Author Kochanowski Jan

of King Sigismund II Augustus, serving for a time as royal secretary. In 1574, following the decampment of Poland's recently elected King Henry of Valois (whose candidacy to the Polish throne Kochanowski had supported), Kochanowski settled on a family estate at Czarnolas ("Blackwood") to lead the life of a country squire. In 1575 he married Dorota Podlodowska, with whom he had seven children. Kochanowski is sometimes referred to in Polish as "Jan z Czarnolasu" ("John of Blackwood"). It was there that he wrote his most memorable works, including The Dismissal of the Greek Envoys and the Laments. Kochanowski died, probably of a heart attack, in Lublin on 22 August 1584. Kochanowski never ceased to write in Latin, however his main achievement was the creation of Polish-language verse forms that made him a classic for his contemporaries and posterity. Kochanowski's first major masterpiece was Odprawa pos?ów greckich (The Dismissal of the Greek Envoys, 1578; recently translated into English by Indiana University's Bill Johnston). This was a blank-verse tragedy that recounted an incident leading up to the Trojan War. It was the first tragedy written in Polish, and its theme of the responsibilities of statesmanship continues to resonate to this day. The play was performed at the wedding of Jan Zamoyski and Krystyna Radziwi?? at Ujazdów Castle in Warsaw on January 12, 1578.[3] The masterpiece for which Kochanowski is best remembered is Treny (Threnodies, 1580, translated into English in 1995 by Stanis?aw Bara?czak and Seamus Heaney as Laments). It is a series of nineteen elegies upon the death of his beloved two-and-a-half-year-old daughter Urszula. The Laments move the reader with their unaffected sentiments, expressed with a skill worthy, in a later generation, of a Shakespeare.