Jan Kochanowski

Seamus Heaney has collaborated with the Polish poet, Stanislaw Baranczak, to produce a text which follows as closely as possible the strict rhymes and stanzaic patterns of the original while managing to forfeit none of its emotional impact.

Jan Kochanowski is one of the great Polish poets of the sixteenth century. Because of its intimate and domestic nature, this poignant series of poems on the death of Kochanowski's young daughter was a radical and rebellious departure from the literary conventions of his day. But it is this same intimacy that now gives Laments a startling potency and realism for contemporary readers. The poems express a candid grief, a profound angst, and an undeniably modern sense of humiliation and religious doubt.