Our World-Under-The-World

On Miroslav Holub 

Joshua Jones

   

    

In English, the poems of 1923 Plzeň-born poet Miroslav Holub are collected in a sizable anthology first published by Bloodaxe in 1990, titled: Poems Before and After. The great division, the before and the after, is a line of intense scrutiny in the ideals and history of communism. The before poems, beginning with the collection Denní služba, or Daily Duty, in 1958, end with Beton, or Concrete, of 1970. Two years after the Soviet tanks rolled into Prague, to crush reformists of the regime, to reinforce the communist government of then-Czechoslovakia. Everything else is after.

Home is a state in which the photograph album is a source of 

immortality and the image in the mirror persists without limit, like a 

butterfly in a beam of light.

But to suggest Holub’s work, while often political, was limited to the reflective-critical sphere of anti-communism, isn’t correct. The poem At Home, from Holub’s 1982 collection, Naopak (translated as On The Contrary) offers an image of a world briefly frozen, in images, in mirrors, in beams of light. Then-Czechoslovakia was an alternately thawing and freezing place, a country where economic and cultural progress was monitored closely by the regime. But it was not one in which culture could no longer occur. The frozen image becomes the point of Holub’s scrutiny in the poem, the nation-home of few windows, each one a chance to pin the butterfly in a ray.

And it’s all so simple. Where

Man ends, the flame begins —

And in the ensuing silence can be heard the crumbling

of ash worms. For

those milliards of people, taken by and large,

are keeping their traps shut. 

At Holub’s most political, he writes of Jan Palach, in a memorialisation that is both metaphysical and accusatory, holding up the ash worms of where Man ends, while looking straight into the eyes of those who keep their traps securely shut. The Prague of Jan Palach, would have been published in the collection Ačkoli, or Although, the same year as Palach’s self-immolation on Václavské náměstí on the sixteenth of January, 1969. In public memory, the invasion by Warsaw Pact forces was only just over a year old. Simultaneously, in the logic of the regime, this memory was forbidden, replaced with an emptiness, a new stability, in the same way that Palach’s remains were replaced with another’s body in Olšany Cemetery, emptying its true space. 

The Prague of Jan Palach was translated to English by Czech scholar, George Theiner, who had personally suffered at the hands of the regime, having been sentenced to forced labor in the Silesian coal-mines around 1948, for refusing to join either the Communist Party or the Youth Union. Theiner was a prolific translator, later the editor of Index on Censorship, until his death in 1988, honored by authors as such Ludvík Vaculík and Václav Havel. At Home, however, was translated by celebrated Czech-to-English translator, Ewald Osers, who though a less-overtly political figure, skillfully handled the verso aspect of Holub’s poetry: the metaphysical complications and the images of the empty and the absurd. As in the poem, Anatomy of a Leap into The Void, also in Although.

A. Use of the lift 

going up

Is permitted, provided

B. Use of the lift

going down

is not permitted, provided

C. Use of the lift

going up is

D. Use of the lift

going down is not

E. Use of the lift

going up

F. Use of the lift

going

G. Use of the lift

H. Is Is not

I. Use

J. U—

The leap, swallowed up in the void, had then been transmuted to another language. But Osers was not the only translator to take on the task of rendering Holub’s poetic-scientific work into English. New Zealander Ian Milner, whose patterned life included being a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and an accused KGB spy in Canberra, translated many of Holub’s poems, working with his wife, Jarmila. During his exile in Czecho-slovakia, Milner had befriended Holub, going on to focus on some of the thornier elements of his writing, the emptinesses and the ironies. These emptinesses have their philosophical implications, as Holub reflects in the eponymous poem Although, translated to English by Milner.

And emptiness is not the concern of the single person, of the 

isolated individual. By its aspect of disorderliness, it becomes the 

affair of all, concretises itself as life environment, is inhaled, infects, 

multiplies, epidemicises.

Its focus is where there are no self-purifying forces of any 

stable inter-human order, where there is no relying either on history 

or ancient beauty or a new powerful image of life. Where things and

thoughts depend entirely on a new creation and a newly imprinted 

order and where there is no perfection in the new creation nor 

stability in the order.

     

Again, Holub’s poetics cross over from the political, into the metaphysical, a turning-inside-out that universalizes individual struggle. The irony of this communality, while Holub writes that it’s not the concern of the isolated individual, is as corrosive when applied to metaphysics, as when applied to the ideals of Soviet-era communism. Nothing can be entirely reduced to one. From one nothing entire can be produced.

The matter-of-fact unrhymingness of the poems Holub composes, the rhythmic cadence taking priority over metrical discipline, gives them a naturalism that also reaches out towards a more universal form. His contemporary admirers included Seamus Heaney, admiring his—laying bare of things—and Ted Hughes. The influence of Holub’s work is eerily apparent in a half-dark, half-smiling poem like Crow and The Sea, with its Holubesque brevity and concision, in Hughes’s 1970 collection, Crow.

He tried just being in the same world as the sea 

But his lungs were not deep enough 

And his cheery blood banged off it 

Like a water-drop off a hot stove. 

Finally 

He turned his back and he marched away from the sea 

As a crucified man cannot move.

Hughes stringent—finally—matches Holub’s own word-sockets, his final—although—that concludes the eponymous poem, as well as the poem Lyric Mood, in the same 1969 collection. These sockets are the points where the whole poetic form rotates back onto itself. Holub exercises a philosophical uncertainty through these points, through the questioning—although. But Death of a Sparrow, also translated by Osers, from Holub’s 1963 collection Zcela Nesoustavná Zoologie, or Totally Unsystematic Zoology, contains a sample of the closest formula for an influence on Hughes, of the tarring irony of both poets’ collections. 

A sparrow’s death

is quite tiny, 

grey

with minute

wiry claws.

And Holub himself is said to have joked that the reason he wrote in such a straightforward and precise manner, with sharp and unrhymed ends, was deliberate, knowing that his readers wouldn’t know the Czech language, that they wouldn’t be reading his work in Czech. The truth at the core of this joke is an attack on the censors and a wink at his poetic contemporaries abroad, who would have read his work in translation. Joke or not, the simplicity of his form lends itself to easier translatability, accounting in part for his influence on Heaney and Hughes, who both wrote solely in English.

  

Unable to be completely restricted by the censors, the influence of the poems spread with an irony that must have been apparent to Holub, who was also a renowned immunologist, publishing some one-hundred-and-thirty scientific papers (alongside three additional monographs) in his adult lifetime. If Václav Havel is described as the Platonic philosopher-king, it would be an extension of the same hyperbole to describe Miroslav Holub as the Lucretian scientist-poet. But Holub acknowledged an uneasy relationship between the disciplines. 

Diseases of puppets are tiny, thread-like, with soft funereal fur coats

and big ears. And small claw-like feet.

There is no fever. Only the sawdust trickling from their sleeves.

Diarrhea only like woe from wit.

Cardiac arrhythmia only like the tick of the death-watch beetle.

In A lecture on Diseases, from his 1986 collection, Interferon, Čili o Divadle, again translated to English by Osers as Interferon, or On Theatre, Holub overturns the stiffness of the scientific lecture with the absurdity of the theatre, at the same time substituting the grief of human beings with the misfortunes of saw-dust-stuffed puppets, suffering wit and woe. The exactitude needed for scientific inquiry is matched in Holub’s taut syntax, referring each thing to its specifics.

The popularity of Holub’s poetry and prose has waned in his home-country. To some, the sweeping precision of his work might sometimes nullify its object, his poetics preserving it all-too-carefully in its petri dish, in its specimen jar. The logic of his work is universal and linear, and no doubt the lingering aftereffects of censorship and criticism has stifled some of the enduring appeal the poet retained in foreign lands. His specimens however, aren’t frozen remains, but thriving lab-samples. Taken at their most-straightforward, forgetting political allegory or linguistic experiment, each contains a living truth about the virology of poetics, impossible to curb or contain, spreading from subject to subject. They are a testament to the undying characteristics of a culture (viral, bacterial or literary) in its determination to survive.