Poetry
Laments
Treny
Jan Kochanowski · 1580
Synopsis
Nineteen laments on the death of Ursula, the poet's daughter, taken away when she was very small. The father calls on the mourners of Antiquity to help him, recalls the child he has lost, who sang and made up little verses, then turns against the wisdom he had served all his life: neither reason nor philosophy holds up before this death, and grief opens a crisis in all his thought.
Context
The cycle appeared in Kraków in 1580, shortly after the child's death, and the poet was reproached for having devoted to a little girl a genre reserved for great men and great events. It has been compared with Ronsard's poems on the death of Marie. Mickiewicz translated passages of it into prose in 1849; there followed the French verse translations by Venceslas Gasztowtt in 1884 and by Lucien Roquigny in 1919, then that of Edmond Marek in the nineties; in English, Stanisław Barańczak and Seamus Heaney translated it in 1995.
Who it is for
Nineteen pieces, mostly short, which can be read in one sitting. The references to Antiquity are numerous, but the grief they carry can be followed without them.
Prizes and reception
Counted among the highest achievements of Polish poetry, and became a model for men of letters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
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