Stanisław Barańczak

Stanisław Barańczak

Stanisław Barańczak with his wife Anna in 1995
Born (1946-11-13)November 13, 1946
Poznań, Poland
Died December 26, 2014(2014-12-26) (aged 68)
Newtonville, Massachusetts, USA
Spouse Anna Brylka
Children Michael
Anna
Relatives Małgorzata Musierowicz (sister)

Stanisław Barańczak (November 13, 1946 – December 26, 2014) was a poet, literary critic, scholar, editor, translator and lecturer.[1] He is perhaps most well known for his English-to-Polish translations of the dramas of William Shakespeare and of the poetry of E.E. Cummings, Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson, Wystan Hugh Auden, Seamus Heaney, Thomas Hardy, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thomas Stearns Eliot, John Keats, Robert Frost, Edward Lear and others.

Personal life

Born in Poznań, Poland on November 13, 1946, Barańczak was raised by his mother, a dentist.[2][1] He was the brother of the novelist Małgorzata Musierowicz.[3] He studied philology at Poznań's Adam Mickiewicz University, where he obtained an M.A. and Ph.D.[2] In 1968, he married Anna Brylka, with whom he had two children, Michael and Anna.[2][3]

Career

Barańczak became a lecturer at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. He broke into print as a poet and critic in 1965. Barańczak was on the staff of the Poznań magazine Nurt from 1967-1971. After the political events of June 1976, he became a co-founder of the Workers' Defence Committee (KOR) and of the clandestine quarterly Zapis. In 1981, the year Poland declared martial law, he left the country and accepted a three-year contract to work as a lecturer at Harvard University.[4] He stayed at Harvard for almost two decades, leaving in 1999 due to complications with Parkinson's disease.[1] He was a co-founder of the Paris Zeszyty Literackie in 1983, and a regular contributor to the periodical Teksty Drugie. He also served as editor of The Polish Review from 1986 to 1990.

Barańczak was a leading poet in the "New Wave" and one of the outstanding Polish writers to begin his career in the communist period, combining literary work with scholarship and politics. He was the most prominent translator in recent years of English poetry into Polish and of Polish poetry into English. He received the PEN Translation Prize with Clare Cavanagh in 1996. His book, Surgical Precision (Chirurgiczna precyzja), won the 1999 Nike Award.

His Polish is permeated with the language of the poets he feels closest to - Emily Dickinson, John Donne and Robert Frost - and whose work he has made popular in Poland. Barańczak's own poetry is dominated by three concerns: the ethical, the political, and the literary. His language is extraordinarily supple. His choice of subjects testifies to his community engagement; his language is always amazingly fluent. It may seem paradoxical that Baranczak began as a poetic critic of language and the social order but has achieved his greatest success as a late-20th-century Parnassist, a virtuoso of poetic form.

Some of his poems were set to music by Jan Krzysztof Kelus.

Death

Stanisław Barańczak died at the age of 68 after "a long debilitating disease" in Newtonville, Massachusetts on December 26, 2014.[4][3][2][5] He was buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery.[6]

Bibliography

Each year below links to its corresponding "[year] in poetry" article:

Poetry:

Light verse:

Literary criticism:

Translations into Polish:

Translations into English (anthologies):

Translations into German (anthologies):

References

  1. 1 2 3 Merrigan, Tara (October 2, 2012). "Even When No One is Looking". The Harvard Crimson. Retrieved October 3, 2012.
  2. 1 2 3 4 Weber, Bruce (January 3, 2015). "Stanislaw Baranczak, 68, Polish Underground Poet, Dies". The New York Times.
  3. 1 2 3 Marquard, Bryan (December 31, 2014). "Stanislaw Baranczak, 68; poet left Poland to teach at Harvard". Boston Globe.
  4. 1 2 Scislowska, Monika (December 27, 2014). "Polish poet, translator Stanislaw Baranczak dies". Associated Press.
  5. ↑ Szczęsna, Joanna (January 3, 2015). "Barańczak: Wchodziliśmy w drogę odpryskom świata". Gazeta Wyborcza (in Polish).
  6. ↑ "Poet and dissident Baranczak laid to rest in Boston". Polskie Radio. January 4, 2015.
  7. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 "Rymkiewicz Jaroslaw Marek. Bibliography: Poetry" (in Polish). Institute Ksiazki website. Retrieved February 24, 2010.

External links

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