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The work of one of the greatest poets of the sixteenth century, Laments has been beautifully rendered by contemporary poets Stanislaw Baranczak and Seamus Heaney. This poignant series of poems on the death of Kochanowski's young daughter is surprisingly intimate and domestic in nature, expressing a candid grief and an undeniably modern sense of humiliation and religious doubt.
48 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1580
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407 people want to read
About the author
Jan Kochanowski
81 books20 followersKochanowski was born at Sycyna, near Radom, Poland. Little is known of his early education. At fourteen, fluent in Latin, he was sent to the Kraków Academy. After graduation in 1547 at age seventeen, he attended the University of Königsberg (Królewiec), in Ducal Prussia, and Padua University in Italy. At Padua, Kochanowski came in contact with the great humanist scholar Francis Robortello. Kochanowski closed his fifteen-year period of studies and travels with a final visit to France, where he met the poet Pierre Ronsard.
In 1559 Kochanowski returned to Poland for good, where he remained active as a humanist and Renaissance poet. He spent the next fifteen years close to the court of King Sigismund II Augustus, serving for a time as royal secretary. In 1574, following the decampment of Poland's recently elected King Henry of Valois (whose candidacy to the Polish throne Kochanowski had supported), Kochanowski settled on a family estate at Czarnolas ("Blackwood") to lead the life of a country squire. In 1575 he married Dorota Podlodowska, with whom he had seven children.
Kochanowski is sometimes referred to in Polish as "Jan z Czarnolasu" ("John of Blackwood"). It was there that he wrote his most memorable works, including The Dismissal of the Greek Envoys and the Laments.
Kochanowski died, probably of a heart attack, in Lublin on 22 August 1584.
In 1559 Kochanowski returned to Poland for good, where he remained active as a humanist and Renaissance poet. He spent the next fifteen years close to the court of King Sigismund II Augustus, serving for a time as royal secretary. In 1574, following the decampment of Poland's recently elected King Henry of Valois (whose candidacy to the Polish throne Kochanowski had supported), Kochanowski settled on a family estate at Czarnolas ("Blackwood") to lead the life of a country squire. In 1575 he married Dorota Podlodowska, with whom he had seven children.
Kochanowski is sometimes referred to in Polish as "Jan z Czarnolasu" ("John of Blackwood"). It was there that he wrote his most memorable works, including The Dismissal of the Greek Envoys and the Laments.
Kochanowski died, probably of a heart attack, in Lublin on 22 August 1584.
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October 12, 2022
jebany schizofrenik sobie corke wymyslil
April 10, 2023
Mam jedną pierdolona schizofrenie, zaburzenia emocjonalne..
May 24, 2024
LAMENTS: PAINTING PAIN AS POETRY
One of the most renowned poems in Malayalam language, a Dravidian language that happens to be my mother tongue, is ‘Mambazham’ (Mango) written by our great poet Vyloppalli. In this poignant poem, the poet depicts the sorrow and remembrances of a mourning mother who lost her only child. The poem unfolds with the hot tears of a mother tormented by painful memories when she sees the falling of the first golden mango of the season in her residential premise. She remembers an incident that transpired four months ago when the mango trees were in full bloom. Her naughty child, as part of his fun and frolic, plucks a slender mango flower and sprays its buds like a firework, thereby inviting the wrath of the mother. She admonishes him: “Naughty boy! You are the one who should run to pick up mangoes when they are ripe and now you have crushed the buds without waiting for it to grow into golden mangoes. Do you want a spanking?” The child looks crestfallen and with a lake in his eyes tells the mother: “I won’t be there to pick up the ripe mangoes!” Before the summer mellowed the mangoes, the child leaves the earthly nest to the heavenly abode. At the end of the poem, the mother, who witnesses the merriment of neighboring children rushing to pick up the fallen mangoes in summer, places the first mango on the svelte grave of her son and says: ‘This fruit, without knowing the truth (that you are no more), has arrived only for you my darling, to be held by your delicate hands, and savored by your mini mouth’. I was reminded of this marvelous poem when I read Jan Kochanowski’s Laments.
Jan Kochanowski (1530–1584) is considered as the most outstanding Polish poet and humanist of the entire Slavic world before the Romantic age. Laments (Treny) , a series of nineteen threnodies (or elegies) written in Polish and published in 1580 , is regarded a highpoint of Polish Renaissance and his crowning achievement as a poet. Its genesis lies in the tragic death of his daughter Ursula when she was just two- and-a- half year old. In all the nineteen Threnodies or Laments, Kochanowski desperately pours out his imponderable grief and desolation after the little girl's death with remarkable artistry and pathos. They powerfully portray the true depth of his intimate feelings and pain to come to terms with the loss and mourns his own innate human frailty.
Born into the country nobility, Kochanowski studied at a university in Kraków and later, between 1552 and 1559, at the University of Padua in Italy. On his return to Poland in 1559, he served as a secretary at the royal court in Kraków. Kochanowski devoted many years to the study of Classical philology and achieved a mastery of Latin and had good knowledge of Greek literature which is evident in his allusions to Greek mythology in many of the laments. Kochanowski created a new Polish vernacular literature based upon an assimilation of Greek and Latin models. His imagination and innovations gave rise to some of the most celebrated works in Polish literature. In that sense, Kochanowski was ‘a poet of genius’ and can be called the father of modern Polish poetry.
The new refined English translation of Laments , preserving the meters and rhymes, is the culmination of collaboration between Stanislaw Baranczak, a poet and renowned translator of Polish poetry , and Seamus Heaney, the great Irish poet and Nobel Laureate. This new translation is a thrilling triumph and a treat for poetry readers. They stand by its own merit as amazingly lyrical English elegies.
Making his personal grief public, Kochanowski broke many well-established customs and literary conventions in Poland, thereby provoking disapproval of many of his contemporaries. Stanislaw Baranczak in his insightful introduction points out that the very thing that has appealed most powerfully to the sensitivities of later generations of readers…was the thing that caused the most problems for his contemporary audience
As mentioned, Laments constitute an exceptionally vivid account of one man’s effort to make sense of a devastating experience and all the poems in this collection overwhelm the readers at the first reading itself. It seemed to me that the qualities of the child mourned are less important than the breadth and depth of the poet’s own grief. The opening poem summons all to assemble and grieve the death of his daughter. The poem suggests that, deep as his feelings are, poetry may aid him in his quest for understanding and some sort of recovery- Where, then, is relief?/In shedding tears or wrestling down my grief?. Kochanowski creates powerful building energy in this poem using repetition of ‘All’ at the beginning.
Lament 1
All Heraclitus' tears, all threnodies
And plaintive dirges of Simonides,
All keens and slow airs in the world, all griefs,
Wrung hands, wet eyes, laments and epitaphs,
All, all assemble, come from every quarter,
Help me to mourn my small girl, my dear daughter,
Whom cruel Death tore up with such wild force
Out of my life, it left me no recourse.
So the snake, when he finds a hidden nest
Of fledgling nightingales, rears and strikes fast
Repeatedly, while the poor mother bird
Tries to distract him with a fierce, absurd
Fluttering — but in vain! the venomous tongue
Darts, and she must retreat on ruffled wing.
"You weep in vain," my friends will say. But then,
What is not in vain, by God, in lives of men?
All is in vain! We play at blindman's buff
Until hard edges break into our path.
Man's life is error. Where, then, is relief?
In shedding tears or wrestling down my grief?
The opening of Lament 5 paints a bucolic picture of the shoot of a young olive tree, thriving amidst the other plants, which is cut down by a careless gardener. The suddenness of this act is conveyed by a line break, further emphasizing the cutting of the shoot, and followed by a rough and a rapid section on the ravage that death has spawned.
Lament 5
Just as on olive seedling, when it tries
To grow up like the big trees towards the skies
And sprouts out of the ground, a single stalk,
A slender, leafless, twigless, living stick;
And which if lopped by the swift sickle's blade
As it weeds out thorns and nettles, start to fade
And, sapped of natural strength, cut off, forlon,
Drops by the tree from whose seed it was born—
So was my dearest Ursula's demise.
Growing before her parent's caring eyes,
She'd barely risen above ground when Death
Felled the dear child with infectious breath
At our very feet. Hard eyed Persephone.
Were all those tears of no avail to me?
The belongings of the dead, especially clothes, evoke an intense emotional response in someone who was intimately attached to him. The Lament 7 dwells on the inanimate things left by the infant and the mournful memories associated with it.
Laments 7
Pathetic garments that my girl once wore
But cannot anymore!
The sight of them still haunts me everywhere
And feeds my great despair.
They miss her body’s warmth; and so do I:
All I can do is cry.
Eternal, iron slumbers now possess
My child: each flowered dress,
Smooth ribbon, gold-clasped belt her mother bought—
Their worth is set at naught.
You were meant, my daughter, to be led
To the last stone –cold bed
By your poor mother! She had promised more
Than what your four planks store:
The shroud she herself sewed, the earthen clod
I set down at my head.
O sealed oak chest, dark lid, board walls that hide
The dowry and the bride!
Having failed to transcend the physical world, the poet begins Lament 8 , a sonnet on his daughter’s absence, in measured tones and then turns defenselessly to address her once again as his emotions rise to contradict his effort at control. A house that once reverberated with joy and laughter is contrasted with the loud silence where the parents listen for sounds that never come. This is a fine expression of the way the life of a household flows in and through a happy child, and the grateful reliance parents themselves put on a child's vivacity and vitality.
Lament 8
The void that fills my house is so immense
Now that my girl is gone. It baffles sense:
We all are here, yet no one is, I feel;
The flight of one small soul has tipped the scale.
You talked for all of us, you sang for all,
You played in every nook and cubbyhole.
You never would have made your mother brood
Nor father think too much for his own good;
The house was carefree. Everybody laughed.
You held us in your arms: our hearts would lift.
Now emptiness reigns here; the house is still;
Nobody ever laughs nor ever will.
All your old haunts have turned to haunts of pain,
And every heart is hankering in vain.
While the first eight laments bemoan the cruelty of sudden death or of its symbolic representative Persephone, the last lament takes a totally unexpected shift. It is titled ‘A Dream’. Here the creative urge of Kochanowski finds a splendid solution to his misery. It is a dream sequence in which the poet’s wish is fulfilled and the little girl actually appears-she is seen in Kochanowski’s dead mother’s arms- and it is his mother who finally appeases his tormented soul with philosophical consolation that affirms his Christian faith. She commiserates him that in heaven the lives we live/Are far more glorious and although the loss of Ursula is now mourned, at least she was happy when she lived and admonishes him to stop grieving. She asserts a stern interpretation of human experience and human condition (Bear humanly the human lot). It is clear that Kochanowski wrote these poems as much as for himself as for anyone else as they follow a therapeutic arc of skepticism, sorrow, and rage through to an acceptance of fate and religious hope.
Kochanowski’s Laments is the noblest piece of restorative poetry that I have encountered. The nineteen laments contained in this book demonstrate the ingenious creativity, artistic integrity, stoic resignation, deep humanism, spiritual redemption and enduring universality of Kochanowski as one of the greatest poets of Renaissance era.
One of the most renowned poems in Malayalam language, a Dravidian language that happens to be my mother tongue, is ‘Mambazham’ (Mango) written by our great poet Vyloppalli. In this poignant poem, the poet depicts the sorrow and remembrances of a mourning mother who lost her only child. The poem unfolds with the hot tears of a mother tormented by painful memories when she sees the falling of the first golden mango of the season in her residential premise. She remembers an incident that transpired four months ago when the mango trees were in full bloom. Her naughty child, as part of his fun and frolic, plucks a slender mango flower and sprays its buds like a firework, thereby inviting the wrath of the mother. She admonishes him: “Naughty boy! You are the one who should run to pick up mangoes when they are ripe and now you have crushed the buds without waiting for it to grow into golden mangoes. Do you want a spanking?” The child looks crestfallen and with a lake in his eyes tells the mother: “I won’t be there to pick up the ripe mangoes!” Before the summer mellowed the mangoes, the child leaves the earthly nest to the heavenly abode. At the end of the poem, the mother, who witnesses the merriment of neighboring children rushing to pick up the fallen mangoes in summer, places the first mango on the svelte grave of her son and says: ‘This fruit, without knowing the truth (that you are no more), has arrived only for you my darling, to be held by your delicate hands, and savored by your mini mouth’. I was reminded of this marvelous poem when I read Jan Kochanowski’s Laments.
Jan Kochanowski (1530–1584) is considered as the most outstanding Polish poet and humanist of the entire Slavic world before the Romantic age. Laments (Treny) , a series of nineteen threnodies (or elegies) written in Polish and published in 1580 , is regarded a highpoint of Polish Renaissance and his crowning achievement as a poet. Its genesis lies in the tragic death of his daughter Ursula when she was just two- and-a- half year old. In all the nineteen Threnodies or Laments, Kochanowski desperately pours out his imponderable grief and desolation after the little girl's death with remarkable artistry and pathos. They powerfully portray the true depth of his intimate feelings and pain to come to terms with the loss and mourns his own innate human frailty.
Born into the country nobility, Kochanowski studied at a university in Kraków and later, between 1552 and 1559, at the University of Padua in Italy. On his return to Poland in 1559, he served as a secretary at the royal court in Kraków. Kochanowski devoted many years to the study of Classical philology and achieved a mastery of Latin and had good knowledge of Greek literature which is evident in his allusions to Greek mythology in many of the laments. Kochanowski created a new Polish vernacular literature based upon an assimilation of Greek and Latin models. His imagination and innovations gave rise to some of the most celebrated works in Polish literature. In that sense, Kochanowski was ‘a poet of genius’ and can be called the father of modern Polish poetry.
The new refined English translation of Laments , preserving the meters and rhymes, is the culmination of collaboration between Stanislaw Baranczak, a poet and renowned translator of Polish poetry , and Seamus Heaney, the great Irish poet and Nobel Laureate. This new translation is a thrilling triumph and a treat for poetry readers. They stand by its own merit as amazingly lyrical English elegies.
Making his personal grief public, Kochanowski broke many well-established customs and literary conventions in Poland, thereby provoking disapproval of many of his contemporaries. Stanislaw Baranczak in his insightful introduction points out that the very thing that has appealed most powerfully to the sensitivities of later generations of readers…was the thing that caused the most problems for his contemporary audience
As mentioned, Laments constitute an exceptionally vivid account of one man’s effort to make sense of a devastating experience and all the poems in this collection overwhelm the readers at the first reading itself. It seemed to me that the qualities of the child mourned are less important than the breadth and depth of the poet’s own grief. The opening poem summons all to assemble and grieve the death of his daughter. The poem suggests that, deep as his feelings are, poetry may aid him in his quest for understanding and some sort of recovery- Where, then, is relief?/In shedding tears or wrestling down my grief?. Kochanowski creates powerful building energy in this poem using repetition of ‘All’ at the beginning.
Lament 1
All Heraclitus' tears, all threnodies
And plaintive dirges of Simonides,
All keens and slow airs in the world, all griefs,
Wrung hands, wet eyes, laments and epitaphs,
All, all assemble, come from every quarter,
Help me to mourn my small girl, my dear daughter,
Whom cruel Death tore up with such wild force
Out of my life, it left me no recourse.
So the snake, when he finds a hidden nest
Of fledgling nightingales, rears and strikes fast
Repeatedly, while the poor mother bird
Tries to distract him with a fierce, absurd
Fluttering — but in vain! the venomous tongue
Darts, and she must retreat on ruffled wing.
"You weep in vain," my friends will say. But then,
What is not in vain, by God, in lives of men?
All is in vain! We play at blindman's buff
Until hard edges break into our path.
Man's life is error. Where, then, is relief?
In shedding tears or wrestling down my grief?
The opening of Lament 5 paints a bucolic picture of the shoot of a young olive tree, thriving amidst the other plants, which is cut down by a careless gardener. The suddenness of this act is conveyed by a line break, further emphasizing the cutting of the shoot, and followed by a rough and a rapid section on the ravage that death has spawned.
Lament 5
Just as on olive seedling, when it tries
To grow up like the big trees towards the skies
And sprouts out of the ground, a single stalk,
A slender, leafless, twigless, living stick;
And which if lopped by the swift sickle's blade
As it weeds out thorns and nettles, start to fade
And, sapped of natural strength, cut off, forlon,
Drops by the tree from whose seed it was born—
So was my dearest Ursula's demise.
Growing before her parent's caring eyes,
She'd barely risen above ground when Death
Felled the dear child with infectious breath
At our very feet. Hard eyed Persephone.
Were all those tears of no avail to me?
The belongings of the dead, especially clothes, evoke an intense emotional response in someone who was intimately attached to him. The Lament 7 dwells on the inanimate things left by the infant and the mournful memories associated with it.
Laments 7
Pathetic garments that my girl once wore
But cannot anymore!
The sight of them still haunts me everywhere
And feeds my great despair.
They miss her body’s warmth; and so do I:
All I can do is cry.
Eternal, iron slumbers now possess
My child: each flowered dress,
Smooth ribbon, gold-clasped belt her mother bought—
Their worth is set at naught.
You were meant, my daughter, to be led
To the last stone –cold bed
By your poor mother! She had promised more
Than what your four planks store:
The shroud she herself sewed, the earthen clod
I set down at my head.
O sealed oak chest, dark lid, board walls that hide
The dowry and the bride!
Having failed to transcend the physical world, the poet begins Lament 8 , a sonnet on his daughter’s absence, in measured tones and then turns defenselessly to address her once again as his emotions rise to contradict his effort at control. A house that once reverberated with joy and laughter is contrasted with the loud silence where the parents listen for sounds that never come. This is a fine expression of the way the life of a household flows in and through a happy child, and the grateful reliance parents themselves put on a child's vivacity and vitality.
Lament 8
The void that fills my house is so immense
Now that my girl is gone. It baffles sense:
We all are here, yet no one is, I feel;
The flight of one small soul has tipped the scale.
You talked for all of us, you sang for all,
You played in every nook and cubbyhole.
You never would have made your mother brood
Nor father think too much for his own good;
The house was carefree. Everybody laughed.
You held us in your arms: our hearts would lift.
Now emptiness reigns here; the house is still;
Nobody ever laughs nor ever will.
All your old haunts have turned to haunts of pain,
And every heart is hankering in vain.
While the first eight laments bemoan the cruelty of sudden death or of its symbolic representative Persephone, the last lament takes a totally unexpected shift. It is titled ‘A Dream’. Here the creative urge of Kochanowski finds a splendid solution to his misery. It is a dream sequence in which the poet’s wish is fulfilled and the little girl actually appears-she is seen in Kochanowski’s dead mother’s arms- and it is his mother who finally appeases his tormented soul with philosophical consolation that affirms his Christian faith. She commiserates him that in heaven the lives we live/Are far more glorious and although the loss of Ursula is now mourned, at least she was happy when she lived and admonishes him to stop grieving. She asserts a stern interpretation of human experience and human condition (Bear humanly the human lot). It is clear that Kochanowski wrote these poems as much as for himself as for anyone else as they follow a therapeutic arc of skepticism, sorrow, and rage through to an acceptance of fate and religious hope.
Kochanowski’s Laments is the noblest piece of restorative poetry that I have encountered. The nineteen laments contained in this book demonstrate the ingenious creativity, artistic integrity, stoic resignation, deep humanism, spiritual redemption and enduring universality of Kochanowski as one of the greatest poets of Renaissance era.
December 1, 2025
2023: czytanie przymusowo książek z biblioteki narodowej będzie mi się śniło po nocach do końca życia
2025: nadal śni mi się po nocach
2025: nadal śni mi się po nocach
February 10, 2023
moim zdaniem, ta ksiega jest bez sensu. rozuemiemy, janie, ze panu zmarla curka. jestemy tego swiadomi. ale ile mozna nad nia sie uzalac!!!!!
January 15, 2023
urszulko miej mnie w opiece, zebym zdala kolokwium ze staropola
April 9, 2023
jeśli oni nie będą razem to nie wierzę w miłość
April 8, 2023
Typ co opłakiwał córkę która nie istniała
September 16, 2019
English translation by Seamus Heaney & Stanisław Baranczak, introduction by Baranczak
[4.5] This sequence of nineteen poems, first published in 1580, is one of the foundation stones of Polish literature. Kochanowski, a gentleman, spent his twenties studying in several foreign cities, becoming respected for his Latin poetry in Padua. During his subsequent career at the Polish court, including work as a royal secretary, he wrote innovative and dynamic Polish poetry, adapting forms from Latin and other languages for the new Polish vernacular literature; however, he had not yet published. Following the election of a new king in 1574, he retired to the countryside, married and started a family.
It seems that, especially by the standards of his day, Kochanowski had led something of a charmed life until his small daughter Orszula died in 1579 aged 30 months - the bereavement which was the subject of the Laments, or Treny (Threnodies). His philosophies seem to have left him unprepared for this tragedy, despite the high child mortality of the day. Baranczak suggests he experienced a very modern-sounding state of turmoil. (Just substitute, for example, a devotee of positive psychology or the prosperity gospel).
"For a sixteenth-century humanist—in this case, moreover, a poet whose earlier work included not only a classical tragedy with a plot borrowed from Homer but also a poetic translation of the Psalms—elements of stoicism or epicureanism could merge conflictlessly with the belief in providential protection bestowed on the just as a reward for their virtuous lives. (Calvinism was to score a huge, if short-lived, success in Poland, but only several decades later.)
Yet it is precisely this kind of stable and secure philosophical foundation that may well be the first thing to crack…" when confronted by profound personal tragedy:
In plenty we praise poverty;
In pleasure, sorrow seems to be
Easy to bear; each living breath
Makes light of Death.
But when the Parcae cease to spin
Their thread, when sorrows enter in,
When Death knocks at the door, at last
We stand aghast.
Cicero, silver tongue, please tell
Why exile's tears afflict you still;
Did you not claim: 'The world's my home,
And not just Rome"? (Lament 16)
Addressing wisdom (that favourite Renaissance personification), he cries:
To think that I have spent my life in one
Long climb towards your threshold! All delusion!
Wisdom for me was castles in the air;
I'm hurled, like all the rest, from the topmost stair. (Lament 9)
The initial reception of the poems is also deeply interesting within the history of emotions:
"What is curious is the fact that a respected poet deemed it possible to write a series of poems on the death of his small child. This was simply not done, and not done from the perspective of two codes of behavior at once: that of social custom and that of literary convention. In the rural provinces of Poland at the end of the sixteenth century, the death of a small child was a sad but fairly regular occurrence. Even in Kochanowski's own family, Ursula was the first but not the only child to die: her older sister Hanna shared her fate soon afterwards.
So, by making his grief public, Kochanowski came into conflict with a certain socially accepted and indeed socially required model of behavior. What was even more striking for his contemporaries, however, was that he also broke a well-established literary convention. The classical principle of decorum reserved the genre known as the funeral elegy, lament, threnody, neniae, etc., for momentous public occasions: deaths of heroes, military leaders, statesmen, great thinkers. Therefore, the poet's reaching for this genre (unequivocally identified in the sequence's title) in order to mourn a child's death (and to make things worse, his own child, a very young daughter unknown to anybody beyond the immediate family) was tantamount, at best, to a serious artistic error. Indeed, the initial reaction to the publication of Laments in 1580 was definitely cold, and the most frequently reiterated charge was that the author had foolishly chosen to write not as he should have, about some persona gravis, but about a persona as shockingly and inexcusably levis as his own child. Which is to say that the very thing that has appealed most powerfully to the sensitivities of later generations of readers, including our own, was the thing that caused the most problems for his contemporary audience."
Baranczak then goes on to warn against mistaking Kochanowski for merely a rebellious Romantic ahead of his time (both due to this, and a 1567 poem 'I sing unto myself and the Muses' which may be considered a manifesto of artistic independence and the lack of material gain which goes with that choice).
This would seem to indicates that it is not a good idea to make blanket statements either way that 'of course parents of centuries past were, or were not, distraught about the deaths of children'. It seems quite likely that the spread of responses was more varied than the acceptable range today in the Global North.
The poems are interesting for their context alone, but the content is very nicely translated here too. I'd previously looked at the 1920 English version translated by Dorothea Prall, but the sing-song line-end rhymes were, by and large, offputting. There are a few lines where I think the Prall sounds better in English than the Heaney/Baranczak, but, all in all, the more recent version communicates the emotion more directly, making the structure seem less obtrusive, which is what I, and probably a lot of other contemporary readers, need to find translated poetry effective and affecting.
As I don't read 16th century Polish, I can't comment in detail on how accurately Heaney & Baranczack have represented the originals in English; all I can say is that there are a handful of lines on which there are different shades of meaning as compared with Prall.
But through the sequence, there is a representation of a psychological process echoing the Kübler-Ross grief cycle, to be clinical about it. The bereaved father (who mentions his wife in the poems - it's not just all about him) moves through mental states such as bewilderment, anger and questioning of faith, bargaining, despair, an understanding that only time will heal, and, in the final and longest verse, an echo of the medieval dream-vision, acceptance - after he sees little Orszula in heaven with his own, already deceased, mother.
There are some beautiful extended metaphors running through the verses, including Orszula as a (baby) nightingale; this connects with realist lines about the little girl singing, and with her father's vocation as a poet. He seems to have hoped she would follow in his footsteps as she got older. Another motif is about seedlings and errors in mowing, or ears of grain, a reminder of how overwhelmingly agrarian Renaissance Poland was, and of the rural landscape that would have now surrounded Kochanowski after his years in Padua and Kraków. (The mowing, I understand, is also used in the medieval English poem, the Pearl - by the same unknown author as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight - and thought to be about the death of the poet's young daughter - and which I intend to read in full soon as a companion-piece to Laments. David J. Welsh in his monograph Jan Kochanowski characterises the 'death wedding' imagery found in one Lament to be characteristically Slavic - however the very similar similar 'bride of Jesus' idea is also in the Pearl)
Poland now stands out as the most religious, and most Catholic, country in Europe, yet it seems from these poems that in the Renaissance, its religiosity was not so dissimilar to that elsewhere. Classical imagery is used boldly in Kochanowski's Laments, as it would be in English or Italian writing of the same era, in ways that the most strictly pious might find unchristian: including gods ("we are all Pluto's"), the underworld, and appeals to Charon.
However, Kochanowski's doubts about the Christian god are framed with great care, so as to be obviously a product of grief rather than intellectual questioning - and, as Welsh points out, they are couched in the language of faith:
Yet still we, in our arrogance, pretend
To higher faculties that comprehend
God's mysteries; we climb to heaven, try
To fathom its designs, but our mind's eye
Proves far too weak! The meanings it divines
Are not meant to be read—fleet dreams, not signs . . .
Grief, what do you intend? Am I to be
Robbed first of joy, then equanimity? (Lament 11)
The final few poems have a predominantly Christian focus, indicating, as per Welsh, that "The writings of pagan philosophers (Lucretius, Cicero, Seneca) provided no answer to his desperate questionings. In the last resort, Christian humanism was to symbolize for him the only way to attain peace of mind."
His doubts are finally reconciled in the beautifully translated phrase, three lines from the end of the poetic sequence, one Lord of blight and bliss, giving a sense of transcendent unity, and the reverence necessary in the era.)
Yet there is also an awareness of what secular readers might characterise as the problems of life beyond personal religious belief. A significant part of the closing consolation turns on an awareness of how difficult life, and marriage, often was for women of the time:
So why do you keep crying? My God, son,
What is there to regret? That no man won
Her dowry and her heart, then made her years
One long declension into strife and tears?
That her body wasn't torn by labor pains?
That her experience was, is, and remains
Virginal, that she got release before
She learned if birth or death mark women more? (Lament 19)
There is a hint - which I may have missed were it not for the commentaries in the introduction and Welsh's book - towards a location-specific fear that wouldn't be found in English poetry of the time: the fear of Tatar raids (although in practice these mostly affected lands further to the east in Poland-Lithuania than Kochanowski's estate in what was then Sandomierz Voivodeship):
others still,
Abducted and made slaves of, tread the mill
In some wild heathen enclave, stooped and lame,
Praying for death to come and end their shame. (Lament 19)
Also in this final poem, the idea of life as a dangerous sea brings to mind the Age of Exploration underway at the other end of Europe, and where attitudes to the sea were becoming less fearful than they had been during the medieval period (when even living near the coast was often considered undesirable and risky). Perhaps tenuous, but the idea of the sea still seeming more dangerous from Poland, reminded me of a GR friend's remark that Eastern European literature felt more insular than that of the Spanish-speaking world: it's not something I've perceived myself (and I am more biased in favour of the E Eur stuff anyway) but I wonder how much of that is ultimately rooted in geography and geopolitics.
What Kochanowski could not have known was that, if Orszula had lived, she would have experienced the death of her father when she was aged 7 or 8; he would die himself only four years after publishing these poems.
These translations can sometimes sound a little too recent in style - 19th century perhaps? But they enable a sense of more direct connection with the feelings of the work - as compared with the old Prall translation - alongside the attention to form rightly expected of translators who are accomplished poets in their own right. (There is also a third English translation, by Adam Czerniawski, but that would cost £20, so I haven't read it.)
Reading the Laments, I could not help think of certain households among my Polish ancestors, where several children died, and where the family seems to have been middle class and therefore more likely to read poetry. Did they also read these poems, in their originals, and did they find any consolation in them? There is something about the personal and emotional nature of these poems which prompts these thoughts; whereas I'd rarely, if ever, wondered, what some British ancestor thought about a particular Dickens novel.
----
Learning about Polish literature quite often leads to tantalising reports or fragments of works otherwise untranslated, or unavailable except in exorbitant out-of-print volumes. This, quoted by Welsh, might be characterised as metaphysicals go minimalist, and to this English reader, it carries the sensation of historical styles shifting together like turns of a Rubik's cube:
Bartłomiej Zimorowic (died ca. 1680), from “The Mourners” (Narzekalnice):
My wedding dress—a winding-sheet;
A handful of earth—my dowry,
My bridegroom, the worm; the grave my marriage bed;
My offspring—the tears of my parents.
(It is cited as "an example of the total change that Polish poetry underwent in the hundred years dividing the two poets. The absence of verbs and connectives gives the lines a remarkable tension, intensified by the powerful contrasts.")
[4.5] This sequence of nineteen poems, first published in 1580, is one of the foundation stones of Polish literature. Kochanowski, a gentleman, spent his twenties studying in several foreign cities, becoming respected for his Latin poetry in Padua. During his subsequent career at the Polish court, including work as a royal secretary, he wrote innovative and dynamic Polish poetry, adapting forms from Latin and other languages for the new Polish vernacular literature; however, he had not yet published. Following the election of a new king in 1574, he retired to the countryside, married and started a family.
It seems that, especially by the standards of his day, Kochanowski had led something of a charmed life until his small daughter Orszula died in 1579 aged 30 months - the bereavement which was the subject of the Laments, or Treny (Threnodies). His philosophies seem to have left him unprepared for this tragedy, despite the high child mortality of the day. Baranczak suggests he experienced a very modern-sounding state of turmoil. (Just substitute, for example, a devotee of positive psychology or the prosperity gospel).
"For a sixteenth-century humanist—in this case, moreover, a poet whose earlier work included not only a classical tragedy with a plot borrowed from Homer but also a poetic translation of the Psalms—elements of stoicism or epicureanism could merge conflictlessly with the belief in providential protection bestowed on the just as a reward for their virtuous lives. (Calvinism was to score a huge, if short-lived, success in Poland, but only several decades later.)
Yet it is precisely this kind of stable and secure philosophical foundation that may well be the first thing to crack…" when confronted by profound personal tragedy:
In plenty we praise poverty;
In pleasure, sorrow seems to be
Easy to bear; each living breath
Makes light of Death.
But when the Parcae cease to spin
Their thread, when sorrows enter in,
When Death knocks at the door, at last
We stand aghast.
Cicero, silver tongue, please tell
Why exile's tears afflict you still;
Did you not claim: 'The world's my home,
And not just Rome"? (Lament 16)
Addressing wisdom (that favourite Renaissance personification), he cries:
To think that I have spent my life in one
Long climb towards your threshold! All delusion!
Wisdom for me was castles in the air;
I'm hurled, like all the rest, from the topmost stair. (Lament 9)
The initial reception of the poems is also deeply interesting within the history of emotions:
"What is curious is the fact that a respected poet deemed it possible to write a series of poems on the death of his small child. This was simply not done, and not done from the perspective of two codes of behavior at once: that of social custom and that of literary convention. In the rural provinces of Poland at the end of the sixteenth century, the death of a small child was a sad but fairly regular occurrence. Even in Kochanowski's own family, Ursula was the first but not the only child to die: her older sister Hanna shared her fate soon afterwards.
So, by making his grief public, Kochanowski came into conflict with a certain socially accepted and indeed socially required model of behavior. What was even more striking for his contemporaries, however, was that he also broke a well-established literary convention. The classical principle of decorum reserved the genre known as the funeral elegy, lament, threnody, neniae, etc., for momentous public occasions: deaths of heroes, military leaders, statesmen, great thinkers. Therefore, the poet's reaching for this genre (unequivocally identified in the sequence's title) in order to mourn a child's death (and to make things worse, his own child, a very young daughter unknown to anybody beyond the immediate family) was tantamount, at best, to a serious artistic error. Indeed, the initial reaction to the publication of Laments in 1580 was definitely cold, and the most frequently reiterated charge was that the author had foolishly chosen to write not as he should have, about some persona gravis, but about a persona as shockingly and inexcusably levis as his own child. Which is to say that the very thing that has appealed most powerfully to the sensitivities of later generations of readers, including our own, was the thing that caused the most problems for his contemporary audience."
Baranczak then goes on to warn against mistaking Kochanowski for merely a rebellious Romantic ahead of his time (both due to this, and a 1567 poem 'I sing unto myself and the Muses' which may be considered a manifesto of artistic independence and the lack of material gain which goes with that choice).
This would seem to indicates that it is not a good idea to make blanket statements either way that 'of course parents of centuries past were, or were not, distraught about the deaths of children'. It seems quite likely that the spread of responses was more varied than the acceptable range today in the Global North.
The poems are interesting for their context alone, but the content is very nicely translated here too. I'd previously looked at the 1920 English version translated by Dorothea Prall, but the sing-song line-end rhymes were, by and large, offputting. There are a few lines where I think the Prall sounds better in English than the Heaney/Baranczak, but, all in all, the more recent version communicates the emotion more directly, making the structure seem less obtrusive, which is what I, and probably a lot of other contemporary readers, need to find translated poetry effective and affecting.
As I don't read 16th century Polish, I can't comment in detail on how accurately Heaney & Baranczack have represented the originals in English; all I can say is that there are a handful of lines on which there are different shades of meaning as compared with Prall.
But through the sequence, there is a representation of a psychological process echoing the Kübler-Ross grief cycle, to be clinical about it. The bereaved father (who mentions his wife in the poems - it's not just all about him) moves through mental states such as bewilderment, anger and questioning of faith, bargaining, despair, an understanding that only time will heal, and, in the final and longest verse, an echo of the medieval dream-vision, acceptance - after he sees little Orszula in heaven with his own, already deceased, mother.
There are some beautiful extended metaphors running through the verses, including Orszula as a (baby) nightingale; this connects with realist lines about the little girl singing, and with her father's vocation as a poet. He seems to have hoped she would follow in his footsteps as she got older. Another motif is about seedlings and errors in mowing, or ears of grain, a reminder of how overwhelmingly agrarian Renaissance Poland was, and of the rural landscape that would have now surrounded Kochanowski after his years in Padua and Kraków. (The mowing, I understand, is also used in the medieval English poem, the Pearl - by the same unknown author as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight - and thought to be about the death of the poet's young daughter - and which I intend to read in full soon as a companion-piece to Laments. David J. Welsh in his monograph Jan Kochanowski characterises the 'death wedding' imagery found in one Lament to be characteristically Slavic - however the very similar similar 'bride of Jesus' idea is also in the Pearl)
Poland now stands out as the most religious, and most Catholic, country in Europe, yet it seems from these poems that in the Renaissance, its religiosity was not so dissimilar to that elsewhere. Classical imagery is used boldly in Kochanowski's Laments, as it would be in English or Italian writing of the same era, in ways that the most strictly pious might find unchristian: including gods ("we are all Pluto's"), the underworld, and appeals to Charon.
However, Kochanowski's doubts about the Christian god are framed with great care, so as to be obviously a product of grief rather than intellectual questioning - and, as Welsh points out, they are couched in the language of faith:
Yet still we, in our arrogance, pretend
To higher faculties that comprehend
God's mysteries; we climb to heaven, try
To fathom its designs, but our mind's eye
Proves far too weak! The meanings it divines
Are not meant to be read—fleet dreams, not signs . . .
Grief, what do you intend? Am I to be
Robbed first of joy, then equanimity? (Lament 11)
The final few poems have a predominantly Christian focus, indicating, as per Welsh, that "The writings of pagan philosophers (Lucretius, Cicero, Seneca) provided no answer to his desperate questionings. In the last resort, Christian humanism was to symbolize for him the only way to attain peace of mind."
His doubts are finally reconciled in the beautifully translated phrase, three lines from the end of the poetic sequence, one Lord of blight and bliss, giving a sense of transcendent unity, and the reverence necessary in the era.)
Yet there is also an awareness of what secular readers might characterise as the problems of life beyond personal religious belief. A significant part of the closing consolation turns on an awareness of how difficult life, and marriage, often was for women of the time:
So why do you keep crying? My God, son,
What is there to regret? That no man won
Her dowry and her heart, then made her years
One long declension into strife and tears?
That her body wasn't torn by labor pains?
That her experience was, is, and remains
Virginal, that she got release before
She learned if birth or death mark women more? (Lament 19)
There is a hint - which I may have missed were it not for the commentaries in the introduction and Welsh's book - towards a location-specific fear that wouldn't be found in English poetry of the time: the fear of Tatar raids (although in practice these mostly affected lands further to the east in Poland-Lithuania than Kochanowski's estate in what was then Sandomierz Voivodeship):
others still,
Abducted and made slaves of, tread the mill
In some wild heathen enclave, stooped and lame,
Praying for death to come and end their shame. (Lament 19)
Also in this final poem, the idea of life as a dangerous sea brings to mind the Age of Exploration underway at the other end of Europe, and where attitudes to the sea were becoming less fearful than they had been during the medieval period (when even living near the coast was often considered undesirable and risky). Perhaps tenuous, but the idea of the sea still seeming more dangerous from Poland, reminded me of a GR friend's remark that Eastern European literature felt more insular than that of the Spanish-speaking world: it's not something I've perceived myself (and I am more biased in favour of the E Eur stuff anyway) but I wonder how much of that is ultimately rooted in geography and geopolitics.
What Kochanowski could not have known was that, if Orszula had lived, she would have experienced the death of her father when she was aged 7 or 8; he would die himself only four years after publishing these poems.
These translations can sometimes sound a little too recent in style - 19th century perhaps? But they enable a sense of more direct connection with the feelings of the work - as compared with the old Prall translation - alongside the attention to form rightly expected of translators who are accomplished poets in their own right. (There is also a third English translation, by Adam Czerniawski, but that would cost £20, so I haven't read it.)
Reading the Laments, I could not help think of certain households among my Polish ancestors, where several children died, and where the family seems to have been middle class and therefore more likely to read poetry. Did they also read these poems, in their originals, and did they find any consolation in them? There is something about the personal and emotional nature of these poems which prompts these thoughts; whereas I'd rarely, if ever, wondered, what some British ancestor thought about a particular Dickens novel.
----
Learning about Polish literature quite often leads to tantalising reports or fragments of works otherwise untranslated, or unavailable except in exorbitant out-of-print volumes. This, quoted by Welsh, might be characterised as metaphysicals go minimalist, and to this English reader, it carries the sensation of historical styles shifting together like turns of a Rubik's cube:
Bartłomiej Zimorowic (died ca. 1680), from “The Mourners” (Narzekalnice):
My wedding dress—a winding-sheet;
A handful of earth—my dowry,
My bridegroom, the worm; the grave my marriage bed;
My offspring—the tears of my parents.
(It is cited as "an example of the total change that Polish poetry underwent in the hundred years dividing the two poets. The absence of verbs and connectives gives the lines a remarkable tension, intensified by the powerful contrasts.")
June 15, 2023
płakałam 3h siedząc na polskim słuchając tego
April 20, 2023
urszulka jakaś zimna jest i sztywna a Kochanowski coś brał.
ONA TAK NAPRAWDE NIE ISTNIEJE JEBANY SCHIZOFREMIK
ONA TAK NAPRAWDE NIE ISTNIEJE JEBANY SCHIZOFREMIK
March 6, 2023
Lepsze niż Tadzio, ale za dużo rozpaczy i smutku. Czasem się rymowało więc na plus 👍
March 9, 2023
depresyjne
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April 13, 2023NIESZCZĘSNE OCHĘDÓSTWO ŻAŁOSNE UBIORY
February 18, 2025
Kochanowskiego bardzo lubię i nie będę tutaj strugał kozaka… trochę się rozkleiłem. Zwłaszcza, że po raz pierwszy przeczytałem treny chronologicznie i w całości, a nie na wyrywki jak to było robione na lekcjach polskiego. Treny VI, VII, VIII, X, XII i XIII podobały mi się szczególnie i też jestem z siebie nawet zadowolony bo mimo trudnego języka i ogromu archaizmów zdaje mi się, że większość utworów zrozumiałem jak nie w pełni to prawie w pełni i nie patrzyłem jakoś często na objaśnienia
March 14, 2024
Bandy imbecyli, którzy przyznają temu arcydziełu najniższe oceny, powinny przejść proces reedukacji gdzieś w zimnych krajach.
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March 20, 2025„Ten grób nie jest na martwym, ten martwy nie w grobie, Ale samże jest martwym, samże grobem sobie”.
April 13, 2023
Kolejny raz czytam i w liceum jeszcze bardziej mi się podoba, ach!!!!! Uwielbiam:3
Ocena 4,75
Nie lubię, gdy ktoś bezmyślnie kwestionuje isntienie Urszuli, to właśnie jej śmierć musiała spowodować załamanie Kochanowskiego, i mimo tego, iż jest to już tak oczywista i wiele razy omawiana przez wszystkich sprawa, trzeba o tym pamiętać, naprawdę. Człowiek, który tak silnie trzymał się poglądów stoickich, bez powodu nie popadłby w tak ogromną rozpacz, zwątpienie i bezradność.
Ocena 4,75
Nie lubię, gdy ktoś bezmyślnie kwestionuje isntienie Urszuli, to właśnie jej śmierć musiała spowodować załamanie Kochanowskiego, i mimo tego, iż jest to już tak oczywista i wiele razy omawiana przez wszystkich sprawa, trzeba o tym pamiętać, naprawdę. Człowiek, który tak silnie trzymał się poglądów stoickich, bez powodu nie popadłby w tak ogromną rozpacz, zwątpienie i bezradność.
April 8, 2024
Kiedy chcesz napisać ,,Córka mi zmarła", ale piszesz ,,Wielkieś mi uczyniła pustki w mym domu moja droga Orszulo tym zniknieniem swoim". Nie polecam. Druga córka Janka, która też umarła dostała tylko jeden utwór liryczny, a taka Urszulka całą serię. Faworyzacja. Podobna sytuacja jak w jakiejś Niechcianej Córce z gacha life.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 18, 2023
love hate relationship tbh
October 19, 2023
Droga Jana Kochanowskiego przez schizofrenie
April 3, 2024
chyba kochanowskiemu fabuła nie fabułowała, bo sobie córkę wymyślił
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January 15, 2023mam problem z oceną fundamentów kultury polskiej, a rozprawę o wartości (wątpliwej?) dzieł Kochanowskiego możnaby pisać w nieskończoność i jeszcze dłużej, bo zarówno jego zasługi dla rozkwitu myśli i kultury narodowej, jak i pewne wady tego, co do nich wprowadził, są niebagatelne. pozostawię więc tu swoje znużone patriarchatem westchenięcie i subtelny podziw dla nawiązań czy przekrojowego sposobu myślenia poprzez analogie.
January 4, 2024
Po pierwsze uważam że Urszula nigdy nie istniała, a Kochanowski miał schizofrenię
Po drugiej urszulka strasznie pick me, córeczka tatusia, a jak Kochanowskiemu inna córka umarła to o niej już nic nie napisałal
Po trzeciej Kochanowski dotknij trawy proszę
+Chcę wiedzieć co on brał pisząc
Po drugiej urszulka strasznie pick me, córeczka tatusia, a jak Kochanowskiemu inna córka umarła to o niej już nic nie napisałal
Po trzeciej Kochanowski dotknij trawy proszę
+Chcę wiedzieć co on brał pisząc
April 11, 2023
janek ja nie wiem co ty brales ale moglbys sie chociaz tym podzielic
April 14, 2023
Spoko wnioski i przemyślenia ale trudno się to czyta
April 20, 2023
Kochanowski chyba miał srake pisząc to. Chyba go cos powaliło że 19 trenów tylko dla jakiejś dziewczynki. Rozumiem że dziecko mu zmarło ale bez przesady dupa boli od czytania
August 17, 2024
Kochanowski ty jebany schizofreniku nienawidzę cię.
February 6, 2024
A co z Hanną? 🤨
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