Volume 43, Number 3 · February 15, 1996
Bringing a Great Poet Back to Life
By Czeslaw Milosz
Laments
by Jan Kochanowski, translated by Stanislaw Baranczak, by Seamus Heaney
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 59 pp., $17.50
Two distinguished poets have translated into English a sixteenth-century Polish poet whose work reads as if he were our contemporary. The very possibility that we can respond to works written long ago is always fragile. After all, how often do we fail to overcome the gap in time that separates us from a given literary work, except when we read it as students of history, fascinated more by a reconstruction of past mores and ways of feeling than by the work itself? The rare accomplishment of Stanislaw Baranczak and Seamus Heaney in translating Jan Kochanowski (1530-1584), a Polish poet of the Renaissance, is that they allow us to forget about differences in mentality and read Laments as a powerful work of literature.
Review, 4535 words
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