Who
has his bread
All
that man needs
Does
not need to worry about high incomes
About
villages, towns and high castles.
In
my opinion a lord is someone
Who is satisfied with what he has.
Whoever
seeks more than he has, shows himself
That
in his own opinion he is inferior.
Great
riches has gained
Who
has discarded greed.
It
is more difficult than to make Turks pay tribute
Or
to fight fierce Tartars.
A
big chunk of the world
Won
in a short time
The
king of Macedon, but still he thought
That
for him it won't be enough to have the whole world.
What's
the use of armour
Or
temporal power?
Gold
is no medicine for your heart.
Treasures
won't drive worries away from your head.
Lady Death is nasty
Grabs
by their throats
Both
rich lords and their servants
Won't
give you time to regulate the accounts.
Humans,
however,
Mostly
worry about this:
How
to make gold come to gold.
No
matter how much, a glutton won't have enough.
It
will all stay here
After
you are deceased
And
what you gathered here greedily
Will
end up in somebody else's house.
This
supposed safe house
One
day will disintegrate
And
the wine that you worry so much about today
Your
grandchildren will give to horses to drink.
Translated
by W.F.
Jan
Kochanowski (pronounce
Yan Ko-hanofskee) (1530-1584)
The best known poet of the Polish
Renaissance. A son of a noble family affluent enough to send him to
the best universities, first to Cracow, later to Padua in Italy.
Padua at that time was one of the best European universities, a
centre of humanism, Kochanowski would meet there the best minds of
the continent. After he returned to Poland he had a career in
administration, for some time he was a secretary of king Sigismund
Augustus. After the king’s death he retired from official duties
and lived in his manor in a village called Czarnolas.
The Kingdom of Poland was at the
hight of its power at that time. It was one of the great powers of
Europe, the one that stopped the expansion of the Ottoman empire.
Consequently in Kochanowski’s poetry there are no worries about the
independence of the motherland, so typical of the later Polish
poetry. The typical subject in the poetry of Kochanowski are joys of
simple village life.
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