Ivan Minatti

Ivan Minatti (22 March 1924 – 9 June 2012) was a Slovene poet, translator, and editor. He started writing poetry before World War II but principally belongs to the first postwar generation of Slovene poets. He is one of the best representatives of Slovene Intimism. After the war, he studied Slavic studies at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Ljubljana and graduated in 1952. He became a regular member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts in 1991. The poet and translator Veno Taufer characterised him as a rock-steady and, at the same time, of a soft heart, and ascribed his success to his expression of human as well as social distress in postwar Communist Slovenia.

Awards Minatti won the Prešeren Fund Award in 1964 for his poetry collection You Have to Love Somebody . In 1972, he won the Sovre Award, bestowed for the best translations into Slovene, for his translations of lyrical poems by the Macedonian poet Kočo Racin and the Bosnian poet Izet Sarajlić. In 1985, he won the Prešeren Award for his poetry collection I Listen to the Silence Inside Me .

Poetry collections

Off-Trail (, 1947) And the Spring Will Come (, 1955) You Have to Love Somebody (, 1963) The Wind Sings (, 1963) The Pain of the Unexperienced (, 1964) Poems (, 1971) The Face (, 1972) When I Am Silent and Good (, 1973) The Poems (, 1977) - with Janez Menart and Lojze Krakar I Eavesdrop on the Silence Within Me (, 1984) Behind the Closed Eyelids: Chosen Poems (, 1999) Minatti – Chosen Lyrical Poetry (, 2004)