Description: 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.

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