In 1981 Stanisław Barańczak was offered a job as a lecturer at Harvard University. The acceptance of tree-year contract changed both his personal and professional life. The article is an attempt to consider the role of crossing cultural borders in Stanisław Barańczak’s poetry. The analysis of selected poems is formed by two main assumptions: the first one concerns real influence of decision to leave homeland on the shape of Barańczak’s work, whereas the second one is connected with conviction that the language sets limits of experience of the world and the main task of poetry is to go beyond those limits. Writing about America in Polish language is considered to be an attempt to cross borders. Current analysis is concentrated on three poems: Dyletanci, Druga natura and Podnosząc z progu niedzielną gazetę.