France Balantič

France Balantič (29 November 1921 – 24 November 1943) was a Slovene poet. His works were banned from schools and libraries during the Titoist regime in Slovenia, but since the late 1980s he has been re-evaluated as one of the foremost Slovene poets of the 20th century.

Life Balantič was born in a working-class family in Kamnik, in the Slovenian region of Upper Carniola in what was then the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. Before World War II, he studied Slavic linguistics at the University of Ljubljana. he was however suspicious to the materialist world view present in most left-wing ideologies of the time, especially in Communism. By 1941 he had turned away from political activism, convinced that the only salvation for humanity was to be found in the Gospel.

In the first months after the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia and the Italian occupation of Ljubljana, he joined the illegal student organization of the Liberation Front of the Slovenian People, but left it soon afterwards, disturbed by its pro-Communist leanings.

In June 1942, the Fascist authorities of the Italian-occupied Province of Ljubljana interned him in the Gonars concentration camp, In 1966, a selection of Balantič's poems were printed under the title Muževna steblika, but after intervention by the Communist Party it was decided that the book should be withdrawn and the entire run was sent to be destroyed and recycled.

His poems were published among the Slovene diaspora, especially in Argentina, where the literary historians Tine Debeljak and France Papež edited and published most of his works. In the late 1980s, Balantič was rediscovered in Slovenia, and he is now considered one of the foremost Slovene-language poets of the 20th century

Poetry collections

V ognju groze plapolam (I Flutter in the Fire of Horror; Ljubljana, 1944) Muževna steblika (The Sappy Stem; Published posthumously in Buenos Aires, 1966) Zbrano delo (Collected Work; Buenos Aires, 1976) Zbrane pesmi (Collected Poems; Ljubljana, 1991) Tihi glas piščali (The Silent Voice of the Flute; Ljubljana, 1991)