Mirroring: Selected Poems

by Vladimír Holan, Dana Hábová (Translator), C.G. Hanzlicek (Translator)

English, Czech (translation)

Genres: Poetry, Classics

135 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

s one of the earlier poets of the country. Born in the year 1905, Vladimír Holan was famous for the obscure language and the pessimistic ideas that his poems revealed. Born in Prague, Vladimír Holan perused a career of a clerk. His first poetic work was published in the year 1932 and was called Vanutí meaning Breezing.

A member of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, Vladimír Holans poetry often reflected his strong political views. His more political poems included, Zárí 1938 (September 1938),Sen (The Dream), Odpoved Francii (The Reply to France), and Zpev tríkrálový (Twelfth Night Song). In the year 1949 he left the Communist party and by the 1950s and 60s he started writing longer poems which were a mixture of abstract lyrics and reality.

Vladimír Holan stopped writing after the death of his only daughter in the year 1977 and in the year 1980 he passed away and was buried at the Olšany Cemetery. The most celebrated poems of the poet Vladimír Holan includes:

* Snow
* Stay
* When It Rains On Sunday
* A Night With Hamlet
* Eodem anno pons ruptus est
* Meeting in a Lift
* Mi Lascio
* She Asked You
* Human Voice

Reviews

[Gabriel Congdon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Zigga Zigga,

I'm not going to say too here. I have a Piero Della Francesca review coming up that’s going to zap a lot of my energy.

So real quick here. 2 Things I liked.

Onsey: Narrative leaning. I like that. Even the poems that are in the key of Beautiful Thought, even the characters (Characters? Noundlings) are still on the go. I like movement.

Which brings me 2: Nounlings. He uses stuff. Things. Objects. Props. Matter & mass. Again, I dig. Objects are mysterious, they’re what the what is; theirs nothing within the chair, but more chair.

Anyway. I’m not too crazy about these collections though, I’m a singles man; the jumps from book to book, too much for me. I’ll say this though: The war poems were daffy. When what’s his name is doing normal poet stuff, he’s fine, soon as war stuff arrives, characters get batty, a loosening of reality, a tragic-absurdism more puzzling than pathotic. A certain not-that-good-ness that was nevertheless piqueful for that reason.

How about a poem for the road

Epoch

We were never quite it. We only resembled it,
But we resembled it completely.
Now, when we begin to be it summarily
we only shape ourselves to part of the image
We’re going to abandon totally in the future.
What we will become, I wonder.

[Jenna · Rating 4 out of 5]

My first exposure to Holan's poetry occurred via the Jarmila and Ian Milner translation of the simple-yet-beautiful poem "She Asked You" (incidentally, I greatly prefer the Milner translation to the C. G. Hanzlicek translation; it's so much more colloquial and hard-hitting). Many of Holan's short poems try to condense so much meaning into such a small space that the reader comes away feeling simply baffled (e.g., "Knowledge isn't vision. But it's repeated./That's one of the reasons we die..."). But a few of the short poems are stunningly effective; my favorite is "Snow" (another poem whose Milner translation is, IMHO, superior to the Hanzlicek translation -- Since I'm unfamiliar with the Czech language, I am judging the translations on their virtues as free-standing poems here).

The longer narrative poems demonstrate Holan's talent for evoking the piteous existences of poor people living in wartime; by scattering just a few memorably bizarre, so-weird-that-they-must-be-true scraps of dialogue on the page, Holan brings his subjects to life without ever compromising his air of naturalistic authenticity or descending into mawkishness -- a formidable accomplishment, considering that his subjects include suicidal grandfathers and penniless-but-purehearted virgins. Even better are his fierce philosophical poems, like "To the Enemies" and "Death of a Poet" (the latter invites comparison to Guillaume Apollinaire's "Zone" and Yehuda Amichai's "Travels of the Last Benjamin of Tudela," two other 20th-century kunstlerromans-in-verse that drift somnabulistically among referring to the protagonist as "he," "I," and "you"). A poet who should be better-known than he is.

[luciana · Rating 2 out of 5]

this is my first time reading Czech poetry and while Holan has a unique voice, i couldn't find the flow of his poems, nor did i find the lines particularly impactful.

[Ba · Rating 5 out of 5]

I began to understand Holan's use of paradox and his interest in the liminal spaces in which existence suddenly becomes incomprehensible, rationality loses its meaning, things are up in the air and cannot be grasped. In such moments something happens...sometimes sth transformative, but more often an action that simply only makes sense in such a context and not in "regular life." The moments of a life temporarily grasped or stalled at, the inevitable progression towards oblivion, which is where "You have nothing more to say, silence has turned away from you, and death itself has disowned you" (118). Holan's vision is often bleak...in death there is not even the peace of silence, but an anti-silence... The search for comfort which comes (in this collection) closest in the famous "Resurrection" poem (which was what got me into Holan years ago), part 1 of "A Triptych from 1975" (118), and the two letter poems that surround it (the latter of which I read as Holan speaking to his daughter, who, side note, could not read/comprehend his writing, but this is not something that he flaunts or cries about) -- the poems I interpreted as to his daughter moved me, even more than the mother poems he is famous for, which to me began to take on a note of desperation and even resigned hopelessness in the later years.

[Cc · Rating 5 out of 5]

I began to understand Holan's use of paradox and his interest in the liminal spaces in which existence suddenly becomes incomprehensible, rationality loses its meaning, things are up in the air and cannot be grasped. In such moments something happens...sometimes sth transformative, but more often an action that simply only makes sense in such a context and not in "regular life." The moments of a life temporarily grasped or stalled at, the inevitable progression towards oblivion, which is where "You have nothing more to say, silence has turned away from you, and death itself has disowned you" (118). Holan's vision is often bleak...in death there is not even the peace of silence, but an anti-silence... The search for comfort which comes (in this collection) closest in the famous "Resurrection" poem (which was what got me into Holan years ago), part 1 of "A Triptych from 1975" (118), and the two letter poems that surround it (the latter of which I read as Holan speaking to his daughter, who, side note, could not read/comprehend his writing, but this is not something that he flaunts or cries about) -- the poems I interpreted as to his daughter moved me, even more than the mother poems he is famous for, which to me began to take on a note of desperation and even resigned hopelessness in the later years.

[Sportsman · Rating 2 out of 5]

bad translation sorry

[Zarja]

Ne to ampak zid kot avtoportret (pr. Nives Vidrih), ki je ni na goodreads:/
Idk about this one ampak Zid kot avtoportret je 5/5

[Sabina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Vladimir Holan est un poète unique. Si l'histoire de ce XXe siècle est présente dans sa poésie, et elle est présente, insistante, laissant désarroi et douleur, c'est à la fleur d'un ressentir qui ne se noie jamais dans les lieux communs de l'être et autres certitudes. Chaque mot de sa poésie érafle et questionne, ouvre un abîme autant pour la pensée que pour la poésie. Sabina Stranger

[Msoneworld4me · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed reading this. Reading something that has been translated is always interesting, but this flowed well.

[Mills College Library]

891.861 H722m 1985