| Larry Schwartz |
| Science and poetry meet in the person of Miroslav Holub. Larry Schwartz reports. WAY up in a highrise city hotel room, the man in hastily donned yellow shirt smiles a weary welcome. Miroslav Holub has endured a 20-hour- flight from Prague. “Therefore I have eyes like an albino rabbit. In town for this week’s Melbourne Writers’ Festival, the Czech poet and scientist plans to sleep for 12 hours when we leave. He says an event such as this can provide a break from cares of home and laboratory. But he regards festivals as a duty. “Maybe somebody wanted to be invited to a festival. I can’t imagine any such living creature … Considered to be among a handful of the finest practising poets, he ironically came to prominence abroad through English translations that appeared around the time he was declared a “non person” in Czechoslovakia (1969 to 1982). “It was very simple. You couldn’t be named. It started with my book on Edgar Allen Poe. They called me to the publishing house and told me, `look, it’s more than half a million crowns. We must publish it …’ “They were very fair-minded. They took all the Czech names out of the book. So when you read the book, it follows that Edgar Allen Poe was an American poet writing in Czech an essay on himself 100 years after his death. Holub dismisses as “provocation” claims in a publication on international authors that though he was a supporter of the reformist Dubcek government in 1968 and signed a petition on behalf of political prisoners in 1972, he “astonished his friends in August 1973 by issuing a long statement repudiating these activities … He says he did not write such a statement. An immunologist, he has written more than 140 scientific papers, 14 books of poetry, five books of essays. Almost 70, he is considered to be the leading Czech poet of a generation that reached maturity during the Nazi occupation. An only child born in Pilsen, Holub’s father was a railway clerk, his mother a professor of French and German. “So I was all Goethe and Holderlin and Baudelaire and Verlaine.” After World War II, he discovered a Czech anthology of American poetry that would have a big impact on his work. His was a “kind of poetry derived, some would say, from English and American new poetry. The Walt Whitman heritage, Carl Sandburg, the Beat poets and so on … A lonely child, he collected butterflies, caterpillars and plants. And, of course, poems. He went on to study medicine at the Charles University, Prague, and later gained a doctorate in immunology. After the fall of Communism, it became possible to take on a full-time writing role. But he decided that that was not for him. “I need the science, for my soul, so to say. The humanist would say that science is corrosion of your soul … Partly because he can always turn to scientific work, he says he feels no compunction to be published or to push himself to write poems. He says he rarely wrote a poem in 1987-8 when busy with a scientific monograph on the immunology of “nude” mice. He explains that 10 major mutations of mice are hairless. They would not survive in nature because they cannot compete with the herd. “A typical man-made mouse,” he says of the 400-to-500 he has in cages in his laboratory. Meaning but for human intervention they would be dead. With the likes of Zbigniew Herbert and Tadeusz Rozewicz (Poland) and Vasko Popa (the former Yugoslavia), Holub is among a group of central European poets introduced to a wider audience through a magazine called `Modern Poetry In Translation’. Eschewing conventional metre and rhyme, his verse has been described as “tough-minded and laconic … to some coldly analytical and skeletal”. Associated from the late 1950s with a Czech group called The Everyday Poetry Movement, his influences include Rozewicz, Herbert as well as Americans Williams Carlos Williams and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. He has spoken of a “naked poetry stripped of words”. “Words should be the swimsuit of the poem,” he now says, “but not double wrapping.” He favors what he terms a scientific approach to poetry, a scepticism about human nature. HOLUB says he is tolerant of other approaches. However, he has very clear likes and dislikes. “I hate the fully introverted poetry which believes in its finding the truth. It’s finding the truth about the state of mind of the poet right now. It’s not such a little thing to find out the truth about somebody’s mind. But to find the truth about the world. Especially after Auschwitz, it’s an illusion. He says he seeks to connect with readers by using humor and a poetry written of specific events. “If it is a theme for the poem you can’t forget it for the next 40 years.” He talks of “a fair poem, a frank recording of what occurs to you in this moment”. Holub once claimed to favor “writing for people untouched by poetry”. “I would like them to read poems as naturally as they read the papers or go to a football game,” he said. Now, he concedes this was “juvenile optimism”. He is sceptical too of poets who fail to realise that they have a fairly limited audience. “I hate the prophets preaching to people. He (the poet) believes he has crowds before him. He has nobody before him. He has 500 people who will buy the book if it ever appears and 200 would read a couple of poems at all. “I believe … in a network of poetry. you touch just a couple of individuals. They touch other individuals. While he continues to write his poetry and prose, Holub is studying the effect of cold temperatures on the immune system. Nude mice experience stress related to the cold at 22 degrees Celsius, a temperature at which normal mice are quite comfortable. “But this mouse, because it’s hairless, it’s very unhappy. What will their discomfort teach us? “What is the mechanism of catching cold,” he says. “What is the immunological mechanism. Because it’s not exactly known. He says that to ask what this might achieve is somewhat like asking the meaning of a particular poem. “Nothing. Maybe nothing. But it is the way of progress. “It is a logical question. So you ask the question and you try to answer the question. Just because it’s a logical question. It’s no special question. The worst poetry written is based on common sense and eternal truth … THE SUNDAY AGE, 05-Sep-1993 |
Larry Schwartz Writer 