‘There is no deep difference between the scientific and the artistic mind: both include the maximal creativity with the maximal freedom.’ 

Born in 1923, Holub was the most significant Czechoslovakian poet of the second half of the 20^th century, and considered a major European poet.

His life’s work was twice interrupted by war. First it took him until 1953 to complete his medical studies because the Nazis shut down all higher educational facilities in Czechoslovakia (they executed many academics at the beginning of the war.) Secondly his creative writing was banned from 1970 to 1982 by the communist satellite government of Russia. 

Holub was a Marxist-Leninist, and had a complex relationship with this government, who allowed him to travel internationally as a world-renowned clinical pathologist specialising in immunology. He published about 140 papers in immunology after gaining his PhD in 1958, whilst lesser creative writers were ignored, repressed, and sometimes imprisoned. 

Ode to Joy

You only love

when you love in vain.

 

Try another radio probe

when ten have failed,

take two hundred rabbits

when a hundred have died:

only this is science.

 

You ask the secret.

It has just one name:

again.

 

In the end

a dog carries in his jaws

his image in the water,

people rivet the new moon,

I love you.

 

Like caryatids

our lifted arms

hold up time’s granite load

 

and defeated

we shall always win.

 

 

 

In his poem ‘Suffering’ the subject is laboratory rats, but he meets himself at every step:

 

But I ask no questions,

            no-one asks any questions,

Because it’s all quite useless,

Experiments succeed and experiments fail,

Like everything else in this world,

            in which the truth advances

            like some splendid silver bulldozer

in the tumbling darkness,

 

Consider: How difficult an act it is to write poetry under a repressive regime! It is perhaps rather like writing for children’s pantomime…one must be able to write to two distinct audiences, in this case entertaining preschool children as well as amusing adults with lashings of innuendo. What precisely could he mean by this next poem?

 

In the Microscope   

Here too are dreaming landscapes,

lunar, derelict.

Here too are the masses

tillers of the soil.

And cells, fighters

who lay down their lives

for a song.

 

Here too are cemeteries,

fame and snow.

And I hear a muttering,

the revolt of immense estates.

 

 

Incorporating a persistent play between scientific pursuit as factual progress and as metaphor, Holub’s poetry was like his Marxism a variety of bottom-up social humanism. It is as a humanist that he is celebrated:

 

Wings

 

We have

a microscopic anatomy

this

gives

Man

assurance

 

(William Carlos Williams)

 

We have

a map of the universe

for microbes,

we have

a map of a microbe

for the universe.

 

We have

a grand master of chess

made of electronic circuits.

 

But above all

 

we have

the ability

to sort peas,

to cup water in our hands,

to seek

the right screw

under the sofa

for hours

 

This gives us

wings.

 

 

A Helping Hand

 

We gave a helping hand to grass-

            and it turned into corn.

We gave a helping hand to fire-

            and it turned into a rocket.

Hesitatingly,

cautiously,

we give a helping hand

to people, to some people…

 

 

Waiting

 

The one who waits is always the mother,

all her fingers jammed

            in the automatic doors of the world

all her thoughts like

            egg-laden moths pinned out alive,

and in her bag the mirror shows

            time long gone by when

            glad cries lingered in the apples trees,

and at home the spool and the thread are whispering together:          

What will become of us?

 

The one who waits is always the mother,

and a  thousand things whose fate is

            ineluctable fall.

 

The one who waits is always the mother,

            smaller and smaller,

            fading and fading

second by second,

until in the end

no-one sees her.

 

 

Miroslav Holub died in1998.

 

References and further reading 

Alvarez A (1967) (ed.) Miroslav Holub: Selected Poems      Penguin