Polish · 1530–1584
Kochanowski studied at Kraków, Königsberg and Padua, spent fifteen years abroad, wrote elegant Latin verse, served as a royal secretary to Sigismund Augustus, and then took holy orders, resigned them, married, and retired to his estate at Czarnolas to farm and write in Polish. He is the reason Polish became a literary language: he translated the Psalms into Polish verse, wrote the first Polish tragedy in classical form, and produced songs, epigrams and pastorals of a technical polish nobody in the language had approached. In 1579 his daughter Urszula died at two and a half. He wrote nineteen laments for her that break every rule of the classical consolation he had spent his life mastering, including the rule that a great poet does not write elegies for infants. Seamus Heaney and Stanisław Barańczak translated them together in 1995.