Tomaž Šalamun facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Tomaž Šalamun
|
|
|---|---|
Šalamun in 2005
|
|
| Born | July 4, 1941 Zagreb, Independent State of Croatia |
| Died | December 27, 2014 (aged 73) Ljubljana, Slovenia |
| Occupation | Poet |
| Language | Slovene |
| Nationality | Slovenian |
| Alma mater | University of Ljubljana |
| Literary movement | Neo-avant-garde |
| Notable awards | Pushcart Prize, Prešeren Fund Award, European Prize for Poetry |
| Spouse | Metka Krašovec |
Tomaž Šalamun (July 4, 1941 – December 27, 2014) was a Slovenian poet who was a leading figure of postwar neo-avant-garde poetry in Central Europe and an internationally acclaimed absurdist. His books of Slovene poetry have been translated into twenty-one languages, with nine of his thirty-nine books of poetry published in English. His work has been called a poetic bridge between old European roots and America. Šalamun was a member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. He lived in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and was married to the painter Metka Krašovec.
Life
As members of the Slovene minority in Italy (1920–1947), Šalamun's mother's family joined thousands of Slovenes who left their homes because of forced Italianization and moved from Italy to Yugoslavia, where he was born in 1941 in Zagreb. His father's family came from Ptuj, where his grandfather had been a mayor. After his family moved to Koper, the local high school teachers of French and Slovene aroused his interest in language. In 1960, he began to study art history and history at University of Ljubljana. His mother was an art historian, his brother Andraž is an artist, and his two sisters Jelka and Katarina are a biologist and a literary historian respectively. Šalamun died on 27 December 2014 in Ljubljana.
Work
In 1964, as editor of the literary magazine Perspektive, he published his iconoclastic poem "Duma '64" (Thought '64). When Ivan Maček, a Titoist hard-liner, saw the dead cat in the poem as a reference to himself (the Slovene word maček means 'cat'), Perspektive was banned and Šalamun was arrested. He spent five days in jail and came out something of a culture hero, but he refrained from including the poem in his first poetry book, which appeared in 1966 in a samizdat edition, full of absurdist irreverence, playfulness, and wild abandon.
Poetry collections translated into English
Several collections of Šalamun's poetry have been published in English, including The Selected Poems of Tomaž Šalamun (Ecco Press, 1988), The Shepherd, the Hunter (Pedernal, 1992), The Four Questions of Melancholy (White Pine, 1997), Feast (Harcourt, 2000), Poker (Ugly Duckling Presse), Row! (Arc Publications, 2006), The Book for My Brother (Harcourt), Woods and Chalices (Harcourt, 2008, translated by Brian Henry), There's the Hand and There's the Arid Chair (Counterpath, 2009), On the Tracks of Wild Game (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2012), Soy Realidad (Dalkey Archive Press, 2014), Justice (Black Ocean, 2015), Andes (Black Ocean, 2016), Druids (Black Ocean, 2019), and Opera Buffa (Black Ocean, 2022). American poets that influenced him include Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, and Walt Whitman.
Prizes
Šalamun won a Pushcart Prize, as well as Slovenia's Prešeren Fund Award and Jenko Prize. Šalamun and his German translator, Fabjan Hafner, were awarded the European Prize for Poetry by the German city of Muenster. In 2004, he was the recipient of Romania's Ovid Festival Prize.
See also
In Spanish: Tomaž Šalamun para niños
