Interviewing Philip Larkin in 1964, Ian Hamilton wondered if he read "much foreign poetry". "Foreign poetry?" came the incredulous reply; "No!" The answer confirmed attitudes for which Larkin was already well known, and also reflected the views of the Movement poets in general. For ill as well as for good, insular anti-Modernism was one of their hallmarks.
Yet at the same time as the Movement poets were turning their backs on "abroad", others - just as defiantly - were doing the opposite. The Penguin Modern European Poets series, Poetry International, and the journal Modern Poetry in Translation represented a concerted effort to dispel the ignorance about collateral poetries that had existed since the second world war. Ted Hughes was a driving force in two of these initiatives, and the rewards of his labours show clearly in his own middle-period work. The cartoon savageries of Crow - as well as its black comedy, its neo-surrealism and its laconic style - obviously owe a good deal to the work of the translated poets he especially admired: Amachi, Herbert, Popa and Rozewicz.
And Miroslav Holub. Like the others, Holub appealed partly to Hughes because his poetry encouraged a new kind of imaginative freedom, and partly because his subjects included the great European political and humanitarian crises of the mid-century. He was exemplary for his suffering as well as his style. Born in western Bohemia in 1923, Holub was not able to go to university until the war had ended (the Nazis closed down Czech universities during the occupation), then studied medicine at Prague and began publishing poems until he was silenced by the communist coup of 1948.
Although Holub was able to continue his studies after the coup (in 1954 he joined the Institute of Biology at the Academy of Sciences) he didn't publish poetry again until the "thaw" of the late 1950s. His aim, along with confederates such as Jirí Sotola and Karel Siktanc, was to celebrate the ordinary and everyday, to avoid making large rhetorical gestures, and to manifest these sympathies in a suitably precise yet colloquial language. There is a special interest in the work - it is preoccupied with medical science - but no sense of separation from familiar life. "I prefer to write for people untouched by poetry," he said.
This doesn't mean that Holub was avoiding the big traumas of his time. Far from it. It means that rather than approaching these things head-on, he broadened their significance by subtleties - by wry humour, by stoicism, and by moving very rapidly from the actual to the symbolic. When we contemplate the characters in his work - whether they be painstaking doctors and researchers, or anonymous suffering citizens - and when we consider the damaged cityscapes and landscapes in which they appear, we are never entirely sure what kind of reality Holub is describing. It seems actual yet filmic, familiar yet dreamlike (or actually nightmarish), substantial yet on the brink of vanishing.
"Five minutes after the air raid" is a good example. It begins with the plainest of physical descriptions:
" In Pilsen,
twenty-six Station Road,
she climbed to the third floor
up stairs which were all that was left
of the whole house,
she opened the door
full on to the sky,
stood gaping over the edge."
The move from certainty to uncertainty here is amazingly swift. No sooner have we taken the address on board than we are treading those free-standing stairs. What dreadful history do they suggest? Are they the hallucination of a damaged mind, or real wreckage? How can the climbing woman avoid further injury? At the end of the poem, we find that she couldn't: she "went back downstairs / and settled herself / to wait / for the house to rise again / and for her husband to rise from the ashes / and for her children's hands and feet to be stuck in place. / In the morning they found her / still as stone, / sparrows pecking her hands."
These imaginative leaps, and the encompassing sense of horror and hurt, are deeply characteristic of Holub's whole oeuvre, and they combine with his humour in all his most successful poems - "Napoleon" and "A History Lesson", for instance, and the lyric by which he is probably best-known outside his own country, "The Fly". This brilliantly catches Holub's paradoxical manner: as the fly buzzes round the battle of Crécy - mating, rubbing her legs together, squatting on a disembowelled horse, laying eggs on the eye of the Royal Armourer, and eventually being gobbled by a swift "fleeing / from the fires of Estrées" - we envisage the scene itself, while once again quickly transposing it to other places, other times, continually asking the difficult central questions. Is the fly heartless or pitiable or neither? Is there something heroic in its pursuit of its own ends, or something reprehensibly ignorant? Is its death inevitable or deserved?
"The Fly" was included in Paul Keegan's tremendous New Penguin Book of English Verse (2000). It was a controversial choice (Holub English?) yet it accurately weighed the importance of George Theiner's translation to a non-Czech readership. It also recognised that Holub's great achievement as a poet is to comment on the whole of human experience, not just one country's particular history. This seems all the more remarkable, given the continuing and confining difficulties of his own life. After the Warsaw Pact invasion of 1968, he was sacked from his job in the Microbiological Institute, and his books were banned. Only when he offered a public self-criticism was his work published again: the dismay this caused among former colleagues, who felt that he had betrayed his liberal beliefs, made the fruit of his rehabilitation taste bitter.
By the time of his death in 1998, Holub had stretched the canvas of his writing to include accounts of his visits to America and elsewhere, and essays on the scientific and technical matters (often referring to his own specialism, immunology). Whatever the accusations levelled against him for not speaking out against communism during the 1970s and '80s, these later writings stay true to his first imaginative principles. They combine diverse worlds, they refine his plain style, they keep up the appearance of good humour in the face of barbarity, and they speak to the common lot of mortal suffering. Forty-odd years ago, when his work first began appearing in translation, he was immediately recognised as one of the most compelling voices of his time. Now that times have changed, he still speaks to all of us.
