He was the creator of the modern Slovak poetic language and taking over the sceptre from Krasko, he loosened the spasm of symbolism, made its diction more civil and transformed it into a sparkling, natural, everyday and yet foolish speech. He was a poet by the grace of the Word. He knew about It subconsciously, feeling everything like a gourmand: how it tasted in his mouth and how it sounded in his ears. And he documented this continuously: in his large poetic projects as well as in the simple alphabet written for the little ones.
Milan Rúfus
Smrek never became reconciled with the communist regime. His disagreement was expressed in the poems left in his "desk drawer," directed against totalitarianism. These could be published only after November 1989 (Against the Night). In these poems he sharply condemned the practices of the regime (in particular the trials of the 1950's) and he alluded ironically to poets and writers who "over a bowl of lentils" had decided to serve the totalitarian power.
Vladimír Petrík
When reading Ján Smrek's posthumously published volume of selected poems from his "inner exile" from 1948 to 1956, Against the Night, the reader has to admit that Smrek certainly was the most courageous of all Slovak poets: for each of those approximately 200 poems he could have been sentenced to death by the communist regime. It is a mystery to me how they could be hidden and saved in those dangerous times. Smrek saw the evil coming on that February night in 1948 and did not stop writing his secret poetical diary until the Thaw of 1956. He preferred not to publish at a time when his colleagues and intellectuals encountered severe injustice, were brutally imprisoned, sentenced and several even murdered.
Milan Richter
