Maksim Leka

Maksim Leka, born in 1968 in Durres, studied Geology and Mining in Tirana. Since 2001 he has lived with his family in San Diego (California). In 1989 he presented his first translation to the Albanian readers, a volume of poetry by Walt Whitman. This was followed by translations of Wallace Stevens, Lord Alfred Tennyson, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Yunus Emre, E. E. Cummings, Gertrude Stein, Raymond Carver, amongst others. He is currently concentrating on the poems of the Slovenian poet Tomaž Šalamun, whose entire work he would like to make accessible to Albanian readers. In December 2010 Maksim Leka published the translation of the poetry volume Balada za Metko Krašovec.