Before and during the Second World War, Vladimír Holan published many collections that were banned until the early 1960s. Suzanne Renaud and Bohuslav Reynek translated some verses by this great poet for their own and their friends’ enjoyment. These free, spontaneous, unpublished translations were drafts on tiny, disparate cards. Sometimes they became simple missives, like the first four poems addressed to a friend in France. This collection is the first edition. Reynek and Holan’s friendship belongs to those “long-distance relationships” allowed by poetry, “which defy time and death. […] Holan liked Reynek’s translations, poems and engravings and admired the man. ‘When your wife came to see us once at Kampa,’ he wrote to Reynek on his seventy-fifth birthday, ‘I said to myself: a princess! I have long known that you are a rare being, a poet, a singular artist and a translator-explorer’.” (Jan Vladislav, postface).