How extraordinary that little Czechoslovakia, brutalized by the Nazis for six years and then, after the liberation, smothered by the Communists for another 40, should have brought forth several of the finest and most compelling poets of the past century. Sequestered behind their spikily melodious language, these extraordinary poets are not well known in the West, with the possible exception of the incomparable (but badly translated) Jaroslav Seifert, who won the Nobel Prize in 1984. Yet there are at least a dozen other Czech poets deserving of acclaim, including Vitezslav Nezval, Franticyek Halas, Franticyek Hrubin, Miroslav Holub, Jan Skacel, and – the strangest, and perhaps greatest, of them all – Vladimir Holan.

Strolling through Prague, I often stop beneath the Charles Bridge to pay homage to the ghost of Holan, who died in 1980.For many years he lived in Kampa, an exquisite quarter below Mala Strana, whose 16th- and 17th-century houses, painted rose and pale green and saffron, border the Vltava River. Now there is a bronze plaque to his memory on the last house where he lived. A mysterious nocturnal figure, something of a recluse, Holan kept to his house, where he shuffled about in carpet slippers, meditating his fierce and enigmatic lyrics. (It is estimated that he composed more than 30,000 verses during his lifetime and his collected poems fill 10 fat volumes.) Not a dissident in the usual sense, Holan represented something more obdurate than outright protest. A tenacious devotion to his art exiled him in the city of his birth; yet this was never “art for art’s sake” or “pure poetry” but a profoundly human endeavor, which brought the most abstruse metaphysics into fruitful collision with the saloon. Only a Czech poet – only Holan, perhaps – could sound a robust coarseness, as in:

How like a beer-cellar fit for belching
The whole world looked, while I
drank wine!

and then juxtapose it with the sober insight:

There is no knowledge … We live
only in illusions.
Yet we tremble with anxiety
That they may not last
– or will last forever
in an odor like that of a radiance
which had its lover in the sun.

These lines come from his long meditative poem, “A Night with Hamlet,” as translated by Jarmila and Ian Milner; their version first appeared in 1980 but was reissued in a luxurious bi-lingual format (Academia). The book may be hard to find outside Prague, but a selection of Holan’s shorter lyrics is available in “Mirroring: Selected Poems,” translated by C.G. Hanzlicek and Dana Habova (Wesleyan University Press,125 pages, $14).

At first glance, Holan seems to be something of a Surrealist, especially in his wild and brilliant imagery. Thus he describes the sound of a Primus lamp that “began to gurgle / like a carrier-pigeon’s crop / and then hissed like a sneeze in the silence of a funeral.” Or he will speak of Hamlet, “frying the seed of the Word on the melted / bacon of his tongue.” But this is a superficial impression; in fact, Holan is not only a great lyric poet, who can be as tender as he is savage, but also a rather austere moralist.

“A Night with Hamlet” was written during a 13-year period from 1949 to 1962 – that is, during the worst years of the Communist regime. Yet it isn’t a protest poem but a searching, even relentless, exploration of love and destiny, truth and falsehood. To be sure, Holan entertained no illusions about the Czechoslovakia of those years; at the very outset of the poem he states, “Fraud alone is certainty here” and speaks with the utmost contempt of “eunuchs in revolt against the spirit.” But the poem is less about a particular period or regime than about what it means to be truly human in an age of fear.

It doesn’t matter
Whether what we heard was the
sucked saliva
Running from sleeping crickets’
mouths,
Builders of midnight bridges,
Creators who made themselves
double tombs,
Or phantoms whose wages are
prophecy.
Only art made no excuses…
And only life insisted,
Insisted dangerously that we would
survive,
Though we might really wish to die

A Czech friend once told me that simply to know during those terrible years that Holan was roaming his darkened rooms by night and writing his poems under the very shadow of the Prague Castle gave him courage. For the challenge was not merely to formulate dangerous truths that were unpopular with the authorities; it was, rather, to create something beautiful, something enduring, in the teeth of dread. And Holan knew the cost of his art; as he says of Hamlet, his alter-ego, “He was face to face with the holy spirit of music / And had to live for the takings of a whore / Or the price of a dog.”

Against pervasive fear, against the evil that “always rises / up humanity’s spine, spattered with blood / like a dentist’s staircase,” Holan can proffer nothing but patience and love. These virtues he finds embodied in the figure of his aging mother, whom he evokes at the poem’s close without the least trace of sentimentality. His mother’s hands, “wrinkled and veined,” had remained “faithful to all earthly things” and so prevail over Hamlet’s bitter soliloquies and caustic tirades.

Midway through the poem, Holan writes, “The everyday is the miraculous.” The line is inscribed too as a kind of epitaph on his memorial plaque. To us this may sound a bit outworn; so many poets nowadays seek out “the extraordinary in the ordinary.” But for those like Holan and his countrymen who had to live their lives in the numbing monotony of dread, the simple everyday must appear a blessing, a perpetual epiphany. Perhaps this is what he meant when he wrote: “But still more spacious / for the shivering quinine of Elsinore / was the sound of Ophelia cutting her toenails.” In the lightless suspension that is Elsinore, a place of waiting without hope, the snip of a pair of nail-scissors echoes like an annunciation.