Professor Jacek Fisiak’s outstanding achievements are well known in the scholarly community in Poland and abroad. He was an excellent and widely recognizable scholar, an exceptional teacher and talent-detector, an ingenious science manager, and he was so likeable and cordial! Professor Jacek Fisiak directed the Institute of English at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań for 40 years. Thanks to his management, English studies in Poznań obtained a leading position among such institutions in Poland and in the world. Professor Fisiak also cared about other English departments in Poland. On the one hand, he supervised 61 (!) PhD students who continued their academic careers throughout Poland, on the other, he supported English studies as well as the humanities and research in general as Minister of National Education and member of numerous influential bodies. I am grateful to Professor Fisiak for his guidance in my academic work, starting with my M.A., through the doctoral and post-doctoral degrees and the professorial title, my function as his deputy director for 3 terms, up to the ‘take-over of the command’ of the Institute and the creation of the Faculty of English. His opus survives and will last.
Jacek Izydor Fisiak was born on May 10, 1936 in Konstantynów Łódzki and passed away on June 3, 2019 in Poznań, Poland. Eighty-three years of life is usually treated as a fairly long period of time, but if we take into account not only the passage of time itself but also the intensity of filling the events of this period with content, only then can we – but all the time only with some approximation – reflect on the real phenomenon of Professor Jacek Fisiak’s life and work. This phenomenon is perfectly reflected in the travesty, light in form but deep in content, of one of the most famous poems in the English-speaking world by one of the pre-Raphaelite artists, William Blake, entitled The Tiger. Blake's poem was adapted to reflect the spirit of Professor Fisiak – a man of unquenchable thirst for action – by Professor Tomasz P. Krzeszowski, a friend and the first doctor of humanities promoted by Professor Jacek Fisiak. Using Blake’s travesty as a refrain for this short farewell text, I intend to give the floor to Professor Fisiak’s friends and build this text out of their recollections.
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