This week, Stanislaw Baranczak finally got the news he--and Harvard--had been waiting for. The Polish government, after denying seven previous requests for a passport since 1978, gave the dissident poet permission to travel to the United States and take a three-year associate professorship of Slavic Languages and Literatures.

Baranczak's arrival here--probably in about two week, his mother, contacted in Poznan, said this week--will mark the successful conclusion to the prolonged and, for him and Harvard, exasperating dispute over his invitation.

Donald E. Fanger, chairman of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, first approached the 33-year-old Poznan native about a job here in the fall of 1977, after Wiktor Weintraub announced plans to retire from the Jurzykowski Professorship of Polish Languages and Literatures, the only such chair in the United States. The offer of a teaching post to Baranczak--who accepted it in March 1978--was made strictly on the basis of his academic credentials, which include several volumes of poetry, literary criticism and English translation.

But Baranczak did not spend all his time in the library, much to the authorities' displeasure. In 1975, he signed an open letter protesting changes in the Polish constitution, and a year later he was a leading member of the dissident movement that grew out of the Warsaw food riots, helping to found what has become the country's most prominent dissident organization. He has participated in illegal "flying" universities and edited an underground literary magazine. For his troubles, he lost his teaching post at Adam Micklewicz University and was blacklisted from official publications. And when he asked for a passport, the answer was no--despite protests from President Bok and the State Department.

But Poland today is a far different country than it was even a year ago, and Polish experts presume that the decision to permit Baranczak's departure reflects the pattern of liberalization sparked by the country's labor unrest. Still, as Fanger noted, letting Baranczak take his message to Harvard "must have been a bitter pill for the government to swallow."

The good news arrived officially in a brief but self-explanatory cable from Baranczak to the Slavic Department: "PASSPORT OBTAINED STOP HURRAH."