France Balantič: Zasypaná ústa a jiné básně
France Balantič: Buried Mouth and Other Poems

Summary/Abstract: The year 2013 marks exactly seventy years since the tragic death of the Slovenian poet France Balantič (born 1921), who perished in a fire on November 24, 1943, during a partisan attack on a Home Guard (White Guard) base in Grahovo near Lake Cerknica. Balantič soon became a literary icon for opponents of the communist revolution and ideology. Consequently, after World War II, his work vanished from all public libraries and was placed on the Yugoslav *index librorum prohibitorum*. The post-war regime jealously ensured that not a single mention of Balantič appeared anywhere. When literary scholar Anton Slodnjak included Balantič’s name in his *History of Slovenian Literature* in the 1950s, he immediately lost his university position. In 1966, the regime wavered but ultimately decided to destroy the entire print run of a collection that had already been prepared and printed under the title *Muževna steblika*. However, Balantič’s poetry did not fade from view within the Slovenian diaspora (new collections appeared in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1956 and 1976), whereas in Slovenia, his work did not see its first post-war edition until 1984. To the best of our knowledge, Czech translations of excerpts from this significant poet’s work—primarily his sonnets—have appeared only once so far: in the journal *Souvislosti* (Issue 1/1997), translated by František Benhart.

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