Gorzkie żale – skarb języka polskiego okresu baroku

This article discusses the circumstances under which Lenten Lamentations were composed and how this devotion won popularity in Poland and among the Polish communities abroad. Also discussed are a selection of linguistic features that Lenten Lamentations display (e.g. some archaic inflection, typical syntactic constructions or lexical and semantic archaisms) and the problems related to the modernization of the text. The need for modernizing the textual organization of Lenten Lamentations resulted both from the evolution of the Polish language system as well as from the changes taking place in culture and religion. Since this article was originally written in relation with the collective volume Amargas lamentaciones. Un tesoro de la espiritualidad y de la cultura polaca para el Papa Francisco y el Mundo Hispano (Coordinación del proyecto y traducción de textos Pablo de la Fuente y Cezary Taracha, Lublin 2015), addressed to Spanish-speaking audiences, the author also discusses this collective publication and puts forward a (rhetorical?) question how to present the complexity and „exoticism” of issues like the evolution of the Polish language (grammatical and semantic changes etc.) to a non-Polish recipient.