Jan Kasprowicz

Jan Kasprowicz (born in Szymborze, 12 December 1860 – died in Poronin, 1 August 1926) was a Polish poet, playwright, critic and translator and one of the leading figures of Young Poland, the literary movement that reshaped Polish letters at the turn of the twentieth century. He was born into a peasant family without any tradition of schooling, in the Prussian province of Posen, and he reached literature by an unusual route: he attended Prussian secondary schools, then studied in German universities, and educated himself to a large extent on his own.

In his youth he was active in socialist circles, which led Prussian police to arrest him twice and cost him half a year in prison. After his release he settled in Lwów, where he would spend most of his remaining life. There he worked as a journalist and as a critic of literature and theatre, while publishing his own poetry at a remarkable pace. In 1904 he earned a doctorate with a study of the lyric poetry of Teofil Lenartowicz, and in 1909 he took charge of a department of comparative literature at the university, one created with him in mind.

Kasprowicz was also a tireless translator. He rendered into Polish works by Aeschylus, Euripides, Shakespeare, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Goethe, Rimbaud and Ibsen, among many others, and that engagement with very different traditions shows in his verse, which pairs a strong religious and social concern with a symbolist sensibility. His poems move between the world of the peasantry and metaphysical introspection, and critics have often compared them with those of Rimbaud and Shelley. His private life was turbulent: after a first marriage that ended within months and a second that ended in separation, he married the much younger Russian Maria Bunin in 1911. In his final years he visited the Tatra Mountains ever more often, and in 1923 he settled permanently at the Harenda villa between Poronin and Zakopane.

His legacy rests on the quality of his poetry and on his role as a bridge between Polish and European literature. Witold Gombrowicz, who read him with irony, described him both as a sincere singer and as an intellectual who wanted to keep appearing a peasant, a tension that helps explain his figure.