The funeral of prominent Polish poet and anti-communist dissident Stanislaw Baranczak has been held in the chapel of Mount Auburn cemetery in Boston, USA.
Among those attending the ceremony was the Polish Ambassador in the United States Ryszard Schnepf and representatives of the Polish Consulate in New York. Baranczak died on 26 December, aged 68.
In the late 1970s, during the communist period, he was among the founders of the Committee for Workers’ Defense (KOR), the first dissident organization in the Soviet bloc. He was sacked from his job at Poznan University for his political activity.
He was the leading light of the “New Wave” poetry of the late 1960s, which sought to describe the dreary realities of the People’s Republic and expose the Newspeak of the Communist party.
In 1999 his collection of poems Surgical Precision (Chirurgiczna precyzja) won Poland's most prestigious literary prize, Nike.
Baranczak left Poland in the early 1980s, settling in the US where he lectured at Harvard. During that period he developed a fine career as a translator from English, Russian and Lithuanian, his output including almost all of Shakespeare’s plays.
Dariusz Cisowski
