On Health (Jan Kochanowski)
My good and noble health,
Thou matter’st more then wealth.
None know’th thy worth until
Thou fad’st, and we fall ill.
And every man can see,
In stark reality,
And every man will say:
“’Tis health I need today”.
No better thing we know,
No dearer gem we owe,
For all that we possess:
Pearls, stones of great finesse,
High offices and power
– One may enjoy this hour –
And so the gifts of youth,
And beauty are, in truth,
Good things, but only when
Our health is with us then.
For when the body’s weak,
The world around is bleak.
O jewel dear, my home
Awaiteth thee to come;
With thee it shall not perish.
’Tis all for thee to cherish.
This work is a translation and has a separate copyright status to the applicable copyright protections of the original content.
| Original: |
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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| Translation: |
This work is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license, which allows free use, distribution, and creation of derivatives, so long as the license is unchanged and clearly noted, and the original author is attributed—and if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same license as this one.
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