Ivan V. Lalić

Ivan V. Lalić (8 June 1931 – 28 July 1996) was a Serbian and Yugoslav poet. He was also a translator of poetry from English, French and German into his mother tongue.

Biography Lalić was born in Belgrade; his father, Vlajko, was a journalist, and his grandfather Isidor Bajić was a composer. His poems tell of a happy childhood, but also of two teenage traumas. As a child in Belgrade, many of his school-friends perished in a 1944 air-raid - as described in the poem "Zardjala igla (A rusty needle)". Lalić said that "my childhood and boyhood in the war marked everything I ever wrote as a poem or poetry". A second trauma was the loss of his mother, Ljubica Bajić, from tuberculosis in 1946.

Ivan V. Lalić finished high school in Zagreb, where he studied law. Here he met his wife Branka (née Kašnar), who was studying English and music. They married in 1956. Ivan described her as "the spirit behind my poems", and her presence remains in his verse at all stages of his poetic oeuvre.

Ivan V. Lalić published his first poems in 1952, and his first collection of poetry in 1955; the last appeared in 1996, the year of his death. After initially working as a literary editor for Radio Zagreb, he moved to Belgrade in 1961 to take up a new post: Secretary of the Yugoslav Writer's Union. Then, from 1979 until his retirement in 1993, he worked as an editor for the Nolit publishing house in Belgrade.

Abroad, however, Lalić's reputation grew more quickly. He was among seven non-Anglophone poets featured in the inaugural 1965 issue of the UK journal Modern Poetry in Translation, edited by Ted Hughes and Daniel Weissbort (see #Bibliography below). Hughes and Weissbort praised these poets for the way they tackled "universally comprehensible" issues and did "not fight shy of philosophy" – features which are central to Lalić’s work.

Lalić is now recognised internationally as one of Yugoslavia’s and Serbia’s most accomplished late 20th-century poets. Book-length translations of his poems have appeared in six languages (English, French, Italian, Polish, Hungarian and Macedonian). Individual poems have appeared in more than 20 languages. UK critics have described his poetry as "vital and intense", with a "magisterial transcendent quality", and his "lyrics [as] ablaze with successes of metaphor", with an "irresistible blend of private lyricism and public force".

Lalić also wrote a radio drama (Majstor Hanuš, 1965) and a body of literary criticism. He edited and translated book-length anthologies of modern French poetry, German poetry (with several co-translators) and American poetry (with Branka Lalić as co-translator).

Awards Lalić was awarded many literary prizes, including Yugoslavia's and Serbia's most prestigious awards: Nagrada tribine mladih (1960), Zmajeva nagrada (1961), Nagrada jugoslovenske radiodifuzije (1965), Nolitova nagrada (1969), Nagrada "Miloš Đurić" (1978), Nagrada "Branko Miljković" (1985), Gost Disovog proleća (1987), Oktobarska Nagrada Beograda (1988), Nagrada "Meša Selimović" (1992), Nagrada "Stanislav Vinaver" (1992), Nagrada lista Borba (1992), Velika Bazjaške povelja (Romania, 1994), Nagrada "Braća Micić" (1995) Nagrada "Vasko Popa" (1996), Žička hrisovulja (1996), Račanska povelja (1996), Vitalova Nagrada "Zlatni suncokret" (1996).

In English translation (see below), his poems have gained six awards: Thornton Wilder Prize (1990), European Poetry Translation Prize (1991), 2nd Prize, British Comparative Literature Association Translation Competition (1992), European Poetry Translation Prize (Joint Winner, 1997), 1st Prize, John Dryden Translation Competition (2013), 3rd Prize, Stephen Spender Prize for poetry in translation (2019).