Ivan V Lalić (1931-1996) was born in Belgrade, the Yugoslav and Serbian capital. The summers of his childhood were spent in western Serbia, an idyll that came to an abrupt end with the Nazi invasion in 1941 and then the allied bombing raids on Belgrade in 1944 in which several of his friends died. He attended high school and university in the Croatian capital, Zagreb, where he studied law, followed by comparative literature. For a while he worked for Radio Zagreb as a literary editor and was later invited to become secretary of the Yugoslav Writers’ Union. He spent the rest of his working life living in Belgrade as an editor for two publishing houses. The family also made their home in Rovinj on the Istrian peninsula. In the early 1990s, his Serbian nationality meant that he could no longer visit Rovinj as a consequence of the disintegration of Yugoslavia. This was a source of great personal loss.

Book-length translations of his 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. His poems in their translations have won six awards, including the European Poetry Translation prize twice. This new collection, which contains revisions of previous translations together with translations of new poems not seen before in English, provides readers with an opportunity to sample a generous selection of his work from 1961 up to his death in 1996. 

Lalić’s poetry, sensual, accessible, vivid and memorable, has gained widespread admiration and recognition. Some of his poems are set around his Belgrade home whereas others explore chronicles of Serbian history or the wider heritage of Orthodox Christianity. On the one hand, his poetic world is deeply rooted in Greek and Roman mythology; on the other, it is grounded in the culture and landscape of the Croatian Adriatic, and of Italy.   

Lalić’s lyrical poetry is imbued with Mediterranean landscapes and the play of sunlight on water. Much of his work, especially with reference to the sea, reminded me of George Seferis and, in his creation of vivid imagery and immediacy of experience, Odysseus Elytis.

In Lalić, the sea is depicted in all its moods. Often, it is rising rather than falling, stormy rather than calm. In ‘Atlantis’ it reveals its true power:

     Ships are flying off the rim of a doubtful horizon

     Into the void. Landslides tip gentle orchards

     Down cracked slopes. Thin black swallows

     With broken compass needles quivering in them

     Circle brown oceans of sand until they vanish

     Into the cruel air, like a meteor shower.

     Water won’t slake this thirst. On the table

     Glasses shatter, caught by a stray tracer bullet of fear.

The sea as a destructive force reminds us that his experience of war in childhood left its mark in everything he ever wrote in poetry. 

Weather is a key element that is used to contextualise his work. Wind and rain are mentioned frequently, and also, to a lesser extent, lightning. All his locations are “spaces of hope … the spaces of a moderate mercy”, often depicted in the form of a garden or a view that “unravels / Into the sea’s pure line".  A recurring motif is that of decay, collapsing debris, rusted objects, crumbling ruins which, when viewed against the background of civil war, serves to emphasise, more acutely perhaps than normal, the transitory nature of existence. Beneath the surface, there is a great deal of personal history – the early death of his mother, his love for his wife, Branka, and the tragic death of one of his sons, Vlajko – although some of these things are never mentioned explicitly. Despite all this, Lalić holds on to the beauty and resilience of nature: “Look, beauty is coming back in hordes, and at night / The sea glitters with stars, the sea glitters with light!”

These sensual poems, with their love of the natural world often contain vivid images. ‘Marina V’ opens with an “acetylene flash of lightning” where “(the lumbering thunder / Lags behind, can’t keep up with the picture);”  and in ‘Fiesole, rain’  Lalić describes “a bright edge of cloud” that is likened to “the trace of a lip / On glass;” 

Reading his work is like watching a drama unfold as the sea rises and threatens to overwhelm with its majesty and power. Everywhere in his work, history merges with memory, just like “the Danube with the Sava”. Turning back the pages of history is often viewed as being a pointless exercise except in the discovery that the past has a tendency to repeat itself but never in quite the same way as before. At the same time, and somewhat contrary to this, there is the belief that a future is born out of every return.

The translator, Francis R Jones, knew Lalić well and their close collaboration on these translations, (Lalić was a translator too), is immediately self-evident. Helpful notes at the end provide the reader with additional sources of information. Highly recommended.

Ivan V Lalić, The Taste of Lightning, Bloodaxe, £14