The poet, literary critic, and translator Stanislaw Baraczak was born on 13 November 1946 in Pozna, Poland, to Jan and Zofia (née Konopinska) Baraczak. As a university freshman he was the literary director of the Theater of the Eighth Day, a group of nonprofessional actors who went on to create one of the most renowned dissident theatrical groups of the 1970s. After graduating in 1969 from Adam Mickiewicz University in Pozna with an M.A. in Polish philology, he took a position there as an instructor in Polish literature. He became an assistant professor in 1975, after completing his Ph. D. the previous year. He published his first poems in 1965 in the highly respected monthly Odra. His first volume of poetry, Korekta twarzy (Proofreading of a Face), appeared in 1968.

Baraczak's later poetry is renowned for its masterful use of poetic forms of great complexity; a propensity for intricate structural complexity...