Jan Kochanowski

Jan Kochanowski (1530-1584) is honoured as the father of Polish poetry. Born at Sycyna into a gentry family, he studied at Krakow, Konigsberg and Padua, travelled in France and Italy, and served for some years at the Polish royal court before retiring to his estate at Czarnolas. Writing in Latin and, above all, in Polish, he brought the forms and learning of Renaissance humanism into his native language, and is remembered for his verse Psalter, his epigrams (the Fraszki), and the first Polish tragedy in classical manner, The Dismissal of the Grecian Envoys.

His masterpiece is the Treny (Laments), published in 1580. They were written after the death of his younger daughter Ursula (Urszula), a child of about thirty months, in 1579. The nineteen laments move from the raw outcry of a bereaved father, through the failure of Stoic consolation, to a vision in which his dead mother appears with the child, and a final turn toward Christian acceptance. They are widely held to be among the most moving poems of grief in any European literature.

Dorothea Prall's English version, Laments, was published by the University of California Press in 1920 and is the translation offered here.