Casualty
They bring us crushed fingers,
mend it, doctor.
They bring burnt-out eyes,
hounded owls of hearts,
they bring a hundred white bodies,
a hundred red bodies,
a hundred black bodies,
mend it, doctor,
on the dishes of ambulances they bring
the madness of blood,
the scream of flesh,
the silence of charring,
mend it, doctor.
And while we are suturing
inch after inch,
night after night,
nerve to nerve,
muscle to muscle,
eyes to sight,
they bring in
even longer daggers,
even more dangerous bombs,
even more glorious victories,
idiots.
Translated by Ewald Osers
Miroslav Holub became a favourite poet of mine when I first read his work in the late 60s in the Penguin Modern European Poets series. His translated work lives on, thanks to Bloodaxe’s Miroslav Holub: Poems Before and After, published in an expanded edition in 2006. It’s a marvellous, decades-wide treasure chest, ranging from the Czech author’s earliest published work to the last collection Holub completed before he died in 1998.
I’ve always trusted Holub’s translators. Their versions are largely innocent of the tell-tale jangle of mismatched idioms, the anguished gasping of the rhyme-search. Dr Holub’s laconic idiom seems ideally suited to linguistic travel. As Neil Astley notes in his Afterword, “Holub used to claim, perhaps only half-jokingly, that he deliberately wrote his poems in a plain style in order that they could be translated …”
This essay also makes it clear that the poet’s choice of plain language was no mere expediency. From the start, he was a conscientious objector to rhyme and metre. His style was formed by the experimental and surrealist writers of the earlier 20th century, especially Jacques Prévert – and, most significantly, by his own scientific training. A microbiologist and immunologist by profession, Holub wrote poetry that epitomised the level but richly-grassed playing field on which science and poetry could meet on equal terms.
He had been a classical scholar before embarking on medicine, and the first poets he read were Homer and Virgil. As a modernist, opposed to socialist realism, he wanted to make poems for people who didn’t usually read poetry. I wonder if he included, or hoped to include, his scientist peers in that category.
Before and After demonstrates a consistency of quality throughout his career. He wrote trenchantly and vividly at every period, through every vicissitude. I always knew I would find it maddeningly difficult to pick a Holub Poem of the week: and that’s exactly as it turned out.
Casualty dates from at least 10 years before the crushing of the Prague Spring by Soviet tanks in 1968 (the event from which the signposts, “Before” and “After,” take their orientation). In fact, it originally appeared in Holub’s first, 1958, collection, Day Duty (Denní Služba).
The narrative seems to be spoken – or grumbled – by a doctor in a field-hospital or casualty department. But Holub shapes his grumble like a folk-tale, in a style dominated by parison and refrain (“mend it, doctor”). That spark of playfulness fires imaginative possibilities.
The use of fable had a practical point for writers in central and eastern Europe during the Soviet occupation; it allowed them surreptitiously to criticise the state and evade censorship. And what a fine artistic resource it proved to be. A Holub poem often seems a form of what prose writers would later call magic realism. Sometimes, of course, the fabulousness is courtesy of the microscope.
Casualty delivers various shocks to the lyric sensibility. We can easily understand “burnt-out eyes” and, although there are two ways of reading “burnt-out”, one of them unpleasantly literal, neither is too disturbing. But you have to pause on the strange, suggestive image and sounds of “hounded owls of hearts”. Perhaps these hearts are exhausted, hunted to near-death both by time and/or totalitarianism. Somehow, the “h” of “hounded” seems to hook itself to the “o” of “owls”, and give birth to a mournful howling. The poem makes hearts appear owl-shaped, and heartbeats resemble beating wings.
Amplification of the simple statement “they bring us” creates even stranger effects, a chain reaction beginning “on the dishes of ambulances they bring …” It takes a bit of imagination to see an ambulance as a dish, and then to conjure the injuries presented (“the madness of blood”, etc) as meals. Yet the metaphor works because it makes us look: it makes horror slightly (if only slightly) approachable. Those half-abstract images cohere and gain additional meaning, as blood, flesh and charring recall the white, red and black colours of the bodies listed earlier.
It’s important for the poem’s argument that two antithetical activities, suturing and wounding, should go on almost simultaneously, and that it’s while the doctors are mending the broken bodies that other people are bringing in (like trophies) more and more sophisticated weapons. The triad zips through time, from daggers to bombs to “glorious victories”. That last is a brilliant sardonic twist. It must have taken guts to write – and publish – such a line in the CSSR in 1958.
No doubt the censor noticed that Casualty was critical primarily of human nature, not the state. The people are the “idiots”. That’s why the poem remains supple and trenchant, in message as well as method. It has the human condition in an absurdist nutshell. And – surprise, surprise – we’re still the same idiots.
- Casualty is from Miroslav Holub, Poems Before and After: Collected English Translations (Bloodaxe Books, 1990, 2006), translated from the Czech by Ian & Jarmila Milner, Ewald Osers, George Theiner, David Young, Dana Hábová, Rebekah Bloyd and Miroslav Holub.