Despite the political undertones of this poem and its appropriation of the collective “we,” Baranczak was unwilling to become the “political martyr,” as his wife put it, that the crowd in the chapel wanted him to become. His steadfast individualism overrode any of the collectivist impulses his early poetry may have suggested. “He couldn’t stand having this political popularity,” Anna says. “Politics means to use we, and he was committed to I.”

A thirst for truth, rather than politics or activism, provided an impetus for Baranczak’s more political poetry. In a 1986 interview with the American Poetry Review, Baranczak explained how representing what a poet felt to be real or accurate could be seen as a political act. “Even writing on, say, flowers, or love can be—doesn’t necessarily have to be, but it can be—a political gesture, if it’s written in the spirit of defending your right to be independent,” Baranczak said. “Just pure description, if it describes the world faithfully, is a kind of political act.”

Baranczak’s poetry from this period attempted to demystify the government’s control over the Polish people by showing how  propaganda embedded politics in day-to-day life. “What he was doing in his poetry was that he was using colloquial speech to reveal various mechanisms of mystique of the communist regime and show how the communist regime manipulates language,” Nizynska says. “And he revealed those mechanisms by going back to everyday reality.” In his poetry, Baranczak attempts to expose the dual consciousness imposed by communist censorship. Because individuals’ minds were divided in two, between what they could and could not say, Baranczak’s alternating use of propagandist language and vernacular language can be read as a political statement.

Baranczak’s poem “A Special Time” exemplifies his reappropriation of oblique communist-speak to reveal underlying truths:

“We live at a special time (clears throat) and that

we must, isn’t that the truth, be clearly.

Aware of. We live at (splashes water

into his glass) a special, isn’t that the truth,

time, at a time of

continuous efforts on behalf of, at a

time of increasing and sharpening

and so on (slurps water), isn’t that the truth  Conflicts.”

ELLA’S HOME

In March 1978, Professor Emeritus Donald Fanger, a former Chair of the Slavic Languages and Literatures Department, carried Harvard stationary in his luggage when he flew across the Atlantic Ocean, passed through the veil of the invisible Iron Curtain, and landed in Poland. He had come to meet, and potentially hire, Baranczak to teach Polish literature at Harvard. Fanger was impressed with the out-of-work poet, and after their discussion, he asked Baranczak if he wanted a one-year, three-year, or five-year contract. The two immediately signed the three-year contract,  drawn up on Fanger’s stationary, in the American Embassy in Warsaw.

It took time for the Baranczaks, like many immigrants, to adjust to the American landscape. In his essay “E.E.: The Extraterritorial,” Baranczak makes light of the differences between Eastern Europe’s dull grays and America’s “orgy of colors.” American gulls are bigger too, as if “they had been fed all their lives with some especially nutritious gull food, sold in easy-to-open cans,” he quips, demonstrating the wry sense of humor that friends recall.