Very sad to wake up to news of the passing of poet, translator, and scholar, Stanisław Barańczak, a leading figure of the Polish poetic New Wave of the late 1960s that includes Adam Zagajewski, Ryszard Krynicki, and others. He was a founding member of KOR (The Committee for the Defense of Labor) which was an important precursor of Solidarity, and was a founder of their journal Zapis. In the US, where he served as Jurzykowski Professor of Polish Literature at Harvard, he was editor of The Polish Review during one of its most interesting periods in the late 1980s. He was a brilliant translator into Polish, famous for his felicity with language and wordplay, particularly in his translations of Shakespeare, and for his astonishing productivity. He once had nine books come out in the same year, and a now old joke went that theater scholar Jan Kott had called him up and his son picked up the phone. The boy said, Daddy cant come to the phone right now, because hes translating Hamlet, and Kott said, Ill hang on. We never managed to meet personally. Id hoped to hear him at a conference in Montreal in 1991, while I was a student at Toronto, but he was unable to attend. Later it was whispered that he was suffering from Parkinsons, which continued to reduce his ability to travel. I did send him some translations of the extraordinarily difficult expressionist poet, Tadeusz Miciński, that Id been working on and that I still occasionally return to, and he sent them back with many generous comments. At Columbia, once, I was leading an independent study on literary translation with a couple of graduate students in Polish, and without identifying the work, I gave them Barańczaks translation of Shakespeares Sonnet 77, to see what they would come up with, translating it back into English. What the exercise revealed was just how much more fluid Barańczaks version seemed than Shakespeares, at least to our modern ears.
Posted on: Fri, 26 Dec 2014 17:53:58 +0000