Warsaw Voice - Poet`s Corner

Poet`s Corner
30 August 1998

Grief in the Poetry of Jan Kochanowski (1530-1584) and Władysław Broniewski (1897-1962)

During the Renaissance, the writing of funerary poetry was reserved for esteemed and titled figures. Jan Kochanowski, Poland's great Renaissance poet disregarded such pompous poetic codes and wrote a cycle of grief-stricken poems entitled Treny (The Laments) in the wake of his beloved daughter Urszula's death. Over the course of 19 poems he experienced a gamut of feelings while mourning his dearly beloved child. Behind his repeated lamentation lay the realization that language failed to express deep human emotion, and one senses that the idea behind the cycle was to overcome the limitations of language to express, paradoxically, an unlimited depth of feeling. In his first lament he wrote about the absurdity of his inability to give his child's death some sort of rational bearing.

We grope for rational cheer,
But the presence of grief is all too clear.
Error-the age of man! Where lies the ground,
To grieve, or my thought to reason violently compound?

Little has changed since the 16th century and whether in grief or love, words often fail to bridge the gap between emotions felt and emotions expressed. However, when a poet attempts to embrace a tradition such as consolatory poetry, the action implies a certain realization that a poet's emotional and linguistic crutch is generations of preceding poets who have found themselves in a similar predicament; that the only wisdom to be eked from adversity is an awareness of the common world order.

This week's poem is a loose translation of a highly regarded 20th-century poet, Władysław Broniewski, who wrote a cycle of poems entitled Anka, concerned with his despair after the death of his daughter, Anka, as the result of a mountaineering accident in 1954. Many comparisons have been made with Kochanowski's Treny. We sense the magnitude of the man's loss but, like Kochanowski, he too attempts to find the words to rationalize and rebuild his shattered life.

A Promise
My far-off child,
Emptiness surrounds,
My sick heart bleeds,
Memory-bound.

Your presence remains,
We'll struggle on,
My promise to keep
These poems for a nation.

To give peace, light,
Love, hope and joy
Is an uphill task,
To carry verse,
To slip death's ploy.

That black night! Under evils' sway
A winged creature swooped to gorge.
I'll rip his filthy wings away,
I'll break free. Life I forge!

Introduction and translation by Barry Keane