ABSTRACT
Polish is usually regarded as the sole survivor of the Lechitic sub-group of West Slavonic languages, though some authorities treat the dialect form known as Kashubian as a separate language. The written record in Polish begins in the fourteenth century - apart from the famous sentence found in a thirteenth century Latin document: ‘daj ac ja pobrucz^ a ty poczywa’ (in modernized spelling), presumably uttered by a considerate miller to his spouse: T il grind for a bit, you take a break.’ The first great Polish writer is Jan Kochanowski in the sixteenth century, the author of Treny, a beautiful threnodic sequence on the death of his little daughter. The Romantic period produced at least four outstanding figures, all of whom spent most of their productive years in emigration: Adam Mickiewicz, the national poet of Poland, whose Pan Tadeusz (1843) is a splendid apotheosis, both of Polish aspirations and of the Polish past; Juliusz Slowacki, Zygmunt Krasinski, and Cyprian Norwid. In the early years of the twentieth century two novelists produced masterpieces: Stefan Zerom ski’s Popioly (A shes’), a saga of the Napoleonic era in Poland, rich in rapturous and lyrical descriptions of the Polish countryside, and Wfadyslaw R eym ont’s Chlopi (T h e Peasants’), an encyclopaedic survey of Polish peasant life in the nineteenth century. This novel received the Nobel Prize in 1924; a previous Nobel laureate was H enryk Sienkiewicz (for Quo Vadis?) in 1905. An impressive school of post-Second World War poets includes such individual voices as Tadeusz Rozewicz and Zbigniew H erbert. In 1980 the Nobel Prize for L iterature went again to a Polish writer - Czeslaw Milosz.
