Stanisław Barańczak, 68
At a Meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on Dec. 6, 2016, the following Minute was placed upon the records. After the dissident Polish poet Stanisław Barańczak accepted a visiting professorship at Harvard in 1978, he endured seven rejections from the Polish government for a passport before finally receiving permission to leave in March of 1981, shortly before the imposition of martial law. The Harvard Crimson joyously announced his coming with the headline “No, no, no, no, no, no, no, yes!” This original three-year commitment quickly led to his permanent appointment as the Alfred Jurzykowski Professor of Polish Language and Literature. Stanisław flourished for nearly two decades in this new, American phase of his already brilliant career as poet, translator, literary critic, and teacher. He trained and inspired a new generation of Polonists, underscoring the interconnected fabric of Slavic literatures. He spurred the development of Polish letters among the diaspora as...