18-19.36 L'Antre des mots - Autour de la poésie de Vladimír Holan

Although the poet Vladimir Holan (1905-1980) belongs to the Czech modernist generation, it is difficult to assess his work either in this context or in the wider Czech literary tradition. First, Holan's poetry is hermetic, based on the autonomy of the word, philosophical references and cultural allusions, thus offering multiple possibilities of interpretation. Second, several personal tragedies drove him into ever deeper isolation, further exacerbated by the strain of living under the communist regime. This article describes the relationship between the events of Holan's life and the main features of his poetic work.

Holan's referencing of the Bible is frequent, even if we cannot assert that it is the sole, or even privileged, influence. This paper does not intend to portray the scope of these allusions, but rather to indicate by means of a few examples how and in what sense he makes varied use of the Bible's familiar imaginary landscape. More often than not his approach consists in re-working a biblical theme by superimposing it upon another theme. He was also very conscious of the poetic dimension of the Bible, most notably that of the Old Testament. If the referencing of the Bible takes on great significance in Holan, then it is primarily due to the possibilities offered by the Bible to establish a parallel between poetic creation and creation as it is set forth in the Bible itself. We have access to Holan's own handwritten annotations in the copies of the Bible in his personal library. These annotations serve an important function by allowing us to examine the correspondences between Holan's commentaries and their transformations in his writings.

The author accentuates what he perceives as an affinity, in terms of structure and ideas, between "Noc s Hamletem" (Night with Hamlet) and "Toskána" (Tuscany), two of Holan's poems, written in 1956 and edited in the early 1960s. The autobiographic protagonists of both poems are lifelong captives to their absurd ejection into the world. While an individual, as an "incessant consciousness," has to accept such a situation, a poet's task is to wage a struggle for a transition "from nature to being." Toskána's epic horizon is determined by three chronotopes: a chronotope of Bohemia where the time of the pragmatic everyday routine clashes with a permanently living historic memory (St. Agnes), a chronotope of Italy as a paralyzing space locked in its past, and a chronotope of world history as a never-ending Babylonian chaos.

This study on the spatial and corporeal concept of the word in the work of Vladimír Holan and Věra Linhartová seeks to characterise the concept of the word in the texts of two contemporary Czech poets from different generations. Their concepts involve the use of similar imagery in discussing the word. They also show the same quest for a “supreme sense” in the poetic word. Their concept of the word stems from an ancient tradition in the interpretation of the biblical word, conceiving of the word as a multiple spatial structure of four different semantic layers. In the work of the two poets, the word has a complex spatial structure that needs to be explored in every sense. Poetry presents itself as the art which explores verbal space. This special concept of the word indicates why the poetry of both poets is so rich in hidden meanings and could be called “hermetic poetry.” The depth of the semantic space directs the “explorer” beyond the common meaning toward the unexpected. In this way these two modern poets remind us of the fact that one has to look behind the surface of words in order to grasp their sense. They also remind us that words never are “innocent” or pure but bear the weight and function of their cultural memory. Both poets augment this spatial concept by the corporeal one, as in the New Testament, where Christ is presented as “the Word of God” made flesh. Like the Word of God that suffered on the cross, poetic words suffer on the cross of their given meaning. Their “resurrection” consists on the one hand in the reconstruction of their lost, hidden or original meaning, on the other hand in their liberation from given senses.

We shall be considering the possibility of a convergence between Vladimír Holan and Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996), two East European poets, both of whom tried to express the trinity of poetry, time and the sentient person in the light of the destinies and writings of their great Russian predecessors. In particular, we shall study their ‘long poems' which unfurl as descriptions of lived experience and as the reality of a moment of speech. As ‘stories' they are of the narrative epic genre, but in their telling they are closer to the meditative, a genre inhabited by an author who apprehends the world and displays thought at work. Sombre epics, which try to reflect the twentieth century. Brodsky rejects "pity" in the Russian sense and replaces it by the categorical imperative of aesthetics. His only universal value is language. He takes no account of Akhmatova's experience: the transcendental illumination, the "miracle" that occurs when all is emptied, lost, destroyed. Holan, however - with his underlying deep and bitter Christianity - obstinately explores these moments of illumination, trying to associate light and shadow, to inhabit and scrutinise pain and its relation with "joy," because it is from that point that the question can arise and the poem take shape.