Jacek Baluch (born 1940) is a Polish scholar, writer, poet, translator and politician.
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Life
Jacek Baluch studied Slavic philology at the Jagellonian University in Cracow and at Charles University in Prague. He is 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 has a wife and three children.
Political activity
Jacek 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 in Czechoslovakia and (after the secession of Slovakia) in the Czech Republic. He is said to play an important role in establishing cooperation in the Visegrad 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
Jacek Baluch wrote many books and papers on Czech literature, especially about avant garde (poetismus in Czech) and fiction by Bohumil Hrabal. He has been a teacher of some generations of students in Cracow and Opole. His main interest are versification and the theory of translation.
Poetry and translations
Jacek Baluch is 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 (The Locomotive) by Julian Tuwim from Polish into Czech.