Jacek Baluch


Jacek Bogdan Baluch was a Polish scholar, writer, poet, translator and politician.

Life

Jacek Baluch was born on 17 March 1940 in Kraków. He studied Slavic philology at the Jagellonian University in Kraków and at Charles University in Prague. He was a Slavist, and in the first place a Bohemist. He took an M.A. in 1962, earned his doctor's degree in 1968 and obtained habilitation in 1982. Much later, in 2008, he was nominated a professor. He had a wife and three children.
He died on 3 July 2019 in Kraków.

Political activity

Baluch was very active in the Solidarity movement in the early eighties. Because of that, he was imprisoned at Załęże by Martial law. In the years 1990–1995 he was the ambassador of the Republic of Poland to Czechoslovakia and to the Czech Republic. He is said to play an important role in establishing cooperation in the Visegrád Group. In 2015 he was awarded by the Czech government for his work for Polish-Czech good relations with the prize Gratia Agis.

Scholarly work

Baluch wrote many books and papers on Czech literature, especially about avant garde and fiction by Bohumil Hrabal. He has been a teacher of some generations of students in Kraków and Opole. His main interest were versification and the theory of translation.

Poetry and translations

Baluch was a writer and poet. He writes chiefly short pure nonsense poems, for example Limericks. He also translated some books and poems from Czech into Polish. Among others, he translated and edited a book of Medieval Czech love poetry. He made a translation of the famous children's poem Lokomotywa by Julian Tuwim from Polish into Czech.

Honours