Miroslav Holub Is Dead at 74; Czech Poet and Immunologist
By SARAH BOXER
Published: July 22, 1998
Miroslav Holub, the Czech poet and immunologist known for his ironic wit, his impatience with irrationality and his knifelike poetry full of scientific imagery, died on July 14 in Prague, where he lived. He was 74.
One of the major Eastern European poets to emerge after World War II, Mr. Holub was celebrated for his surreal mixture of scientific exactitude and absurdist humor. The poet Ted Hughes has called him ''one of the half dozen most important poets writing anywhere.'' In a book called ''The Government of the Tongue'' (1988), Seamus Heaney praised Mr. Holub as a poet who could lay things bare, ''not so much the skull beneath the skin, more the brain beneath the skull.'' Mr. Holub's poetry, he wrote, is ''too compassionate to be vindictive, too skeptical to be entranced.''
Mr. Holub was born in Pilsen, Western Bohemia, on Sept. 23, 1923. His father was a lawyer who worked for the railways and his mother was a language teacher. After World War II, he studied medicine at Charles University in Prague, and worked in a psychiatric ward there.
He supported himself as an editor of Vesmir, a science magazine. In 1953, Mr. Holub earned an M.D. degree and went on to work as an immunologist at the Microbiological Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Science. In 1958, he received a Ph.D. He later developed a strain of nude, or hairless, mice that were used to study various diseases. He wrote more than 150 scientific papers and a monograph, ''Immunology of Nude Mice.''
But it was for his poetry that Mr. Holub was celebrated. His first book of poems, ''Day Duty,'' was published in 1958. And he became known in Europe and the United States when his ''Selected Poems'' was published in 1967 as part of Penguin's series on modern European poets.
Although he never called himself a political dissident and was never jailed as one, he often poked fun at totalitarianism in oblique references in his poetry. ''The Corporal Who Killed Archimedes'' was a protest against Communism's inanities masked as a verse about the death of ''the circle, tangent and point of intersection in infinity.'' Shortly after the Prague Spring of 1968, Mr. Holub became a ''nonperson'' in Czechoslovakia. Any mention of his work was forbidden. And none of his poetry was published there between 1970 and 1980.
During that period, Mr. Holub continued to work as an immunologist in Prague, but he also wrote poetry ''to the table,'' a Russian phrase meaning for an underground audience. In the 1970's his poetry was published in English and in 37 other languages. But in Czechoslovakia, his poems were not published until the fall of Communism.
Although Mr. Holub was sometimes compared with John Donne and the metaphysical poets of the 17th century, he saw himself as closer to other Eastern European writers, particularly Milan Kundera, Zbigniew Herbert and Wislawa Szymborska. He shared with some of those writers what Mr. Heaney called a tough, ''truth-telling urge'' and a ''compulsion to identify with the oppressed.''
Mr. Holub's books include ''Although'' and ''Notes From a Clay Pigeon,'' a book that punned on the poet's name (Holub means ''pigeon'' in Czech). Although he was better known in Europe, he also had an American following. He was a visiting poet at Oberlin College and published four books with the Oberlin College Press, ''Sagittal Section,'' ''Interferon, or On Theater,'' ''Vanishing Lung Syndrome'' and ''Intensive Care.'' He also translated some essays by Lewis Thomas and Stephen Jay Gould from English into Czech.
Mr. Holub included many scientific and medical references in his poems. One titled ''The Festival'' from the book ''Vanishing Lung Syndrome'' begins: ''At the festival of the patients/ with all the known diseases/the crutch choir sings/for the pacemakers./ The double astigmatic landscape/gratefully swallows the murmurs of the mitral valve.'' A poem titled ''Spacetime'' employs the physicist Theodor F. E. Kaluza's theory of space time, in which ''the fifth dimension/ is represented as a circle/associated with every point/in spacetime.''
He was also an unforgiving rationalist in prose. Mr. Holub's book of essays ''Shedding Life: Disease, Politics and Other Human Conditions,'' published by Milkweed Press earlier this year, showed him to be ''a wraith of reason deriding all Dark Age flights of fancy,'' Richard Shweder said in The New York Times Book Review. He was ''against Marxism, parapsychology, Zen, yoga, animal rights advocates, alternative medicine, Hindu gods, J. R. R. Tolkien, postgraduate mystics, California philosophers and anyone or anything either premodern or postmodern,'' Mr. Shweder wrote.
David Young, Mr. Holub's friend and translator at Oberlin College, said: ''He viewed science and reason as antidotes to Communism. He put his faith in facts and was critical of all expressions of irrationality.''
And he did not find his poetic sensibility at odds with his love of science. ''I have a single goal but two ways to reach it,'' Mr. Holub once said. ''I apply them both in turn. Poetry and science form the basis of my experience.''
If something went wrong, Mr. Holub would say, ''It's a very poetic situation,'' Mr. Young recalled. His view of life was sardonic, ironic and grimly witty. In one of his essays in ''Shedding Life,'' he wrote about a muskrat that had been shot in a swimming pool by a neighbor. As Mr. Holub was cleaning it up, ''he was thinking that the blood doesn't know about the muskrat's death,'' said Mr. Young. ''The blood just does what it does.''
Mr. Holub, who was married three times, is survived by his wife, Jitka, and three children.
A restless man with a surreal sense of humor, Mr. Holub did not like to talk about his personal life. He noted that his favorite poet was Homer, whose biography is obscure. He admired science because of its anonymity. ''There is no personal background given: no age, no numbers of girlfriends or wives or children,'' he once said. ''Nothing.''
Filtered Through a Scientist's Eye
And so it circulates
from the San Bernardino Freeway
to the Santa Monica Freeway and
down to the San Diego Freeway and
up to the Golden State Freeway,
and so it circulates
in the vessels of the marine creature,
unbelievable creature in the light
of the southern moon
like the footprint
of the last foot in the world,
and so it circulates
as if there were no other music
except Perpetual Motion,
as if there were no conductor
directing an orchestra of black angels
without a full score:
out of the grand piano floats
a pink C-sharp in the upper octave,
out of the violin
blood may trickle at any time,
and in the joints of the trombone
there swells a fear of the tiniest staccato,
as if there were no Dante
in a wheelchair,
holding a ball of cotton to his mouth,
afraid to speak a line
lest he perforate the meaning,
as if there were no genes
except the gene for defects
and emergency telephone calls,
and so it circulates
with the full, velvet hum of the disease,
circulates all hours of the day,
circulates all hours of the night
to the praise of non-clotting,
each blood cell carrying
four molecules of hope
that it might all be something
from what it is.
''Haemophilia/Los Angeles,'' from ''Vanishing Lung Syndrome,'' translated by David Young and Dana Habova (Faber & Faber, 1990)
Photo: Miroslav Holub