Treny The Laments of Kochanowski

Renaissance artists and poets freely commemorated 'the great and the good'. But mourning a young child not of noble blood was out of the question. Yet that is precisely what Jan Kochanowski did in his sixteenth-century Polish masterpiece Treny. In these nineteen poems the poet is in turn poignantly homely, reflective, devotional, despairing and clinging to hope, as he dwells on the unfulfilled promise of his daughter Orszula, who died before she was three. The disarming simplicity of the sequence, as well as its emotional and intellectual structure, is faithfully rendered by Adam Czerniawski, the distinguished Polish poet and translator. The poem is presented with facing Polish text, edited and annotated by Piotr Wilczek.

Renaissance artists and poets readily commemorated the lives of the great, but rarely mourned a child who could not even claim noble birth. Yet the sixteenth-century masterpiece "Treny" stems from the Polish poet Jan Kochanowski's intense grief over the death of his little daughter Orszula, 'a delightful, radiant, extraordinary child', who died before she was three. The laments stand as Kochanowski's crowning achievement, and the first Polish work to equal the great poems of western Europe. In a cycle by turn reflective, despairing, and finally hesitantly accepting, a father evokes the unfulfilled promise of a life tragically cut short. The work's disarming simplicity and enduring passion, supported by an intellectually impressive structure, are fully realized in translation by Adam Czerniawski, the distinguished contemporary Polish poet. The English translation is accompanied by the original Polish text, edited by Renaissance scholar Piotr Wilczek, and with a foreword by Donald Davie. This important edition will prove of value to scholars and teachers of Slavonic literature, and to all lovers of poetry.