World Order in a Harmonious Hymn. Jan Kochanowski’s “What dost Thou of us require, Lord, for Thy plenteous graces?”

The article presents a stylistic analysis of Jan Kochanowski’s poem Czego chcesz od nas, Panie (What do you want of us, Lord, 1559), traditionally considered as his first work in Polish. Under its apparent simplicity, deriving from the concept of “sprezzatura”, so important in Renaissance poetics, lies a complex vision of the world that is reflected in the style of the poem. The formal and semantic perfection of Kochanowski’s hymn consists of three elements: the versification, the rhetorical structure and the structure of the represented world, which reflect a worldview based on harmony, given by God, embracing all parts of the world, and finally returning to Him in the form of a thanksgiving prayer. The poem was translated twice into Italian over the last two decades, with different versification and translation strategies that determine its collocation in the literary context of the target culture as well as the relationship with the style and content of the original.