Abyss of the Soul

This book features new translations of two iconic works of the Polish literary canon; namely, the Laments (1583) of Poland’s great Renaissance poet Jan Kochanowski, and the lauded Crimean Sonnets of the Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz, which have been retranslated here to celebrate the bicentennial of the work’s first publication in Russia. Both works describe a journey into what has been called “the abyss of the soul”—the former chronicling the poet’s profound grief over the sudden death of his small daughter, and the latter the exiled poet’s rapture over the beauty of an unexplored exotic land.