Станислав Бараньчак: Жизнь и творчество польского поэта и переводчика

Polish poet, literary critic, scholar, editor, translator and lecturer (1946 – 2014)

Stanisław Barańczak (, November 13, 1946December 26, 2014) was a Polish poet, literary critic, scholar, editor, translator and lecturer. 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.

Born in Poznań, Poland on November 13, 1946, Barańczak was raised by his father Jan and mother Zofia, both doctors. He was the brother of the novelist Małgorzata Musierowicz. He studied philology at Poznań's Adam Mickiewicz University, where he obtained an M. A. and Ph. D. His doctoral dissertation concerned the poetic language of Miron Białoszewski. In 1968, he married Anna Brylka, with whom he had two children, Michael and Anna.

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 to 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. He stayed at Harvard for almost two decades, leaving in 1999 due to complications with Parkinson's disease. He was a co founder of the Paris Zeszyty Literackie ("Literary Textbooks") 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 prominent representative of the Polish "New Wave" and is generally regarded as one of the greatest translators of English poetry into Polish and 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 Poland's top literary prize. The language he employed in his works is highly evocative of the poetry of Emily Dickinson, John Donne and Robert Frost, with whom he felt strongest connection and whose literary legacy he helped popularize in Poland. Barańczak's own poetry deals with three major themes: the ethical, the political, and the literary. His language can be characterized as outstandingly fluent and flexible and the subject matter of his poems seems to confirm his commitment to social issues. He started his literary career as "a poetic critic of language and the social order" but his greatest achievements came from his works as a late 20th century Parnassist, a master of poetic form. Barańczak introduced the concept of semantic dominant (Polish: dominanta semantyczna) in translations of poetry. The semantic dominant is a "key to the content" of the poem. It is a semantic or formal element that is most crucial and irreplaceable. It can take the form of rhyme, versification, syntax, or the other stylistic elements that prevail. The translator's task is to find the dominant feature of a given work and make it the most important translation element. This approach to poetry translations is based on heuristic model, which Barańczak described in his essay entitled: "Mały, lecz maksymalistyczny manifest translatologiczny"(Small but Maximalistic Translatological Manifest), included in his book:"Saved in Translation: Sketches on the Craft of Translating Poetry". Some of his poems were set to music by Jan Krzysztof Kelus.

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