The paper discusses a recently completed critical edition of Jan Kochanowski’s “Fraszki” (“Trifles”), which will before long be issued as a subsequent volume of his “Dzieła wszystkie” (“Collected Works”). Different aspects of the publication are presented, including facsimile, transcription, and commentary. As a representative sample, a few actual passages from particular trifles are discussed in length. These include the following poems: I 48, I 55, I 78, II 55, III 1, III 39, III 46, III 53, III 63, and III 69. The most remarkable added value of the edition is that it contains countless minute discoveries—individually marginal—creating much broader, much richer, and much deeper picture of “Trifles” than the previous editions might suggest.

This article discusses the significance of the aurora motif in Jan Kochanowski’s “Fraszki” (“Trifles”): “Do snu” (“To Sleep,” II 37), “Modlitwa o deszcz” (“Prayer for Rain,” III 72), “Na matematyka” (“To the Mathematician,” I 53), “Do Jędrzeja” (“To Jędrzej,” II 53), and “Do Stanisława” (“To Stanisław”) (I 63), against the background of other references to this phenomenon in the poet’s works and in relation to ancient and Renaissance natural science concepts and literary conventions. The motif couples the two most important manifestations of beauty of the cosmos in the author’s oeuvre: mathematical measure and luminosity. The aurora orders space, as it determines the directions of the world, and time, since it regulates the order of the day. It is also a luminous phenomenon, the beauty of which cannot be explained in rational terms. It adorns the macrocosm—the sky—and the microcosm—the human being (especially fair maidens)—and, as a stylistic ornament, the literary work microcosm. In accordance with Neoplatonic thought, through its beauty it refers to the supreme Beauty, surpassing human cognition.

Jan Kochanowski’s trifle II 37 “Do snu” (“To Sleep”) is a fairly enigmatic piece that researchers as a rule rightly interpret in the context of an exceptionally strong influence of Neoplatonism over the poet’s oeuvre. This poem most probably deals with a reference to Anaxagoras’ saying from Joannes Stobaeus’ grand anthology that “there are two things that teach us about death: the time before our birth, and sleep.” Kochanowski gave here a kind of Platonic commentary to the maxim from which it can follow that he did not entirely reject the Pythagorean teaching on the preexistence of the soul known from the works of Late Antique philosophers but questioned by Christianity

Although for a dozen decades or so, beginning the decline of the 19th century when Jan Kochanowski’s “Dzieła wszystkie” (“Complete Works,” 1884–1897) were published, numerous scholars have attempted to match the challenge posed by “Gadka” (“Riddle”), the verse until now remains unsolved. The words “ślepy bełt [blind bolt]” allow to question the suggested proposals put forward to this day and lead to the only proper understanding, namely a pit latrine hole into one eye of which the “blind bolt” hits.

The author of the paper discusses the issue of Italian influences in Jan Kochanowski’s output in the light of his youthful stays in the Republic of Venice, and a possible impact of the books with which he acquainted at that time. Niccolò Franco’s “La Priapea” (1541), a pornographic-satirical cycle of sonnets issued a dozen or so years before Kochanowski’s arrival, could have been one of them. In the trifle III 82 “Do dziewki” (“To a Maid”) Franco’s collection most probably completes the Anacreontic pattern (an elderly suitor’s love’s labours to a young maid in the first stanza) and develops it into a firmly obscene (phallic, in verses 2–3) direction, while ceasing to wipe out the elements traditionally linked with Kochanowski’s home culture.

The paper discusses two poetic pieces closely connected to the Battle of Ula, a significant episode of the war with Moscow for Livonia. Capturing Polock by the troops of Ivan the Terrible (February 15th, 1563) and starting the war campaign by the Tsar in January 1564 moved the conflict into the interior of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Two great Muscovite armies were to meet near the city of Orsha to move towards Vilnius that was placed 26 miles away from the war theatre. The victory of the Lithuanian troops in the Battle of Ula (January 26th, 1564) and almost complete defeat of one army of Ivan the Terrible moved the immediate threat away and made way for a series of successes of the Polish-Lithuanian armed forces. The above-sketched events make up a background of Jan Kochanowski’s trifle III 51 and Maciej Stryjkowski’s handwritten poem. Remarks on the epigram “Do Lubimira” (“To Lubimir”) lead to explication of the relation between the poem and the Greek basis of the trifle, and disambiguate its dating. While as far as recently rendered available fragments of Stryjkowski’s work are concerned, they focus on the piece’s description and the shape of the poem about the Battle of Ula.

The paper offers a sample of a commentary to Jan Kochanowski’s two foricoenia, namely “Ad Lucinam” (21) and “De Neaera” (4). The commentary is effectuated in connection with a new edition of the poet’s “Carmina Latina”. When interpreting the two epigrams, an important context is made not only by antique works (e.g. from “The Greek Anthology”) to which the poet referred within the framework of the Renaissance aemulatio, but also by New Latin ones, inter alia Andrea Navagero’s “Lusus” and Michael Marullus’ epigrams. “Foricoenia” enters into intertextual relationships with the works of other humanists and contributes to the common good of Renaissance Europe.

Although to this day the editors of “Treny” (“Laments”) largely admitted that the 1583 reprinting was revised by Jan Kochanowski, the author of the paper argues that the 1580 first issue is more accurate and that the poet by no means took part in the preparation of this masterpiece’s last impression before his death. Evidence to support his claim is provided by a detailed comparison of the republication with the unique first version purchased by Waldemar Łysiak that the writer rendered available in 2001 (two copies known before the World War II perished). Collation of the two specimens reveals various discrepancies (e.g. errors in rhythm and rhyming) which makes the researcher consider editio princeps as more diligently prepared and closer to Kochanowski’s language habits. Eventually, it should serve as a basis for future scientific publications.

The subject of the paper is a detailed interpretation of the first part of Jan Kochanowski’s “Tren V” (“Lament V”) in the context of “Psalm 128” (“Beati omnes, qui timent Dominum”). As we know, the main source of the opening part of this poem is an epic simile from “Iliad” (XVII, 53–58), where a young warrior Euphorbos is compared to a “slip of an olive tree” as “it blossoms into beauty.” Similarly, “Psalm 128” proposes the picture of sons growing up like “the olive plants around the table” of a pious man. In Kochanowski’s rewriting of the Homeric simile the emphasis is always put on negation of the meanings attributed to the symbol of olive tree, such as peace, wisdom, justice, fertility, abundance, youth. The poet explores the significant absence of the promised blessing for a God-fearing man.

The paper refers to two contradictory images of Poland contained in elegies by Filippo Buonaccorsi Callimachus. Quite concise, stereotypical descriptions of Poland as a northern country covered with snow and ice serve to locate the place of action and the origin of Fannia—the heroine and the addressee of the collection as well as of a few other familiar characters. Furthermore, with antitheses (e.g. barbarian country versus beauty, barbarian country versus literary creation), the descriptions allow to amplify their admiration. Further descriptions are considered more vital, namely that of Polish winter as one of the seasons, and those of warm spring and summer. Callimachus was the first, long before Jan Kochanowski, who offered a vision of Poland based on pastoral locus amoenus and Horatian spring odes (I 4 and IV 7) and patterned on ancient praises of countryside, known from the Roman elegy and Horace’s 2nd epode. He was also the first to use the motive of flower chaplet that a girl gives to a boy as a sign of love.

The paper analyses the mode in which Mikołaj of Wilkowiecko, the author of “Historyja o chwalebnym Zmartwychwstaniu Pańskim” (“The History of the Glorious Resurrection of Our Lord”), “constructs” the indisputable “truth” of the piece, in that he refers to the Latin term “historia” and distances from theatre (does not define his piece in the categories of stage performance). The title of the work reflects a tendency, characteristic of Christianity, to reject theatre while concentrating the believers’ attention on liturgical and paraliturgical phenomena. Under the influence of Protestant criticism, the last aspect exhorted Mikołaj to eliminate the scenes satiated with secularity.

Analysis of Martin Opitz’s poetics of panegyric pieces in honour of two Polish personages—a painter Bartłomiej Strobel and King Ladislaus IV of Poland—is made subject of the paper. Displaying the relationship between the poet and the king, the author focuses more on the aesthetic connections than on the subjective ones. Opitz, exploiting the canon of erudite panegyric, addressed to learned receivers, attempts to portray Strobel’s achievements, and the painter is praised as vir doctus, namely art theoretician. Thus, what he means is implementation of Horatian image ut pictura poesis. Poetics of the panegyric is presented in the context of “last hand” version (silvae genetics complexity) and with respect to Opitz’s epigrams connected with Strobel, but first and foremost in the context of genetic observations from “Das Buch von der deutschen Poeterei” (“Book of German Poetics,” 1642). The panegyric to honour the Polish King appears totally contradictory in its nature and addresses, besides following Gerhard von Dönhoff’s political initiative, to German infidels inhabiting Poland. The author points at the poem’s mediative character and formulates a thesis that the piece could have been directed to Swedish élites, justifying King Ladislaus IV’s not only dynastic, but also ethical rights to the Swedish throne.

The article is devoted to the presentation of an unknown version of a verse about conditions of good confession, which comes from the late Middle Ages. It was discovered in an incunable from 1487 located in the Diocesan Library of Sandomierz. It is a manual of confession entitled “Manipulus curatorum officia sacerdotum secundum ordinem septem sacramentorum perbreviter complectens” by Guido de Monte Rochen addressed to priests. The verse was written in Polish as a part of the treatise De confessione and belongs to penitentiary literature of the late Middle Ages. Translated from Latin into Polish, it is a mnemonic phrase—a subject to the rules of mnemonics—which lists 16 conditions of good confession. Guido de Monte Rochen’s manual played a crucial role in popularising Latin conditions of good confession.

To this day, the history of Polish studies in the attribution and transmission of a diary text by Abraham Rożniatowski (d. 1665) completes with Wojciech Kętrzyński’s “Diariusze Wacława Dyamentowskiego i Marcina Stadnickiego o wyprawie cara Dymitra” (“Wacław Dyamentowski’s and Marcin Stadnicki’s Diaries about Tsar Dmitri’s Expedition,” 1908). The researcher not only made the text’s attribution (formerly ascribed to Wacław Dyamentowski and Marcin Stadnicki), but also reconstructed the phases of its development. The present paper confronts Kętrzyński’s examinations with the outcomes of latest analyses of the diary’s preserved records to formulate arguments that the piece’s history proves to be different from what was previously assumed.

The paper includes pieces of information about a reissue of “Postępek prawa czartowskiego” (“The Trial of the Devil’s Law”), an anonymous early printed book attributed to Sebastian Sternacki’s printing shop, dated approximately 1619, and omitted from scholarly editing until now. Due to physical damage to the unique copy of editio princeps (Brest-Litovsk 1570), the existing state of art is incomplete, and reference to the early 17th c. full-text edition allows to fill the missing gaps. As based on the latter copy, an edition of fragments unknown to this day was prepared, namely the beginning of chapter I, a part of chapter II, prefatory verse “Przedmowa do czytelnika łaskawego” (“Foreword to the Gentle Reader”), and “Dialog abo Rozmowa o Sprawiedliwości Świeckiej” (“Dialogue or Conversation on Secular Justice”), a piece appended to the reissue of “The Trial.”

In 1966, Janusz Pelc, Zbigniew Morsztyn’s monographer, roughly dated the composition of a cycle of emblems. As he claims, Morsztyn completed it between 1675–1680 or 1676–1680, started presumably in the 1660s, and also added corrections probably after 1680. This dating is essentially valid until now. Grześkowiak in his paper proves that the cycle was concluded after May 21st, 1674 (date of Jan III Sobieski’s coronation is mentioned in dedication), and before July 15th, 1675, when Kazimierz Krzysztof Kłokocki, a would-be issuer, who administered the Słuck publishing house, confirmed in a letter that he received the manuscript final draft. Grześkowiak questions the two hypotheses that had impact on the erstwhile dating: Pelc’s thesis suggesting that two different copies of complete collections of emblems represent its two disparate auctorial editions, and Paulina Buchwald-Pelcowa and Janusz Pelc’s assumption that Morsztyn composed 50 three-verse subscriptions written on a 1626 copy of “Amoris Divini et humani effectus varii” treasured in Uppsala University Library

The review discusses the latest edition of „Historyja barzo cudna i ku wiedzieniu potrzebna o stworzeniu nieba i ziemie...” (“The Marvelous Story of the Heaven and Earth Creation...,” 1551) by Krzysztof Pussman. The editors divided the work into three segments: “Wstępy” (“Introductions”), “Transkrypcje” (“Transcriptions”), and “Podobizny” (“Images of Editions”). The introductions trace the Latin basis of the text, the history of the piece’s editions, and discuss its graphic and linguistic layers. The second part presents the 16th–18th century impressions, and the third part presents images of prints from three versions. The publishers’ achievement is the discovery of a Moscow 1685 copy of the print. The edition deserves very high assessment. The remarks put in the review mainly concern comments on the edition in question.

The review concerns, published at the University of Indiana, a volume containing translations of seven occasional poems by the most outstanding of Polish Renaissance poets, Jan Kochanowski. The translator is Michael J. Mikoś, who for many years now has been involved in making the literary legacy of this 16th-century poet available to the English-speaking world. The works mentioned here, although hardly known and difficult to understand, occupy an important place in Kochanowski’s oeuvre, bearing witness to his lively commitment to the Polish-Lithuanian Republic. The reviewer gives a positive assessment of Mikoś’s translation technique, pointing out, among other things, how easy it is in his case to find rhyming pairs. Using “Zgoda” (“Concord”) and “Pamiątka” (“Memorial”) as examples, the question of the appropriateness of giving translations specific titles was addressed.