Edward Stachura

Edward Stachura
Portrait of Edward Stachura author Zbigniew Kresowaty
Born	(1937-08-18)18 August 1937 Charvieu, France
Died	24 July 1979(1979-07-24) (aged 41) Warsaw, Poland
Occupation	Poet, writer, translator
Language	Polish
Notable awards	Stanisław Piętak Prize (1968) Stanisław Piętak Prize (1971) The Kościelski Prize (1972)

Edward Stachura [ˈɛdvard sta'xura] (18 August 1937 – 24 July 1979) was a Polish poet and writer. He rose to prominence in the 1960s, receiving prizes for both poetry and prose. His literary output includes four volumes of poetry, three collections of short stories, two novels, a book of essays, and the final work, Fabula rasa, which is difficult to classify. In addition to writing, Stachura translated literature from Spanish and French, most notably works of Jorge Luis Borges, Gaston Miron and Michel Deguy. He also wrote songs, and occasionally performed them. He committed suicide at the age of forty-one.
 

Edward Stachura was born on 18 August 1937 to a family of Polish emigrants in Charvieu-Chavagneux, department of Isère, in eastern France. He was the second of four children of Stanisław and Jadwiga Stachura (née Stępkowska) who met in France after having emigrated in the early 1920s in search of work.

Stachura spent the first eleven years of his life in France. The family lived in a large tenement house shared by a multilingual mix of emigrants; Stachura would later describe it in his first novel as "this great Tenement of Babel, where apart from the Poles, who called the tune, there was a mass of Greeks, Albanians, Armenians, Italians, Arabs, and other representatives of nations." Stachura attended a French school and, once a week, the Polish school, a teacher having been provided by the consulate. His brother Ryszard, eight years his senior, says that young Edward was courteous, caring, and likeable, but unusually stubborn: in school he had a habit of correcting his teachers if their ideas were at odds with those he got from other sources.

In 1948 the family moved to Poland and settled down in a one-room thatched house in the village of Łazieniec near Aleksandrów Kujawski, the mother's inheritance. Stachura finished grade school in Aleksandrów Kujawski in 1952, completing the program in just three years, even though, according to his mother, his skills in Polish were at first inadequate. He began high school in Ciechocinek. Originally Stachura planned a career in electrical engineering, and he also liked biology and geography, but his interests gradually shifted toward the visual arts and literature. Following conflicts with the school and with his father, Stachura moved to join his brother in Gdynia where he finished high school, graduating in 1956. During that time he published his first poems. After an unsuccessful attempt at enrolling in an arts college, he returned home, working menial jobs, writing poetry, and corresponding with other young writers. He then moved to Toruń, where he audited lectures in the art department at Nicolaus Copernicus University, and participated in the literary movement of the city.