“Hide and Seek” and the International Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski Society - July 25, 2015
Matthias Sarbiewski (1595 – 1640), a Neo-Latin poet often referred to as the Polish Horace, has joined social media! Thanks to Krzysztof Fordonski and the International Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski Society, new trends in Sarbiewski scholarship and translation can now be followed on Facebook. Fordonski is himself a Sarbiewski scholar and his wonderful Casimir Brittannicus (2010) collects the long tradition of emulating, adapting, and translating Sabiewski’s poems into English. That tradition begins in 1646 with George Hills and runs through Robert Burns, Samuel Coleridge and, well, me. I’ve one Sarbiewski adaptation in Other Romes–it’s part of the “Songs of Sickness” series–and another arriving in The Identity Thief: “Hide and Seek.”
In honor of the International Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski Society, I’ll post the latter below. I adapted this poem from ”Ad Iesum Opt. Max.” (Liber IV, Ode XIX), a text found in Jesuit Latin Poets of the 17th and 18th Century(eds. James J. Mertz and John P. Murphy). An equally good source for Sarbiewski in Latin is Fred Nichols’s An Anthology of Neo-Latin Poetry (1979).
This poem originally appeared in The Laurel Review 47.2 (spring 2014). Enjoy!