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Ivan V. Lalić
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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.
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.
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.
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."
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" ('Spring liturgy for a dead poet'). 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 ('Collected Works'), described his oeuvre as standing "not only at the peak of Serbian poetry in the second half of [the 20th] century, but at the peak of Serbian poetry in general”.
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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.
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.
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.
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."
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" ('Spring liturgy for a dead poet'). 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 ('Collected Works'), described his oeuvre as standing "not only at the peak of Serbian poetry in the second half of [the 20th] century, but at the peak of Serbian poetry in general”.