Ivan V. Lalić


Ivan V.[] Lalić 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 ". 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, 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.
Ivan and Branka Lalić spent the summers with their family in the Istrian town of Rovinj. They had two sons. The elder, Vlajko, died in a sailing accident between Rovinj and Venice in 1989. Ivan V. Lalić died suddenly in Belgrade in 1996. He was survived by his wife Branka, and his younger son Marko.

Poetics, thought and themes

Lalić’s use of vivid imagery and metaphor within a clear poetic structure has led Serbian critics to label him a ‘post-symbolist,’ following in the footsteps of W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Paul Valéry, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Serbian predecessors like Vojislav Ilić and Milan Rakić. Drawing on the landscapes, histories, and myths of the Eastern Mediterranean and its Italian, Balkan, and Greek hinterlands, he may also be viewed as a Mediterranean poet, akin to C.P. Cavafy, Giorgos Seferis, and Eugenio Montale.
In her obituary of Lalić, Celia Hawkesworth spoke of "the central place in his work of memory: fragile in the face of the collapse of civilisations, but all we have. Memory allows the poet to recreate brief instants of personal joy as well as to conjure up a sense of the distant past. It allows each of us, as individuals condemned to solitude, to connect with a shared inheritance and feel, for a moment, part of a larger whole."

Reputation and legacy

Lalić’s domestic reputation grew slowly. In the 1960s and 1970s, his work did not chime well with the avant-garde approach prevalent in Yugoslav poetry - nor with the emotive lyricism popular with broader audiences, as in the work of Branko Miljković, whom Lalić addresses in his poem "Prolećna liturgija za mrtvog pesnika". But through the 1980s and 1990s he gradually became recognized as a major voice in his country's poetry. By 1997, Aleksandar Jovanović, editor of Lalić’s 1997 Dela, described his oeuvre as standing "not only at the peak of Serbian poetry in the second half of century, but at the peak of Serbian poetry in general”.
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. 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. 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 ablaze with successes of metaphor", with an "irresistible blend of private lyricism and public force".
Lalić also wrote a radio drama and a body of literary criticism. He edited and translated book-length anthologies of modern French poetry, German poetry and American poetry.

Awards

Lalić was awarded many literary prizes, including Yugoslavia's and Serbia's most prestigious awards:
  • Nagrada tribine mladih,
  • Zmajeva nagrada,
  • Nagrada jugoslovenske radiodifuzije,
  • Nolitova nagrada,
  • Nagrada "Miloš Đurić",
  • Nagrada "Branko Miljković",
  • Gost Disovog proleća,
  • Oktobarska Nagrada Beograda,
  • Nagrada "Meša Selimović",
  • Nagrada "Stanislav Vinaver",
  • Nagrada lista Borba,
  • Velika Bazjaške povelja,
  • Nagrada "Braća Micić"
  • Nagrada "Vasko Popa",
  • Žička hrisovulja,
  • Račanska povelja,
  • Vitalova Nagrada "Zlatni suncokret".
In English translation, his poems have gained six awards:
  • Thornton Wilder Prize,
  • European Poetry Translation Prize,
  • 2nd Prize, British Comparative Literature Association Translation Competition,
  • European Poetry Translation Prize,
  • 1st Prize, John Dryden Translation Competition,
  • 3rd Prize, Stephen Spender Prize for poetry in translation.