Fatos Arapi is a well-known poet and songwriter. Fatos Arapi was born in the city of Vlora (1923). That’s where he finished high school,
while he attended higher studies in Bulgaria (Sofia) at the Faculty of Mathematicsand Economy. He worked as a journalist and lecturer at the Faculty for many years History Philology of Tirana. Several times he has won national and international prizes for poetry. The work of Fatos Arapi is rich in the different types and genres that he studied. In addition to the poem where he stands in the first lines, Fatos Arapi also wrote several novels: Wild Geese, 1969; Snowflakes, 1985; Headless Genius, 1999 etc.; several novels: The restless December, 1970; Friends, 1977; The sea in middle, 1986; several dramas: Qezari and the good soldier Shvejk, at the front somewhere, 1995; has made several translations: Song for the man, Nikolla Vapcarov, 1981; Poems, Pablo Neruda, 1989; Sappho, 1990; Anthology of Turkish poetry etc.; and he has written a large number of articles and various studies.

Fatos Arapi published his first poems in the second half of the fifties, and, respectively, in 1962 and 1966 he published the volumes “Poetic Paths” and”Poetry and Rhyme”. From the first steps he warned a special voice in the linguistic articulation of the world and of man, a vision of his own on reality. The poetic beginnings of Fatos will be thematically shrinked and reduced, was conditioned by the political circumstances of the time. In the spirit of the construction boom and of the enthusiasm for the liberation of the country, which prevailed within the creative principles of socialist realism, the poet expressed the belief that Albania was walking towards a new, free,path.

Within this vision, Fatos Arapi will often mock and despise bureaucrats and demagogues, as in the poem “Antibureaucratic”, or brings some  substantive and expressive pecularities as in the poem “Why I came to life”. 

/Klara Ruci/