Jacek Fisiak Piotr Gąsiorowski I knew Jacek Fisiak for thirty-five years—first as my teacher, then as my academic advisor, my boss, my colleague and my friend. By the time we met personally, I already knew him as the author of A Short Grammar of Middle English and two (Early and Late) Middle English readers—deceptively small books I came across when browsing through an academic bookshop in Warsaw. I read the grammar with interest, then tried to make sense of the selected texts—and I got hooked. I soon found myself enamoured in historical linguistics. As my interest matured, I began to contemplate studying linguistics formally rather than treating it as a hobby. Attracted by the excellent reputation of the School of English at Adam Mickiewicz University, I bought a railway ticket to Poznań (a city where I had never spent more than a day), arrived there one day in 1984 and found out, to my delight, that the Head of the School was the same Jacek Fisiak whose books had made such an impression on me. An amazing number of people (mostly my colleagues from Poznań and several other Polish universities) could tell a similar story. I shall not attempt to reduce thirty-five years of our contacts to a handful of anecdotes. Jacek Fisiak was not just a bearded and bespectacled professor (though he did sport a professorial beard and wore glasses). He was a tireless organizer; a man of many interests; a complicated personality with many facets; an institution builder, and an institution himself. The Poznań centre of English studies which he resurrected and ran for forty years is now a separate faculty of the university. It has grown enormously in terms of staff, structure, and research output since he retired fifteen years ago. But he watched it grow as an emeritus professor and it made him happy – like a proud parent – to see that what he had built now lived a very successful life of its own. Last year we paid out farewells to Jacek. It was a sad loss, but if there is any truth to the saying that people live on in their works and lasting achievements, Jacek Fisiak still has a very long and happy life before him.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTE5NDY5MQ==