On reading Narrative Poems I, a particular music enters the mind: The echo of a ballad. It doesn't happen by chance. It is the tragic and mysterious ballad Maj by the Czech romantic poet K. H. Macha, that impressed Holan with its characters and its ritornello as a wonderful way of telling stories in the popular style. In 1938, the menace of war made Czech poets react and face the Nazi occupation bravely. Holan, in particular, changed his style to be clearer, to fight, and become the one people knew by heart. So the fight for the freedom went together with being closer to people. This tendency...

This collection of Holan's narrative poems, Narrative Poems II, was published in 1963, but the poems were written between 1948 and 1953, during some of the cruellest years following the establishment of a totalitarian regime in Czechoslovakia. Writing in "a delirious seclusion" in what today is regarded a legendary house on the island of Kampa in Prague, the poet experienced "all the horrors" of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Holan, in recollecting those years, emphasised that his poetry did not have a direct connection to any particular events of that time. His concern was always: "man,...