Miroslav Holub

Detta nummer av Dialoger rymmer följande teman: Den tredje kulturen, Erövra ett språk och Paradoxernas underjord.

Miroslav Holub was the Czech Republic's most important poet, and also one of her leading immunologists. His fantastical and witty poems give a scientist's bemused view of human folly and other life on the planet. Mixing myth, history and folktale with science and philosophy, his plainly written, sceptical poems are surreal mini-dramas often pivoting on paradoxes. Poems Before & After covers thirty years of his poetry. Before are his poems from the fifties and sixties, poems written before the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia: first published in English in his Penguin Selected Poems (1967) and in Bloodaxe's The Fly (1987), with some additional poems. After are translations of his later poetry, all written after 1968, including not only those from his two Bloodaxe editions, On the Contrary (1984) and Supposed to Fly (1996), but also the entire texts of two late collections published by Faber, Vanishing Lung Syndrome (1990) and The Rampage (1997). With additional translations by David Young, Dana Hábová, Rebekah Bloyd and Miroslav Holub. 'A laying bare of things, not so much the skull beneath the skin, more the brain beneath the skull; the shape of relationships, politics, history; the rhythms of affections and disaffection; the ebb and flow of faith, hope, violence, art' – Seamus Heaney 'Miroslav Holub is one of the half dozen most important poets writing anywhere' – Ted Hughes 'One of the sanest voices of our time' – A. Alvarez 'He is a magnificent, astringent genius and this volume sings with an oblique and cutting candour, a tubular coolness we must praise again and again' – Tom Paulin

This collection spans almost 40 years of writing, much of it under circumstances that involved risk and silence, living under Communism in Czechoslovakia, pursuing a career as a scientist, and carrying on the 20th century's experimental tradition as represented by artists like Arp, Miro, and William Carlos Williams. By the time of his death in 1998, Miroslav Holub had become one of the most widely acclaimed poets on the planet.

Miroslav Holub was called 'one of the half-dozen most important poets writing anywhere' (Ted Hughes). In the scientific community his renown rested on such works as Immunology of Nude Mice. In Czechoslovakia he also wrote a highly popular magazine column. When Holub was a "non-person", these "column articles" weren't published under his own name, but everyone knew who'd written them because the style was immediately recognisable as his: a cross between Flann O'Brien and Jonathan Swift, with a dash of Tristram Shandy… the Beachcomber of Wenceslas Square. Subtitled Notes and objections, maximum length 43 lines, these "essaylets" are as brilliant and blackly funny as his poetry and as succinct and precisely observed as his scientific writing. In their pausings and musings over daily, supposedly ordinary happenings, they focus on the quirks of human conduct, yet the mirror they prop up to everyday life neither merely distorts nor simply reflects, but pinpoints little facets of human activity which reveal the mortality, thoughts and behaviour of our present age and civilisation. This selection from Holub's contributions to the magazine Vim (maximum length, 43 lines) is illustrated by the leading Czech cartoonist Vladimír Rencin, with photographs by Vojtech Písarík.

Vanishing Lung Syndrome confirms Holub's special status as one of Europe's leading poets and as a rare mediator between scientific and literary modes of discourse. This book is darkly witty and mordantly accurate; it documents, among other things, the ignorance, folly and brutality abroad in our world. But it also brims with tenderness, humor, and occasional gleams of hope.