Stanislaw Barańczak

Stanisław Barańczak was born in Poznan, Poland, and raised by his mother, a dentist. He earned both his MA and PhD in philology at Adam Mickiewicz University, where he also met his wife, Anna Brylka. Barańczak began publishing poetry and criticism in the mid-1960s. Barańczak wrote about the politics of Eastern Europe in both prose and poetry. In the preface to his poetry collection in English, Selected Poems: The Weight of the Body (1989), he noted that “writing poetry is perhaps nothing more than trying to play a straight man to that rambling, rambunctious, never-to-be-interrupted, always-on-a-roll, stand-up comic, the world,” and his work was generally both playful and political. (Source)