Tomaž Šalamun
| Tomaž Šalamun | |
|---|---|
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 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. He had 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.
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.
In 1964, as editor of the literary magazine Perspektive, he published his iconoclastic poem "Duma '64" (Thought '64). When Ivan Maček Matija, 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.
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