Vladimír Holan: Dream

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Author: Vladimír Holan, Translation: Josef Tomáš and Alex Skovron, First edition: 2020, Pages: 96, Language: Czech and English, ISBN 978-80-907886-2-6

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This landmark bilingual edition of Vladimír Holan’s Dream presents the complete Czech text alongside a new English translation. Written in Prague in April 1939, a month after the German invasion of Czechoslovakia, the poem’s compressed intensity bears witness to the atmosphere and anxiety of
the times.

“The basic scenery of Dream is night, in which the world of facts and that of phantoms are constantly rearranging and interpenetrating. Holan chooses the peephole perspective of a celestial ‘perpendicular’ view. It is as if, in the images of a confused world, he was illuminating, in pinpoint, ‘hypnotized’ moments of the city, its events, and its characters, who strive in their commonplace activities to belie and deny the sweeping Apocalypse. These are film stills, dramatically distorted by a special light – the world as phantasm.”

— from the Afterword by Jiří Brabec

If you are in the Czech Republic, you can buy the book here. If you are abroad, please contact us.

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