POEMS
JAN KOCHANOWSKI
Lament 16
No end to misery; my own
Has chilled me to the marrowbone;
I must forgo my rhyme and lute:
My soul is mute.
Am
I alive? asleep? It seems
My head's a haunted house for dreams
That first delude my inner eye,
Then fade and die.
o
error of our minds! Insane
Conceit of men! We feel no pain,
Then straight presume our reason proof
Against
all
grief
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?"
Translators' Note: The poems published here belong in the sequence of nineteen
Laments
(1580) that Jan Kochanowski (1530-1584), the greatest Polish poet up to the
beginning of the nineteenth century and the central figure in the so-called Golden Age
of the Polish Renaissance, wrote in the wake of the death of his two-and-a-half-year–
old daughter Ursula.
