Background
Jan Kochanowski was born in 1530 in Sycyna, province of Radom, Poland, the son of a prosperous family of the gentry.
(Jan Kochanowski 15301584 wybitny polski poeta doby Renesa...)
Jan Kochanowski 15301584 wybitny polski poeta doby Renesansu Do jego najslynniejszych dziel naleza cykle utworow Piesni Fraszki napisane po smierci ukochanej corki Urszulki Treny oraz oparty na historii wojny trojanskiej dramat Odprawa poslow greckichOto seria najpiekniejszych wierszy polskich poetow ktore wprowadza nas w radosny nastroj oczekiwania na swieta Bozego Narodzenia Bogato ilustrowane spodobaja sie zarowno mlodszym jak i starszym Czytelnikom To doskonaly pomysl na swiateczny upominek pod choinke
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(Jan Kochanowski (1530-1584) is acknowledged to be the fir...)
Jan Kochanowski (1530-1584) is acknowledged to be the first great poet in Poland's vernacular literary tradition. His Treny (or Laments) represent the height of his achievement. They are an impassioned, yet impeccably controlled, expression of grief over the death of his daughter Orszula, and, while their power scandalized Kochanowski's contemporaries, they came at length to be considered an enduring masterpiece. As Czeslaw Milosz, winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature, has written of Kochanowski: 'His presence belies foggy notions common in the West about a barbaric Eastern Europe. And yet, the Renaissance literature of Poland is virtually unknown in the West because of the lack of translations. The Laments of Kochanowski should be ranked with the world classics. There were some attempts to translate Laments into English in the past, but now something has happened which allows the English-speaking reader to have nearly direct access to his work. Namely, the cooperation of two excellent poets, Professor Stanislaw Baranczak of Harvard, and Seamus Heaney. That team has translated Laments, preserving its metres and rhythms. It is a rare accomplishment, which brings joy to me as an inheritor of Kochanowski's language and of the Renaissance tradition.'
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Jan Kochanowski was born in 1530 in Sycyna, province of Radom, Poland, the son of a prosperous family of the gentry.
He studied first in Poland, then at the University of Padua.
He matriculated at the standard age of fourteen in the Cracow Academy in 1544, then spent 1551–1552 at the Lutheran university inKönigsberg, where he once returned (1555–1556), perhaps in search of a patron at Duke Albert Frederick's court.
Over the years 1552–1559, Kochanowski spent three longer periods at the University of Padua, where he studied with one of Italy's leading humanist scholars, Francesco Robortello.
Kochanowski began as a Neo-Latin poet, but his place in literary history is secured by his pioneering work in Polish.
He gradually shifted toward what would be his strength, lyric poetry.
A central work here was his Songs (published posthumously in 1585), composed over nearly twenty years and based on Horatian and Petrarchan models.
Over the same years Kochanowski worked on his Trifles, a collection of mostly short poems, often of personal or topical content, ranging in style from epic to anacreontic.
They continue to find imitators among Polish poets.
Kochanowski received recognition as the premier Polish poet during his lifetime, and traditions of reading and imitation of his work have continued uninterrupted.
His Psalter was issued twenty-five times by the middle of the seventeenth century, and it influenced similar projects in Russian, Romanian, Lithuanian, German, Hungarian, Czech, Slovak, and Lusatian.
His work consists of about 7, 000 verses in Latin, some 16, 700 in Polish, and a small amount of prose.
He composed Polish epigrams, songs, and political poems, inspired by contemporary conditions and events; but his chief works are a complete verse rendering of the Psalms, a short drama in classical form, and 19 elegies on the death of his daughter.
Polish Catholics and Protestants sang his versions of the Psalms in their churches (often without realizing whose they were), and seventeenth-century Polish Catholics sought to make him into an orthodox post-Tridentine Catholic, evidently troubled by the tonalities of Horatian epicureanism, Senecan stoicism, and Erasmian irenicism in his life and work.
Upon his return to Poland in 1559, Kochanowski began a fifteen-year period of activities connected with politics and the royal court. We find him among the clients of Little Polish magnates, including the Calvinist palatine of Lublin, Jan Firlej, and crown vice-chancellor (later bishop of Cracow) Piotr Myszkowski, thanks to whose patronage he became one of King Sigismund II Augustus's secretaries and courtiers.
(Jan Kochanowski 15301584 wybitny polski poeta doby Renesa...)
(Jan Kochanowski (1530-1584) is acknowledged to be the fir...)