Humps and Wings

Stanislaw Baranczak was born on November 13, 1946 in Poznan, Poland. He received a Ph.D. in Polish at Adam Mickiewicz University. During the late 1960s, his poetry ridiculed the absurdity of the communist system and its artificial language. He co-founded the Workers' Defense Committee in 1977, following a brutal communist crackdown on protesting workers. For his activity he was fired from his job at the Adam Mickiewicz University and his writings were barred from print in Poland.

In 1981, he became a lecturer at Harvard University, where he worked until 1997 when he left due to Parkinson's disease. In 1999, his poem collection, Surgical Precision, won the Nike, Poland's most prestigious literary prize. He translated many authors from Polish to English and from English to Polish, including works by William Shakespeare, John Donne, Emily Dickinson, and Bob Dylan. He also translated from Russian and from Lithuanian. In 1996, he shared the U.S. PEN Translation Prize with Clare Cavanagh for putting into English a collection by Poland's Nobel Prize-winning poet Wislawa Szymborska. He died after a long debilitating disease on December 26, 2014 at the age of 68.

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