Even When No One is Looking

Baranczak balanced his role as a public intellectual and his own desire to write for writing’s sake.

By Tara W. Merrigan, Crimson Staff Writer October 2, 2012

The black mark left by Baranczak’s dismissal from Adam Mickiewicz faded away on August 31, 1980, when striking Polish dock workers from the northern port city Gdansk won major concessions from the country’s iron-fisted political regime: the right to organize independent unions able to strike, greater religious freedom, and, most significant to Baranczak, greater freedom of expression.

Poles were ecstatic, Anna recalls. “We were so incredibly aware that history was being made,” she says. Baranczak was so euphoric himself that he tried out his son’s skateboard, which turned out to be an impetuous decision, since Baranczak, instead of gliding around Poznan, ended up breaking his leg. The event that spurred his accident also prompted a flood of requests for Baranczak to give readings. Hobbling into a reading with a broken leg gave Baranczak—falsely—the look of a hardened political dissident. “The Communists broke his leg,” audience members often whispered, Anna remembers.

Baranczak, like other Polish poets writing during the 20th century, was a reluctant political figurehead. Poland had lost much of its intelligentsia during World War II, Wolynski says, so few intellectuals of the post-war era were willing to continue the tradition epitomized by Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz, who fought for Polish freedom during the 19th century. “Nobody wanted to be a martyr. Only idiots wanted to be a martyr,” Wolynski says. “It was like we were pushed, pressed to be active politically.”

For Baranczak, poetry was at its most basic the expression of an individual. According to Wolynski, Anna Baranczak, and Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures Joanna Nizynska, humanistic personal philosophies and a deep commitment to the truth drove him to resistance organizing. In “Temporary Shortages,” a poem written during the 1970s, Baranczak explores how communist censorship and cultural policies affected the mind:

“…our apartments