Julius Caesar Book

English translation by Seamus Heaney & Stanisław Baranczak, introduction by Baranczak
[4.5] This sequence of nineteen poems, first published in 1580, is one of the foundation stones of Polish literature. Kochanowski, a gentleman, spent his twenties studying in several foreign cities, becoming respected for his Latin poetry in Padua. During his subsequent career at the Polish court, including work as a royal secretary, he wrote innovative and dynamic Polish poetry, adapting forms from Latin and other languages for the new Polish vernacular literature; however, he had not yet published. Following the election of a new king in 1574, he retired to the countryside, married and started a family.

It seems that, especially by the standards of his day, Kochanowski had led something of a charmed life until his small daughter Orszula died in 1579 aged 30 months - the bereavement which was the subject of the Laments, or Treny (Threnodies). His philosophies seem to have left him unprepared for this tragedy, despite the high child mortality of the day. Baranczak suggests he experienced a very modern-sounding state of turmoil. (Just substitute, for example, a devotee of positive psychology or the prosperity gospel).

"For a sixteenth-century humanist'in this case, moreover, a poet whose earlier work included not only a classical tragedy with a plot borrowed from Homer but also a poetic translation of the Psalms'elements of stoicism or epicureanism could merge conflictlessly with the belief in providential protection bestowed on the just as a reward for their virtuous lives. (Calvinism was to score a huge, if short-lived, success in Poland, but only several decades later.)
Yet it is precisely this kind of stable and secure philosophical foundation that may well be the first thing to crack…" when confronted by profound personal tragedy:

In plenty we praise poverty;
In pleasure, sorrow seems to be
Easy to bear; each living breath
Makes light of Death.

But when the Parcae cease to spin
Their thread, when sorrows enter in,
When Death knocks at the door, at last
We stand aghast.

Cicero, silver tongue, please tell
Why exile's tears afflict you still;
Did you not claim: 'The world's my home,
And not just Rome"? (Lament 16)

Addressing wisdom (that favourite Renaissance personification), he cries:
To think that I have spent my life in one
Long climb towards your threshold! All delusion!
Wisdom for me was castles in the air;
I'm hurled, like all the rest, from the topmost stair. (Lament 9)

The initial reception of the poems is also deeply interesting within the history of emotions:

"What is curious is the fact that a respected poet deemed it possible to write a series of poems on the death of his small child. This was simply not done, and not done from the perspective of two codes of behavior at once: that of social custom and that of literary convention. In the rural provinces of Poland at the end of the sixteenth century, the death of a small child was a sad but fairly regular occurrence. Even in Kochanowski's own family, Ursula was the first but not the only child to die: her older sister Hanna shared her fate soon afterwards.

So, by making his grief public, Kochanowski came into conflict with a certain socially accepted and indeed socially required model of behavior. What was even more striking for his contemporaries, however, was that he also broke a well-established literary convention. The classical principle of decorum reserved the genre known as the funeral elegy, lament, threnody, neniae, etc., for momentous public occasions: deaths of heroes, military leaders, statesmen, great thinkers. Therefore, the poet's reaching for this genre (unequivocally identified in the sequence's title) in order to mourn a child's death (and to make things worse, his own child, a very young daughter unknown to anybody beyond the immediate family) was tantamount, at best, to a serious artistic error. Indeed, the initial reaction to the publication of Laments in 1580 was definitely cold, and the most frequently reiterated charge was that the author had foolishly chosen to write not as he should have, about some persona gravis, but about a persona as shockingly and inexcusably levis as his own child. Which is to say that the very thing that has appealed most powerfully to the sensitivities of later generations of readers, including our own, was the thing that caused the most problems for his contemporary audience."

Baranczak then goes on to warn against mistaking Kochanowski for merely a rebellious Romantic ahead of his time (both due to this, and a 1567 poem 'I sing unto myself and the Muses' which may be considered a manifesto of artistic independence and the lack of material gain which goes with that choice).

This would seem to indicates that it is not a good idea to make blanket statements either way that 'of course parents of centuries past were, or were not, distraught about the deaths of children'. It seems quite likely that the spread of responses was more varied than the acceptable range today in the Global North.

The poems are interesting for their context alone, but the content is very nicely translated here too. I'd previously looked at the 1920 English version translated by Dorothea Prall, but the sing-song line-end rhymes were, by and large, offputting. There are a few lines where I think the Prall sounds better in English than the Heaney/Baranczak, but, all in all, the more recent version communicates the emotion more directly, making the structure seem less obtrusive, which is what I, and probably a lot of other contemporary readers, need to find translated poetry effective and affecting.

As I don't read 16th century Polish, I can't comment in detail on how accurately Heaney & Baranczack have represented the originals in English; all I can say is that there are a handful of lines on which there are different shades of meaning as compared with Prall.

But through the sequence, there is a representation of a psychological process echoing the Kübler-Ross grief cycle, to be clinical about it. The bereaved father (who mentions his wife in the poems - it's not just all about him) moves through mental states such as bewilderment, anger and questioning of faith, bargaining, despair, an understanding that only time will heal, and, in the final and longest verse, an echo of the medieval dream-vision, acceptance - after he sees little Orszula in heaven with his own, already deceased, mother.

There are some beautiful extended metaphors running through the verses, including Orszula as a (baby) nightingale; this connects with realist lines about the little girl singing, and with her father's vocation as a poet. He seems to have hoped she would follow in his footsteps as she got older. Another motif is about seedlings and errors in mowing, or ears of grain, a reminder of how overwhelmingly agrarian Renaissance Poland was, and of the rural landscape that would have now surrounded Kochanowski after his years in Padua and Kraków. (The mowing, I understand, is also used in the medieval English poem, the Pearl - by the same unknown author as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight - and thought to be about the death of the poet's young daughter - and which I intend to read in full soon as a companion-piece to Laments. David J. Welsh in his monograph Jan Kochanowski characterises the 'death wedding' imagery found in one Lament to be characteristically Slavic - however the very similar similar 'bride of Jesus' idea is also in the Pearl)

Poland now stands out as the most religious, and most Catholic, country in Europe, yet it seems from these poems that in the Renaissance, its religiosity was not so dissimilar to that elsewhere. Classical imagery is used boldly in Kochanowski's Laments, as it would be in English or Italian writing of the same era, in ways that the most strictly pious might find unchristian: including gods ("we are all Pluto's"), the underworld, and appeals to Charon.

However, Kochanowski's doubts about the Christian god are framed with great care, so as to be obviously a product of grief rather than intellectual questioning - and, as Welsh points out, they are couched in the language of faith:
Yet still we, in our arrogance, pretend
To higher faculties that comprehend
God's mysteries; we climb to heaven, try
To fathom its designs, but our mind's eye
Proves far too weak! The meanings it divines
Are not meant to be read'fleet dreams, not signs . . .
Grief, what do you intend? Am I to be
Robbed first of joy, then equanimity? (Lament 11)

The final few poems have a predominantly Christian focus, indicating, as per Welsh, that "The writings of pagan philosophers (Lucretius, Cicero, Seneca) provided no answer to his desperate questionings. In the last resort, Christian humanism was to symbolize for him the only way to attain peace of mind."

His doubts are finally reconciled in the beautifully translated phrase, three lines from the end of the poetic sequence, one Lord of blight and bliss, giving a sense of transcendent unity, and the reverence necessary in the era.)

Yet there is also an awareness of what secular readers might characterise as the problems of life beyond personal religious belief. A significant part of the closing consolation turns on an awareness of how difficult life, and marriage, often was for women of the time:

So why do you keep crying? My God, son,
What is there to regret? That no man won
Her dowry and her heart, then made her years
One long declension into strife and tears?
That her body wasn't torn by labor pains?
That her experience was, is, and remains
Virginal, that she got release before
She learned if birth or death mark women more? (Lament 19)

There is a hint - which I may have missed were it not for the commentaries in the introduction and Welsh's book - towards a location-specific fear that wouldn't be found in English poetry of the time: the fear of Tatar raids (although in practice these mostly affected lands further to the east in Poland-Lithuania than Kochanowski's estate in what was then Sandomierz Voivodeship):
others still,
Abducted and made slaves of, tread the mill
In some wild heathen enclave, stooped and lame,
Praying for death to come and end their shame. (Lament 19)

Also in this final poem, the idea of life as a dangerous sea brings to mind the Age of Exploration underway at the other end of Europe, and where attitudes to the sea were becoming less fearful than they had been during the medieval period (when even living near the coast was often considered undesirable and risky). Perhaps tenuous, but the idea of the sea still seeming more dangerous from Poland, reminded me of a GR friend's remark that Eastern European literature felt more insular than that of the Spanish-speaking world: it's not something I've perceived myself (and I am more biased in favour of the E Eur stuff anyway) but I wonder how much of that is ultimately rooted in geography and geopolitics.

What Kochanowski could not have known was that, if Orszula had lived, she would have experienced the death of her father when she was aged 7 or 8; he would die himself only four years after publishing these poems.

These translations can sometimes sound a little too recent in style - 19th century perhaps? But they enable a sense of more direct connection with the feelings of the work - as compared with the old Prall translation - alongside the attention to form rightly expected of translators who are accomplished poets in their own right. (There is also a third English translation, by Adam Czerniawski, but that would cost £20, so I haven't read it.)

Reading the Laments, I could not help think of certain households among my Polish ancestors, where several children died, and where the family seems to have been middle class and therefore more likely to read poetry. Did they also read these poems, in their originals, and did they find any consolation in them? There is something about the personal and emotional nature of these poems which prompts these thoughts; whereas I'd rarely, if ever, wondered, what some British ancestor thought about a particular Dickens novel.

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Learning about Polish literature quite often leads to tantalising reports or fragments of works otherwise untranslated, or unavailable except in exorbitant out-of-print volumes. This, quoted by Welsh, might be characterised as metaphysicals go minimalist, and to this English reader, it carries the sensation of historical styles shifting together like turns of a Rubik's cube:
Bartłomiej Zimorowic (died ca. 1680), from "The Mourners" (Narzekalnice):
My wedding dress'a winding-sheet;
A handful of earth'my dowry,
My bridegroom, the worm; the grave my marriage bed;
My offspring'the tears of my parents.

(It is cited as "an example of the total change that Polish poetry underwent in the hundred years dividing the two poets. The absence of verbs and connectives gives the lines a remarkable tension, intensified by the powerful contrasts.")