Abstract
The poem which follows, ‘A Tribute to Vladimir Holan’, appeared as a samizdat book in Prague in 1980. It is an obituary tribute — Vladimir Holan died in 1980—and it is also a look back at twentieth century Czech cultural history, as personified by eight of Seifert's deceased friends.
Each of these friends were poets who made a contribution to the treasure chest of European literature, yet most are unknown outside Czechoslovakia. (Czech is spoken by only ten million people, and an author writing in a minority language experiences a sort of censorship from the outset; for poetry is difficult to translate.) To introduce the eight poets, we reprint an article by Milan Kundera, the Czech novelist now living in France, which first appeared in Le Nouvel Observateur.
Three of the six pages of the samizdat book are reproduced below and on page 6. The photographer, and the maker, of the samizdat book, was Ivan Kyncl. Over 50 of Ivan Kyncl's photos have appeared in Index since 1978, when he was still in Prague and was pseudonymously credited as ‘Ivan Bárta’. His story is also symptomatic of present day Czechoslovakia. He was 15 when the Warsaw Pact tanks rolled into Prague in 1968. His parents refused to regard this invasion as ‘fraternal international assistance’ and so he was debarred from entering university and instead trained as a commercial photographer. He became the unofficial photographer of Charter 77. Many of his documentary photos and films found their way to the West, but during a house search his entire archive of negatives was confiscated. Following an international outcry, part of the archive was returned — each and every negative destroyed by a chemical. Ivan Kyncl left the country in 1980 and now works as a freelance photographer in London.
In the same year Vladimir Holan died. The Czech authorities allowed public recital by an actor of Seifert's tribute on one condition: instead of the line ‘In the wretched aviary that is Bohemia’ he had to say ‘In the wretched aviary that is the world’.