Stanislaw Baranczak

Stanisław Barańczak was a Polish poet, literary critic, scholar, editor, translator and lecturer. He was a prominent representative of the Polish "New Wave" and is generally regarded as one of the greatest translators of English poetry into Polish and Polish poetry into English. He received the PEN Translation Prize with Clare Cavanagh in 1996. His book, Surgical Precision (Chirurgiczna precyzja), won the 1999 Nike Award - Poland's top literary prize. He was also a co-founder and activist of the Workers' Defence Committee (KOR) and a signatory of the Letter of 59, protesting against the changes in the Polish constitution in 1975. He left Poland in 1981 and worked as a lecturer at Harvard University until 1999, when he retired due to complications with Parkinson's disease. He died in 2014 at the age of 68.