Kaalep was born in
Tartu. He studied at the
Hugo Treffner Gymnasium and at the
University of Tartu, from which he graduated in 1956, specializing in
Finno-Ugric languages. He fought as a volunteer in the
Finnish Infantry Regiment 200 and after the war was imprisoned by the Soviet occupation authorities in Estonia. In 1989–2001, Kaalep was the editor-in-chief of the journal
Akadeemia. In 2002 he held a one-year professorship of Liberal Arts at the University of Tartu. Kaalep was a member of the
Congress of Estonia. He published mainly poetry collections. In addition, he translated into Estonian poetry and prose works from German (
Johannes Robert Becher,
Bertolt Brecht,
Heimito von Doderer,
Günter Eich,
Max Frisch,
Albert Paris Gütersloh,
Hermann Hesse,
Hugo von Hofmannsthal,
Ödön von Horváth,
Hans Henny Jahnn,
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing,
Heinrich Mann,
Georg Maurer,
Hans Erich Nossack,
Benno Pludra,
Friedrich Schiller), Spanish (
Vicente Aleixandre,
Federico García Lorca,
Lope Félix de Vega Carpio,
Octavio Paz, ,
César Vallejo), French (
Charles Baudelaire,
Jacques Prévert,
To Hoai), Portuguese (
Agostinho Neto,
Fernando Pessoa), Catalan (
Salvador Espriu), Ukrainian (
Taras Shevchenko), Polish (
Juliusz Słowacki), English, Galician, Provençal, Turkish (
Nâzım Hikmet Ran), Tajik, Uzbek, Georgian, Finnish (
Arvo Turtiainen), Latin (
Ovid), and Ancient Greek (
Sophocles, together with
Ülo Torpats). His son is the politician
Ruuben Kaalep. ==Honors==