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180 | cZEcHosloVaKia Marián skala (pseudonym of Ján Krajňák, n.d.) While a student at the Philosophical Faculty of the Comenius University in Bratislava, he was expelled after four semesters, and in June 1952 he was arrested and sentenced to five and a half years in the Jáchymov uranium mines. He was freed in 1956 and soon found employment as a reader at the Východoslovensk é tlačiarne (Eastern Slovak Publishers and Printers) in Košice (Slovakia). In 1990 he was named subdean of the Greco-Catholic theological faculty of the Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice. Two years later Pope John Paul II granted him the title of monsignor. Rudolf Dobiáš mentions that hardly anyone at the time was aware of any literary activity on Skala’s part. However, he says, in 2002 he happened to obtain the third edition of Skala’s verse collection Áno a Nie (Yes and No). The following excerpt is from Áno a Nie, reprinted in Básnici za mrežami (Prešov: Vydavatel’stvo Michala Vaška, 2009), 110, and has been translated from Slovak by Harold B. Segel. Črta z denníka (An Entry from a Diary) My heart escapes into the faraway a wistful look into the azure, from the midst of the paradise of the Czech lands, from the hillock of the corner of the camp. . . . This is my world today, all around paled with the last wire, heaps and shafts above the uranium site, from where I return every day toward evening, at midnight, early in the morning, in a throng of tired mates on changes in rotation. This is our world such a cumbersome one without changes, a lot of the life of slaves in the spaces of these one hundred steps, guarded by the gun barrels of guards above a double corridor— with a black sea of injustice that overtakes with a rush in a tangled rage of malice that distances itself here from a view of the world and bristles in a cowardly manner . . . cZEcHosloVaKia | 181 No wonder the heart escapes from this hell, no wonder that the spirit withdraws hastily away from there and in mute gallop slices the air— whizzes into the distance, to the family hearth, to the orphaned place, where the paternal field was abandoned where his grave grows over with grass, where my mother spends her days dispirited by pain— to you, my home, my native land, my sweet fatherland . . . I share the same lot with you, my native mother, similarly bitter, precarious, foamy with the chalices of bitterness we drink together, to the bottom. Pain and grief engulf you and me today, you and me today are burdened by the weight of my eyes. Thus today’s diary entry bears witness to this. And today I am thirty-one years old. (Příbram camp Bitýz, 1956) ...

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