Jan Kochanowski

• 1. Introduction

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  Jan Kochanowski's skull sat inside Warsaw's Czartoryski Museum for well over a century, taken from his grave in 1791 by a nobleman named Tadeusz Czacki. In 2010 anthropologists examined the bone and found it did not belong to Kochanowski at all. It likely belonged to a woman, perhaps his own wife. The mix-up says something about how thin the historical record around Kochanowski really is. He is now called the greatest Polish poet before Adam Mickiewicz, yet even his remains got confused with someone else's. Who was this poet whose Latin and Polish verses shaped the Polish literary language itself? What made a poem about his young daughter's death so controversial in his own time? And how did the poetry of this Renaissance courtier go on to shape Polish literature for centuries after his death?

• 2. A Wandering Education

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  On the 23rd of June 1530, Kochanowski was born at Sycyna, near Radom, into a noble Polish family bearing the Korwin coat of arms. Little beyond his own writings survives to document his early years. His father worked as a judge in the Sandomierz area, and his mother belonged to the Odrowąż family. Jan was the second son among twelve children, and two of his younger brothers, including Andrzej Kochanowski, also grew up to become poets and translators.

  At fourteen, in 1544, Kochanowski enrolled at the Kraków Academy to begin his higher education. Around 1551 to 1552 he studied at the University of Königsberg, in Ducal Prussia, then a fiefdom of the Polish Crown. From 1552 into the late 1550s he attended Padua University in Italy, studying classical philology. There he came into contact with the humanist scholar Francesco Robortello. During what's remembered as his Padua period, he crossed between Italy and Poland at least twice, once returning home for his mother's funeral.

  Kochanowski closed out this fifteen-year run of study and travel with a trip to France, where he visited Marseilles and Paris. There he met the French poet Pierre de Ronsard. One account suggests a future Flemish scholar and poet may have traveled with him for part of the journey. In 1559 he returned to Poland for good. He traded Padua's lecture halls for the corridors of a royal court, where diplomacy and verse would soon serve him in new ways.

• 3. Service and Retreat

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  The few years just after Kochanowski's return to Poland are so poorly documented that historians can only guess at his activities. He likely built closer ties during this stretch with the court of Jan Tarnowski, the voivode of Kraków, and with the powerful Radziwiłł family. Around 1562 to 1563 he also served as a courtier to Bishop Filip Padniewski and Voivode Jan Firlej. In mid-1563 he entered the service of bishop Piotr Myszkowski, the crown's Vice Chancellor, who secured him the title of royal secretary.

  By late 1563 or early 1564, Kochanowski was affiliated with the royal court of King Sigismund II Augustus, serving there as royal secretary. On the 7th of February 1564 he was admitted to the provostship of Poznań Cathedral, a post Myszkowski had just given up. Around the same period he received two benefices, or church incomes, though little else is recorded of his actual court duties. In 1567 he accompanied the king to a show of force near Radashkovichy, part of the wider Livonian War. Two years later, in 1569, he was present at the assembly in Lublin that enacted the Union of Lublin, formally creating the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

  From 1571 onward Kochanowski began spending more time at Czarnolas, his family's estate near Lublin. In 1574, King Henry of Valois abandoned the Polish throne, a candidacy Kochanowski had supported. Kochanowski then settled at Czarnolas for good, to live as a country squire. In 1575 he married the daughter of a Sejm deputy, and the couple went on to have seven children. In 1576 he served as a royal envoy to the regional assembly, or sejmik, at Opatów. People close to him, including the statesman Jan Zamoyski, urged him toward active politics. He declined, though he remained a frequent visitor to nearby Sandomierz. On the 9th of October 1579, King Stefan Batory signed a nomination in Vilnius naming Kochanowski the standard-bearer of Sandomierz. Kochanowski died suddenly in Lublin on the 22nd of August 1584, probably of a heart attack, at the age of 54. He left behind a body of work far larger than his quiet country life might suggest.

• 4. A Grave Disturbed

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  Kochanowski was buried in the crypt of a parish church in Zwoleń, and at least two tombstones were later raised in his memory, one there and another in nearby Policzno. Neither stone survives today. In 1830 church authorities in Zwoleń moved his remains into the family crypt. They were returned to the church itself in 1983, and Kochanowski was given another funeral in 1984. Stone monuments failed to hold him, but the verses he wrote at Czarnolas about grief and loss still circulate today.

• 5. A Father's Grief

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  At his estate in Czarnolas, following the death of his daughter Ursula, which affected him greatly, Kochanowski wrote Treny, known in English as the Laments. The cycle gathers nineteen elegies mourning a daughter who was only two and a half years old when she died. Published in three volumes in 1584, the poems became a perennially popular wellspring for a new genre within Polish literature.

  Czesław Miłosz, the 1980 Nobel laureate and Polish poet, wrote that Kochanowski's poetic art reached its highest achievement in the Laments. Miłosz called the cycle something unique in world literature: a whole sequence of poems built around a single, sustained theme. That choice scandalized some of Kochanowski's contemporaries, since he had applied a classical literary form to what they saw as an insignificant subject, the death of a young child.

  English readers first encountered the Laments in 1920, through a translation by Dorothea Prall. A second English version followed in 1995, jointly translated by Stanisław Barańczak and Seamus Heaney. Kochanowski had spent the 1560s and 1570s composing another very different body of work, one built on wit rather than mourning.

• 6. Wit and Verse

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  Kochanowski's first known work may be the Polish-language Pieśń o potopie, possibly written as early as 1550. His actual publishing debut came in 1558, a Latin-language epitaph honoring a colleague who had recently died. During his years in Padua he mostly wrote elegies, epigrams, and odes.

  Back home, Kochanowski turned to epic poetry, including a commemorative piece on the death of Jan Tarnowski in 1561. Other commemorative works followed, including one for Jan Baptist, Count at Tęczyna, written between 1562 and 1564, and Proporzec albo hołd pruski in 1564. Around 1562 he also wrote the satirical Zgoda, or Harmony, followed in 1564 by Satyr albo Dziki Mąż. His Szachy, or Chess, composed around 1562 to 1566, has been called the first Polish-language humorous epic poem. Some of these writings functioned as a kind of journalism before journalism existed, aimed squarely at members of the Sejm and at voters.

  This period also produced most of Kochanowski's Fraszki, or Epigrams, eventually published in 1584 as a three-volume collection of 294 short poems. Reminiscent of Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron, they became Kochanowski's most popular writings and spawned many imitators across Poland. Miłosz described them as a sort of very personal diary, one where, in his own words, the author's personality never appears in the foreground. Kochanowski also wrote a non-poetic political dialogue from this period known as Portents. Those epigrams set a template of wit and self-effacement that Kochanowski would push in a very different direction, toward tragedy on a Warsaw stage.

• 7. The First Polish Tragedy

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  On the 12th of January 1578, a new play was staged at Ujazdów Castle in Warsaw for the wedding of Jan Zamoyski and Krystyna Radziwiłł. The work was Odprawa posłów greckich, or The Dismissal of the Greek Envoys, which Kochanowski had written around 1565 to 1566. Modeled on Homer, the blank-verse tragedy recounts an episode leading up to the Trojan War, and stands as the first tragedy ever written in Polish. Its central theme, the responsibilities that come with statesmanship, still resonates today. Miłosz called it the finest specimen of Polish humanist drama. In 2007 Bill Johnston translated the play into English as The Envoys. Long before that, though, Kochanowski had already been turning the poetry of ancient Rome and Greece into his own language, poem by poem.

• 8. Founding a Language

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  In 1579 Kochanowski translated the Book of Psalms into Polish as Psalterz Dawidów, or David's Psalter. By the mid-eighteenth century the work had gone through at least 25 editions. Once set to music, it became a fixture of Polish church services and popular culture. It was later translated into Russian by Symeon of Polotsk, and into Romanian, German, Lithuanian, Czech, and Slovak. The historian Norman Davies has written that Kochanowski's Psalter did for Polish what Luther's Bible did for German.

  Kochanowski also spent his lifetime composing Pieśni, or Songs, published only after his death in 1586. The poems draw on Italian lyricism and a deep attachment to the poet Horace. He translated ancient works too, including the Phenomena of Aratus and fragments of Homer's Iliad. His Latin output includes the 1580 Lyricorum libellus, or Little Book of Lyrics, and the 1584 Elegiarum libri quattuor, or Four Books of Elegies. Those Latin poems were later rendered into Polish, first in 1829 by Kazimierz Brodziński and again in 1851 by Władysław Syrokomla. In some poems Kochanowski used the Polish alexandrine, a line of thirteen syllables broken by a pause after the seventh. A historical treatise published after his death dealt with the woven story of Czech and Lech. It offered the first critical literary analysis of Slavic origin myths surrounding Lech, Czech, and Rus'. Since May 2024, the only surviving poem in Kochanowski's hand, Dryas Zamchana, has been on permanent display at the Palace of the Commonwealth in Warsaw.

  Like most people of his era, Kochanowski was deeply religious, and much of his writing draws on faith. He nonetheless avoided taking sides in the era's fierce split between the Catholic Church and Protestant denominations. He stayed on friendly terms with figures from both camps, and both sides found his poetry acceptable.

  A Polish literary historian described Kochanowski as the foremost Renaissance poet not only in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, but across all Slavic nations. That reputation went unchallenged until the rise of nineteenth-century Romantics such as Adam Mickiewicz and Juliusz Słowacki, and of Alexander Pushkin in Russia. The scholar Ulewicz argued that Kochanowski both created modern Polish poetry and introduced it to the rest of Europe, crediting his Songs as influential abroad. One American Slavicist called him the first Slavic author to attain excellence on a European scale. Miłosz went further, writing that until the start of the nineteenth century, the most eminent Slavic poet was undoubtedly Jan Kochanowski. He added that Kochanowski set the pace for the whole subsequent development of Polish poetry. The poet and critic Jerzy Jarniewicz called him the founding father of Polish literature. Another Polish literary historian similarly named him the founding father of elegant humanist Polish-language poetry. The historian Norman Davies ranks him as the second most important figure of the Polish Renaissance, after Copernicus. Davies also calls him the founder of Polish vernacular poetry, crediting him with showing Poles the beauty of their own language. The American historian Larry Wolf credits him with helping create a vernacular culture in the Polish language. The American Slavicist David Welsh described his greatest achievement as transforming Polish into a medium fit for poetry. Kochanowski's work also shaped the development of Lithuanian literature.

  A multi-volume posthumous edition, published in Kraków between 1584 and 1590, gathered Kochanowski's remaining writings, including pieces from his student years in Padua. In 1875 many of his poems appeared in German translation by H. Nitschmann, and Warsaw marked his legacy with a jubilee volume in 1884. The 1894 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica called him the prince of Polish poets, though he remained largely unknown outside Slavic-language countries for decades afterward. The first English-language collection of his poems appeared only in 1928, translated by George R. Noyes and others. David Welsh wrote the first English-language monograph on Kochanowski in 1974. As late as the early 1980s, English-language reference works still tended to pass over his writing or give it only brief mention.

  Kochanowski's work has since inspired Polish literature, music, and visual art. In 1817 Jan Ursyn Niemcewicz used fragments of his poetry in the libretto for an opera titled Jan Kochanowski, staged in Warsaw. Nineteenth-century composers set his Lamentations and Psalter to music with growing popularity. Stanisław Moniuszko wrote songs for bass voice and piano based on Lamentations III, V, VI, and X. In 1862 the painter Jan Matejko depicted the poet in a work showing him with his deceased daughter Ursula. A museum dedicated to Kochanowski opened on the Czarnolas estate in 1961.