Ivan V. Lalić (1931–1996) was one of former Yugoslavia’s most vital poets. He was also an important translator of poetry; his English translations of his own work appeared in the 1965 inaugural issue of Ted Hughes’ and Daniel Weissbort’s Modern Poetry in Translation. Born and living most of his life in the Serbian capital Belgrade, Lalić is regarded as a grand master of Serbian 20th-century poetry. He went to high school and university in the Croatian capital Zagreb, however. And the Croatian Adriatic – especially around the town of Rovinj, where his family had a house – is a crucial backdrop for many of his poems. Moreover, his poetic world is deeply rooted in Byzantium, the Greek Aegean and Italy. Hence Lalić, perhaps most of all, can be seen as a Mediterranean poet.
Lalić’s poems combine a warm sensuality with a love for the natural world, vivid images and similes with thoughtful reflection, here-and-now experience with a backdrop of deep history. In Celia Hawkesworth’s words, his work 'crackles with brilliant, arresting imagery forged by the heat of concentrated thought and, above all, it breathes with compassion and humanity'.
Book-length translations of Lalić’s work have appeared in six languages, including eight volumes in English: two by his US translator Charles Simic, and six by his UK translator Francis R. Jones, with the seventh, The Taste of Lightning: Selected Poems, following from Bloodaxe in 2025. Lalić’s work gained him many prizes at home. His poems in Simic’s and Jones’s translation have won no fewer than six awards – including the prestigious European Poetry Translation Prize twice.
