Stanisław Barańczak: A Widening Horizon

Summary

Barańczak is no longer with us

In a while no one will give credence any more to the existence of this Atlantis, this man who transcended boundaries imposed by human force and a system of power. Just like the sunken platonic continent on which there existed or did not exist a civilization more excellent than ours, his work enters the depths of our cultural memory and calls for us to practice u-topia—which is how Paul Celan wrote the word, to emphasize the striving toward a place perhaps unattainable but still real. Stanisław Barańczak’s titanic work as a translator into the Polish language transformed the British metaphysical poets and the canon of American poetry into living points of reference for the intelligentsia of Central Europe. His own poetry was a voice of the prodemocratic opposition in Poland. Some worried that because of its political message his poetry would fade away along with the Communist regime. But no: it speaks with equal power in a world of liberal democracy, not just because it contains a living metaphysical seed, but also because, in spite of various illusions, we do not live in an era of the end of history, and because freedom is still impossible without solidarity. We also come back to Barańczak for his penetrating essays that reveal how language is preempted by those in power, essays that most convincingly link ethics and poetics.

At the risk of sounding pompous, especially in English, I would like to say that Stanisław, starting from his broad shoulders, embraced the horizon— gazing through his large eyeglasses, and looking Truth right in the eye through the lenses of mistrust and protest, and yet also with his heart. The horizon was a scroll of human life, a paper made of crushed plants, which he unrolled from the full breadth of his shoulders. This is how he lived—from the full breadth of his shoulders and beyond. And his shoulders were capacious, like those of a generous spirit that also has considerable stature.

This is how I remember him from our first meetings in Poznan in the mid-1970s. His body was built rather for shaping a heavy stone with a chisel than for pecking at the keys of a typewriter. The first volumes of his poetry could fit on the palm of his hand.