Poetry
Erotyki
Not translated into English
Franciszek Dionizy Kniaźnin · 1779
Synopsis
Two volumes, ten books and more than three hundred and fifty pieces placed under the sign of Venus: odes, songs, epigrams and elegies in which love holds first place. The poet sings of Clymene, Amaryllis, Corinna, a wounded Cupid, the lute that soothes and the Tokay wine that drives away cares; he mixes in dozens of paraphrases of Anacreon and Horace, pieces imitated from Catullus, Propertius or Sappho, and a first version of his ode to moustaches.
Context
The collection appeared in Warsaw in 1779, in two volumes, three years after a first book of fables. It has been seen as the first assertion of a talent of his own; the author himself judged these pieces unworthy of memory, destroyed the copies he came across, so that few survive, and reworked several of them for his later collections. The anacreontic stands alongside the ancient elegy, Petrarch, Polish baroque poetry and French poetry of the two preceding centuries, under an epigraph from Horace comparing the poet to the bee.
Who it is for
A large collection of brief pieces, to be read in small portions; many of them are translations or imitations of the Ancients. No French translation.
Prizes and reception
Counted among the stages leading Polish love poetry towards that of the Romantics.
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