The Prison Book), a collection of poems which were thought out, and in some cases actually written, during a long spell of political
