Stanisław Barańczak
Polish poet, translator, essayist, and literary critic (1946–2014)
Stanisław Barańczak (Polish pronunciation: [staˈɲiswav baˈrajnt͡ʂak], November 13, 1946 – December 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.
Personal life
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 Bryłka, with whom he had two children, Michael and Anna.
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 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.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1373642. VIAF identifies the subject as 34467174. The Library of Congress control number is n81055044. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1946, 2014, 1968 and 1965.
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This entry incorporates text from “Stanisław Barańczak” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.