Journal 44 – About Translators Szymborska’s Poem

You are right; it is very important who translate a literary work. In Szymborska’s case, they were very competent translators. The poem The Century’s Decline was translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh.
Stanislaw Baranczak, 60, is a poet, translator, literary critic, essayist, scholar and editor. He earned his Ph.D. and lectured at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland. Since 1981, Baranczak has lectured on Polish literature at Harvard University.
Stanislaw Baranczak began his career in the communist period in Poland, and he combined literary work with scholarship and politics. He was Polish dissident in those times. Recently, Baranczak is the most famous translator of Polish poetry into English and English poetry into Polish.
Clare Cavanagh is professor of Slavic Studies at Northwestern University. She is also a translator. Cavanagh has published in The New York Times, Book Review, and other periodicals. She has received grant for her work on Polish and Russian poetry. She concurrently works on Czeslaw Milosz’s A Biography.
Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004), was an American-Polish poet who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980. Czeslaw Milosz left Poland in 1950s in protest against Communism. He arrived in the United States of America in 1960. He became professor of Slavic languages and literature at the University of California at Berkeley.