Stem cells are cells capable of producing any other type of cells that are characteristic of a being: These words by Miroslav Holuben come from science, and lyricism has become poetry.

One of the peculiarities of stem cells is that they can be kept indefinitely in the body or in a strain: I didn't realize it when I read the book; I suggested another point of view about the materials of poetry.

Karlos Cid Abasolo has selected and translated some poems from the Czech writer Miroslav Holub (Plzezen, 1923 – Prague, 1998) for the World Book of Poetry of the editorial Susa. In 1990 he and Šárka Grauová had translated a poetic anthology of the immunologist in the Spanish publisher Cátedra.

So I took Holub for the first time, and it seemed to me that science had become a poem, or an analysis of what science has of poetry. That's why it's necessarily ironic, it has a mixture of disciplines, and the joy of the experiment springs from humor. “Here are the languages of the poor,/ the lungs of the generals,/ the eyes of the beavers,/ the skins of the martyrs,/ in the microscopic/absolute crystalline.” Miroslav Holub often turns physical diseases into a metaphor for the plagues of humanity, and is able to draw vital lessons from geometry: “Two parallel lines/ always meet/ if we draw them with our hand.// The only issue is/ if in front of us/ or behind us// If that distance train/advances/backwards”.

It may seem distant and indifferent, but you will understand, reader, its burden, if you give the book a chance. Bohemian poems were intended for the journal Science, dealing with microbiology, fly, manure, leaf nerve. It was brought by Penguin, under the steel curtain, to please the English in the 1960s. After the Prague Spring, Czechoslovakia returned to the discipline of its bloc, many of those who did as they did not see it.

In the Basque Country there are only a few echoes of Maite González Esnal, in the fifth edition of Hegats magazine in 1991. Now yes, now Miroslav Holubi has done scientific justice. It's not a poet that has moved me especially, but it's interesting and fresh, who knows how to mimic the story that's usually written in capital letters with that of crushed anonymous people, with all that creates some universal empathy: “In Alsace,/ on July 6, 1885/ a raging dog/ He threw nine-year-old Joseph Meister on the ground/ and bitten him fourteen times.”