Jacek Bogdan Baluch (17 March 1940 â 3 July 2019) was a Polish scholar, writer, poet, translator and politician.
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.
Baluch was very active in the Solidarity movement in the early eighties. Because of that, he was imprisoned at Zaà ÂÃÂà ¼e by Martial law. In the years 1990âÂÂ1995 he was the ambassador of the Republic of Poland to Czechoslovakia and (after the secession of Slovakia) 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.
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 Kraków and Opole. His main interest were versification and the theory of translation.
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 (The Locomotive) by Julian Tuwim from Polish into Czech.