Jan Kochanowski
Laments
tłum. Dorothea Prall
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ISBN 978-83-288-3354-8
Laments
Strona tytułowa
Spis treści
Początek utworu
Introductory note
[Laments - Motto and dedication]
Lament I
Lament II
Lament III
Lament IV
Lament V
Lament VI
Lament VII
Lament VIII
Lament IX
Lament X
Lament XI
Lament XII
Lament XIII
Lament XIV
Lament XV
Lament XVI
Lament XVII
Lament XVIII
Lament XIX
Przypisy
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Laments
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Introductory note
Jan Kochanowski (1530–84) was the greatest poet of Poland during its existence as an independent kingdom. His Laments are his masterpiece, the choicest work of Polish lyric poetry before the time of Mickiewicz.
Kochanowski was a learned poet of the Renaissance, drawing his inspiration from the literatures of Greece and Rome. He was also a man of sincere piety, famous for his translation of the Psalms into his native language. In his Laments, written in memory of his little daughter Ursula, who died in 1579 at the age of thirty months, he expresses the deepest personal emotion through the medium of a literary style that had been developed by long years of study. The Laments, to be sure, are not based on any classic model and they contain few direct imitations of the classical poets, though it may be noted that the concluding couplet of Lament XV is translated from the Greek Anthology. On the other hand they are interspersed with continual references to classic story; and, more important, are filled with the atmosphere of the Stoic philosophy, derived from Cicero and Seneca. And along with this austere teaching there runs through them a warmer tone of Christian hope and trust; Lament XVIII is in spirit a psalm. To us of today, however, these poems appeal less by their formal perfection, by their learning, or by their religions tone, than by their exquisite humanity. Kochanowski’s sincerity of grief, his fatherly love for his baby girl, after more than three centuries have not lost their power to touch our hearts. In the Laments Kochanowski embodied a wholesome ideal of life such as animated the finest spirits of Poland in the years of its greatest glory, a spirit both humanistic and universally human.
G. R. Noyes
[Motto and dedication]
Tales sunt hominum mentes, quali pater ipse
Juppiter auctiferas lustravit lumine terras1.
To Ursula Kochanowski
A charming, merry, gifted child, who, after showing great promise of all maidenly virtues and talents, suddenly, prematurely, in her unripe years, to the great and unbearable grief of her parents, departed hence.
Written with tears for his beloved little girl by Jan Kochanowski, her hapless father.
Thou art no more, my Ursula.
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Lament I
Come, Heraclitus2 and Simonides3,
Come with your weeping and sad elegies:
Ye griefs and sorrows, come from all the lands
Wherein ye sigh and wail and wring your hands:
Gather ye here within my house today
And help me mourn my sweet, whom in her May
Ungodly Death hath ta’en to his estate,
Leaving me on a sudden desolate.
’Tis so a serpent glides on some shy nest
And, of the tiny nightingales possessed,
Doth glut its throat, though, frenzied with her fear,
The mother bird doth beat and twitter near
And strike the monster, till it turns and gapes
To swallow her, and she but just escapes.
«’Tis vain to weep,» my friends perchance will say.
Dear God, is aught in life not vain, then? Nay,
Seek to lie soft, yet thorns will prickly be:
The life of man is naught but vanity.
Ah, which were better, then — to seek relief
In tears, or sternly strive to conquer grief?
Lament II
If I had ever thought to write in praise
Of little children and their simple ways,
Far rather had I fashioned cradle verse
To rock to slumber, or the songs a nurse
Might croon above the baby on her breast,
Setting her charge’s short-lived woes at rest.
For much more useful are such trifling tasks
Than that which sad misfortune this day asks:
To weep o’er thy deaf grave, dear maiden mine,
And wail the harshness of grim Proserpine4.
But now I have no choice of subject: then
I shunned a theme scarce fitting riper men,
And now disaster drives me on by force
To songs unheeded by the great concourse
Of mortals. Verses that I would not sing
The living, to the dead I needs must bring.
Yet though I dry the marrow from my bones,
Weeping another’s death, my grief atones
No whit. All forms of human doom
Arouse but transient thoughts of joy or gloom.
O law unjust, O grimmest of all maids,
Inexorable princess of the shades!
For, Ursula, thou hadst but tasted time
And art departed long before thy prime.
Thou hardly knewest that the sun was bright
Ere thou didst vanish to the halls of night.
I would thou hadst not lived that little breath —
What didst thou know, but only birth, then death?
And all the joy a loving child should bring
Her parents, is become their bitterest sting.
Lament III
So, thou hast scorned me, my delight and heir;
Thy father’s halls, then, were not broad and fair
Enough for thee to dwell here longer, sweet.
True, there was nothing, nothing in them meet
For thy swift-budding reason, that foretold
Virtues the future years would yet unfold.
Thy words, thy archness, every turn and bow —
How sick at heart without them am I now!
Nay, little comfort, never more shall I
Behold thee and thy darling drollery.
What may I do but only follow on
Along the path where earlier thou hast gone.
And at its end do thou, with all thy charms,
Cast round thy father’s neck thy tender arms.
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