LAMENTS

Laments, by the sixteenth-century Polish poet Jan Kochanowski, is acknowledged to be the first great work in Poland's vernacular literary tradition, and yet these impassioned poems were often overlooked beyond their native country. This translation, published in 1995, was a collaboration between Seamus Heaney and the Polish poet and academic Stanislaw Baranczak. The laments themselves are an anguished yet impeccably controlled expression of grief over the death of Kochanowski’s daughter Orszula. This translation was hailed by Czeslaw Milosz, winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature, as ‘a rare accomplishment’.