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One of Poland's foremost contemporary poets and Ireland's most famous living bard offer a collaborative translation, with the original Polish on facing pages, of Poland's first supreme contribution to world literature. The Treny or Laments of Jan Kochanowski (1530^-84) mourn the death of his 30-month-old youngest daughter, defying poetic tradition by doing so, for such elegies were reserved for the mighty and famous. They also show the quintessential Renaissance scholar-poet struggling with the stoicism enjoined by classical philosophy because it simply did not answer his grief. At last, in a dream of his mother holding the lost child, Kochanowski receives Christian consolation in eternal life and in the acceptance of "time's great remedy . . . The wax / And wane of things, and nothing more" while he lives. An elegy as great as Milton's Lycidas and Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed," Laments exerts a more poignant appeal because it commemorates a child. Ray Olson