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. 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 mother, a dentist. 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. 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 1967-1971. 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 in 1983, and a regular contributor to the periodical Teksty Drugie. He also served as editor of The Polish Review from 1986 to 1990.