Welcome back to The Deep Dive. We are so glad
to have you with us. Today we are opening up
a file that, honestly, it feels less like reading
a biography and more like opening a very old,
very heavy jewelry box. Okay, I like it. You
know the kind I mean. You expect to find, I don't
know, a lot of costume jewelry, maybe some tangled
chains, big flashy things. But instead, you find
these very small, very sharp, very... Precise
diamonds. That is a surprisingly poetic metaphor
to start us off. I have to say a very accurate
one. I try my best. But seriously, we are talking
about a figure today who is, well, she's a massive
paradox. She is a giant of world literature,
a Nobel Prize winner. And yet, if you look at
the sheer volume of her work, it's tiny. It really
is. We're talking about fewer than 350 poems
published in her entire lifetime. It's a remarkably
small output for someone of her stature. I mean,
if you do the math on her career, which spanned
over six decades, that averages out to, what,
roughly five or six poems a year. It's nothing.
Right. I mean, I know songwriters who write 350
songs in a bad year. I know people on social
media who tweet 350 times a week. But today we
are diving into the life and mind of Wisawa Szymborska.
And that's pronounced Wisawa Szymborska. Thank
you. I was going to get there. Wisawa Szymborska.
And here's the thing that hooked me right away,
before we even get into the history, the politics,
any of it. When people would ask her, Wisawa,
you're a Nobel laureate. Why so few poems? Why
aren't you just churning them out? She had this
fantastic, simple answer. She said, I have a
trash can in my home. which is such a perfect,
perfect encapsulation of her entire character,
it implies standards. It implies that what we
see, those 350 or so poems, is only what survived
a rigorous, almost brutal process of elimination.
But doesn't that also imply a certain level of...
I don't know, anxiety or even paralysis. If you
have a trash can that active, aren't you just
afraid of silencing yourself before you even
start? Well, that's a valid critique. And for
a lot of writers, that kind of perfectionism
is paralyzing. But for Zimborska, I don't think
it was fear. I really think it was respect. Respect
for what? Respect for the reader's time, for
one. And more importantly, respect for the weight
of words themselves. I mean, she lived through
an era where words were used to lie, to manipulate,
to destroy on a massive scale. Right. Propaganda.
Exactly. So she wasn't going to add to the noise,
to the chatter, unless she was absolutely certain
that the words were necessary, that they were
true. That distinction between fear and respect.
That's crucial because we aren't just talking
about a perfectionist poet today. We are talking
about a woman who lived through the absolute
meat grinder of the 20th century in Poland. And
that is the context we cannot, cannot ignore.
We're looking at a life that spans World War
II, the Stalinist era, the Cold War, the Solidarity
Movement, and then the final transition to democracy.
It's the whole story. And she navigated all of
this not with shouting or grand speeches, but
with what the Nobel Committee eventually called
ironic precision. I love that phrase. It's so
good. Ironic precision. We're going to unpack
that today. And we have to mention the stat because
it just blows my mind, especially for anyone
out there who thinks. Poetry is dead or nobody
reads poetry. In Poland, her books, her collections
of poetry, sold with numbers that rivaled prominent
prose authors. We're talking pop fiction, thrillers.
She was a bestseller. Which she found quite amusing
and probably a bit baffling, considering she
also wrote a famous poem called Some Like Poetry,
where she estimated that statistically only two
in a thousand people actually like poetry. So
either her math was wrong or she was the massive
exception to the rule. I think she was the exception.
She managed to bridge that gap between, you know,
high art and the common reader in a way that
very, very few people ever do. So here's our
mission for this deep dive. We want to understand
how this incredibly quiet, private person used
these tiny fragments of human reality, a beetle,
a cat, a grain of sand, to illuminate massive
historical and biological forces. And we have
to look at her political arc, which is, let's
just say, it's complicated. Deeply complicated.
I mean, it is a journey from being a true believer
in socialist realism, literally writing poems
for the regime, to becoming a dissident voice.
It is not a straight line and it's not a comfortable
story to tell. No, it isn't. And then we're going
to look at her pop culture footprint, which is
surprisingly huge. Jazz albums, rock songs, major
motion pictures. She's kind of everywhere. And
because we have to bring it into the modern world,
we need to touch upon a controversy that just
happened. in 2024 involving her voice and artificial
intelligence. Yeah, that story is a wild coda
to her life. It brings the whole discussion full
circle. It really challenges everything she stood
for regarding that trash can and the biological
reality of being a human. Exactly. But let's
rewind. Let's go all the way back. Let's go back
to the world that created her. Because to understand
that trash can, you first have to understand
the history she was trying so hard to filter.
To understand Szymborska, you have to understand
where she came from. She was born on July 2,
1923. So the Roaring Twenties. But this is Poland,
which is what, just a few years after regaining
its independence, after being wiped off the map
for over a century? For 123 years, yeah. So it
was a time of immense national optimism, but
also incredible fragility. She was born in a
place called Prowent, which is now part of a
town called Kornik in western Poland. And her
start in life wasn't, I mean, it wasn't aristocracy,
but it wasn't exactly humble peasantry either,
right? It was a very specific social stratum.
That's a great way to put it. Her father... Winsony
Cymborski was the steward to a count. Count Wydysa
Zamoyski. Yes, a very well -known Polish patriot
and a charitable patron. So Cymborska grew up
in this environment of... Let's call it managed
gentility. Her father managed this huge estate.
It was an intellectual household. They valued
education. They were somewhat insulated from
the harshest realities of the time, but also
deeply connected to this old world idea of service
and patriotism. But that world, the whole world
of counts and stewards and grand estates was
about to just completely vanish. It was already
vanishing. The count died in 1924 when we saw
it was just a baby, just one year old. The family
had to move. First, they went to a city called
Toru, and then in 1931, they landed in Krakow.
And Krakow is the key, right? I mean, every biography,
every piece of analysis, it emphasizes this.
Krakow is the backdrop. It's the stage for her
entire life. She lived and worked there until
she died in 2012. You really cannot separate
Szymborska from Krakow. What's so special about
it? Well, it feels very different from, say,
Warsaw. Warsaw was almost completely destroyed
in the war and then rebuilt. It has this frantic,
modern, sometimes chaotic energy. Krakow was
physically spared much of that destruction. So
it kept its history. It retained its medieval
architecture, its old university atmosphere,
its slow coffeehouse intellectualism. It's a
city of thought, of history, of quiet corners.
And that's very much her personality. So she's
a teenager in Krakow living this relatively normal
intellectual life. She's reading. She's maybe
starting to write a little. And then 1939 hits,
September 1st. World War II breaks out, Nazi
occupation. She's 16 years old. A pivotal age.
16 is when you were just forming your worldview,
your sense of self. And suddenly, your world
is occupied. And one of the very first things
the occupiers did was target Polish culture,
and specifically... So education just stopped.
Higher education for Poles was forbidden under
the occupation. The Nazis wanted a workforce,
a population of servants, not an intelligentsia.
So secondary schools and universities were just
shut down. For a girl like Simborska, who valued
learning above almost anything else, this was
a direct attack on her future, on her very being.
So what did she do? What did any of them do?
Did they just stop learning? No, she went underground.
When we say underground, we don't necessarily
mean physically in a bunker, though I'm sure
it felt like that sometimes. We mean secret education.
This is such a wild concept to me. The idea of
classes being held in secret, in private apartments,
risking arrest, just to learn about literature
and history. Precisely. Imagine walking to a
friend's house, hiding your textbooks under your
coat, knowing that if a patrol stops and searches
you, not only are you in serious trouble, but
the teacher hosting the class is in mortal danger.
That must create a bond, a kind of sacredness
around the idea of education that we probably
can't fully grasp today. It absolutely does.
It shows a commitment to the life of the mind
that starts very, very early for her. It wasn't
a chore. It was an act of defiance. But you can't
just study when there's a war on. I mean, you
need to eat. You need to not get arrested or
deported. Yeah. And I found this detail about
her day job during the war absolutely fascinating.
Yes. From 1943, she worked as a railroad employee.
A railroad employee. I'm just picturing this
future Nobel Prize winner walking the tracks
or checking tickets. It was likely clerical work,
dealing with schedules, cargo manifest, that
sort of thing. But we have to pause on the significance
of this. This job wasn't about the paycheck.
It was about the paperwork. You mean the Osweys,
the official ID card. Exactly. Having that official
job with the railway. which was essential infrastructure
for the Germans, was what prevented her from
being deported to Germany as a forced laborer.
I really want to dwell on that for a second.
Forced labor wasn't just, you know, hard work.
This was abduction. This was starvation. It was
slavery. It's that simple. Hundreds of thousands
of Poles were rounded up on the streets in what
they called the Opanka and shipped to the Reich
to work in factories or on farms, often under
horrific, deadly conditions. Many never returned.
So Simborska sitting in that railroad office
stamping papers, that wasn't a career. That was
a lifeline. That was her survival strategy. It
really highlights the precarious nature of survival
for that generation, the randomness of it all.
One different stamp on your ID card, one wrong
turn on a street corner, and your life goes in
a completely different and likely tragic... And
that idea of chance. Of luck, of randomness in
who survives and who doesn't. That becomes a
massive, massive theme in her poetry later on.
She knew deep down that her survival wasn't because
she was special or chosen. It was because of
a railway pass. And amidst all this fear and
railroad paperwork, she starts making art. which
seems almost impossible under those conditions.
It's the human instinct, isn't it? She started
illustrating. She illustrated an English -language
textbook, of all things, and she began writing
stories and occasional poems. It was a way to
maintain an inner world, a private space, when
the outer world was collapsing into chaos. So
the war ends, 1945. The Germans retreat. The
Soviets arrive. Poland is in ruins, but it's
beginning to rebuild. And she goes to university,
Zagilonian University in Krakow, the big one.
She starts out studying Polish literature, which
makes sense. But then she switches to sociology.
She's trying to figure out how society works,
perhaps. Trying to understand what on earth just
happened to the world. And this is where we get
the public debut, March 1945. The war in Europe
isn't even officially over yet. No, the fighting
is still happening in the West. But in Krakow,
life is restarting. She publishes her very first
poem in a daily newspaper, Zanikpolski. It's
called Sukham Suwa. Which means looking for words.
It's such a fitting title for a debut, isn't
it? Looking for words. The old words, the old
language just didn't fit anymore. You couldn't
use romantic, flowery language to describe gas
chambers and rubble. She was part of a generation
that was trying to articulate the post -war reality
from scratch. But the reality for her personally
was also one of financial struggle. She actually
dropped out of university, right? She did in
1948. She quit her studies without getting a
degree. Because of poor financial circumstances?
The currency was unstable. The economy was completely
wrecked. She just had to work to survive. It's
really humbling to realize that a future Nobel
laureate was a college dropout because she couldn't
afford the tuition or the living costs. It grounds
her. She was never someone who lived in an ivory
tower. She was always working. She worked as
a secretary for an educational magazine. She
did illustrations to make ends meet. And in 1948,
she also got married. To Adam Wudeck, another
poet. A poet. and a pretty prominent figure in
the literary circles of Krakow at the time. They
were young, they were idealistic, they divorced
fairly quickly in 1954, but, and this is very
Simborska, They remained close friends until
he died in 1986. No big drama, no public feuds,
just a quiet shift in the relationship. Okay,
so she's writing, she's working, she's married.
She tries to publish her first book, her first
collection of poems in 1949. And here's where
we hit the first major wall. The manuscript is
rejected. Censorship. The state censors deemed
that it did not meet socialist requirements.
And this brings us to the most difficult and
probably the most important part of her story.
To understand why she became the poet she was,
the poet of doubt and irony, we have to look
at the poet she tried to be in the beginning.
This is the political arc. And it's so tricky
because looking back from today, we think of
her as this beacon of wisdom and skepticism.
But in the late 40s and early 50s, she wasn't
fighting the system at all. No. She was, to put
it bluntly, part of the machinery. She was. And
we need to be very careful here not to judge
this with 21st century hindsight. Early in her
career, Szymborska adhered to the official ideology
of the People's Republic of Poland. She was a
member of the ruling Polish United Workers Party.
The big question is why? I mean, she was brilliant.
Couldn't she see that it was a totalitarian setup?
We have to remember the context of 1945. The
old world, capitalism, nationalism, the aristocracy,
the church, all that had just resulted in the
deadliest war in human history. Poland was a
graveyard. For many young, idealistic intellectuals
at that time, communism didn't look like tyranny.
What did it look like? It looked like the only
rational path to rebuilding. It promised equality.
It promised rapid industrialization. It promised
education for all. And most of all, it promised
that never again would fascism rise. It was very
powerful intellectual seduction. So she was swept
up in that. She, like many others, wanted to
believe in a better future. And the price of
that future, the price of being a published author
in that system, was adhering to the doctrine
of socialist realism. So let's talk about what
that work actually looked like. Her debut collection,
which finally did come out in 1952 after she
adjusted it to please the censors, was called
La Tego Ujimi. That is what we were living for.
And it contained poems that are... While they're
jarring to read today, there were poems praising
Lenin. There's a very famous one called Mutishuyu
Budishay Nowohuta to the youth building Nowohuta.
And Nowohuta is that massive gray socialist industrial
town they built right next to Krakow. Exactly.
It was designed to be the model Stalinist city
built to counterbalance the reactionary intellectualism
of old Krakow. It was all about steel mills,
concrete, the power of the proletariat rising.
And she wrote poetry celebrating its construction.
It feels like such a betrayal of her later style.
Her later style is all about doubt, about not
knowing. This early stuff is all about certainty
with a capital C. We are building the future
and we know exactly how to do it. That is the
key distinction. Socialist realism demanded certainty.
It demanded optimism. It demanded that you view
the world not as it is, with all its messiness
and contradictions, but as it should be, according
to the party line. There was no room for ambiguity.
And then there's the 1953 petition. This is probably
the most controversial single act in her entire
biography. It's the skeleton in the closet. It
is a difficult historical fact, but we absolutely
must face it. In 1953, the Stalinist terror in
Poland was at its absolute peak. The authorities
launched a fierce anti -religious campaign, and
there was a show trial in Krakow of several Polish
priests accused of treason of working for American
intelligence. That's sort of complete fabrication.
And these trials were? They were shams. Complete
shams. Total fabrications designed to intimidate
the church. But the verdict was death for three
of them. And a party mobilized the Writers' Union
to publicly support the verdict to show a united
front. And Szymborska signed a political petition
condemning those priests. She did. She, along
with 52 other prominent Krakow intellectuals,
signed it. So this wasn't just, you know. writing
a bad poem about a tractor this was her lending
her name her moral authority to the state's prosecution
and potential execution of innocent people yes
now as it happened the priests were not actually
executed their sentences were commuted to life
in prison but she didn't know that at the time
she signed it was it out of fear if she didn't
sign would she be next Was it out of true belief
that the church was an enemy of progress? It
was likely a toxic mix of immense peer pressure,
genuine fear, and a lingering ideological commitment.
It's heavy. It's a real stain on her legacy.
It is. And she knew it. She never tried to erase
it from her history, but she spent the rest of
her life, in a way, trying to atone for that
moment of certainty. Because that's the pivot
point, isn't it? This ideological fervor didn't
last. No. Stalin dies in 1953, the same year
as the petition. Then in 1956, Khrushchev gives
the secret speech, denouncing Stalin's crimes.
There's a period known as the Saw. And for true
believers like Simborska, this was a psychological
earthquake. They realized they hadn't been building
a utopia. They had been supporting a brutal police
state. She woke up. She became estranged. She
later renounced all that early political work.
She called it an illness of youth. But unlike
some who just quietly changed their coats and
pretended nothing had happened, she really seemed
to engage with the question of why she had been
so wrong. And she officially left the Communist
Party in 1966. But the drift away from the ideology,
that started much earlier. Much earlier. By 1957,
she was already in contact with Jerzy Giedroyk.
We need to explain who he is, because for a Polish
listener, that name is like thunder. But for
our global listeners, he might not be as well
known. Imagine, if you will, the most prestigious
political and literary journal in your country.
Now imagine it's illegal, it's published in Paris,
and it has to be smuggled back into your country
in backpacks and false bottom suitcases. That
was Kultura, the journal Giedroyk ran. It was
the intellectual lifeline of free Polish thought
during the Cold War. It was anti -totalitarian,
pro -democracy. So for her to be befriending
him and contributing to Kultura as early as 1957,
that is a very risky move. It's a huge risk.
It shows that her mind was already moving toward
dissent. She was establishing contact with the
other side long before she formally broke with
the party. And then we start to see her taking
more public stands. In 1964, there was a protest
organized by the communists against independent
intellectuals, a letter they wanted to send to
The Times in London. The party wanted prominent
writers to sign it to basically say everything
is fine here in Poland. There is no censorship.
And she refused. Yeah. She actively opposed it.
And instead, she signed a counter letter, the
letter of the 34, which demanded freedom of speech.
That is a bold move in 1964. That is putting
a real target on your back. And by the 1980s,
with the rise of the Solidarity Movement, she's
fully in the opposition camp. Completely. She
was contributing to the underground press, the
Samizdat. She wrote for a periodical called Arca
under a pseudonym. It is a brilliant, brilliant
pseudonym. Stachik was the famous court jester
in Polish history. You might know the famous
painting of him by Jan Matejko, where he's looking
sad and thoughtful while the court party is in
the background. Right. He was the one person
allowed to tell the truth to the king. Usually
through humor or irony. So for her to call herself
Stachikona. which means daughter of the jester,
is just perfect. She's the ironic jester telling
the truth to the powerful totalitarian regime.
That fits her perfectly. It's who she became.
And she continued this political engagement into
the 90s. Even after the fall of communism, she
didn't just retire from public life. When the
first non -communist government fell in a vote
of no confidence and former communists came back
to power, she published a poem in Gazeta Weiborza
supporting that vote of no confidence. she stayed
engaged. So she went from writing poems for Lenin
to writing poems that criticized democratically
elected governments. It's a complete journey
of conscience. And I think that regret, maybe
even the shame over her early years, especially
that 1953 petition, is what fueled the incredible
precision and the deep skepticism in all of her
later work. She knew firsthand how dangerous
absolute truths could be. She had been drunk
on an absolute truth once, and it left a terrible
lifelong hangover. Which leads us perfectly into
the work itself. Because if socialist realism
was about shouting, I know the way, her mature
poetry is all about whispering, I'm not sure.
Exactly. Let's go back to that trash can philosophy
we started with. Fewer than 350 poems. It implies
that she threw away anything that felt dishonest
or bloated or overly sentimental. Anything that
sounded even remotely like a slogan. So what's
left? After all that filtering, what characterizes
a Zimborska poem? The Nobel citation really hit
the nail on the head. They said her poetry allows
the historical and biological context to come
to light in fragments of human reality. Fragments
of human reality. That sounds lovely, but what
does it actually mean in practice? It means she
doesn't write about war with a capital W. She
doesn't write about the nation or history. She
writes about a specific moment, a specific object,
a single telling detail. Can we look at the cat?
I feel like we have to talk about the cat. We
absolutely have to talk about the cat. This is
one of her most famous concepts from the poem
Cat in an Empty Apartment. It was written after
the death of her longtime partner, the writer
Kornel Filipovich. It's a poem about grief. Now,
think about how most poets write about grief.
They write about their own tears, their own emptiness,
the silence of the house. It's very human -centric,
very internal. But Simborska, she writes it from
the perspective of the cat. Yes. The poem starts
with the absolutely arresting line. Die? You
can't do that to a cat. Which is just such a
gut punch of an opening. The cat doesn't understand
death as an abstract concept. The cat just understands
that the routine is broken. The bowls aren't
full. The familiar footsteps aren't on the stairs.
The hand isn't there to pick it up. The poem
describes the cat prowling around the empty apartment,
confused, offended. Someone has been here and
been here and then suddenly disappeared and now
is stubbornly absent. It's just devastating.
It's more devastating than a human crying. Because
the cat is innocent, and its confusion perfectly
mirrors our own raw primal confusion in the face
of death. We don't really understand it either.
By using the biological context, the cat's simple,
instinctual need for routine, she illuminates
the human reality of loss more powerfully than
any direct lamentation could. That is the unusual
point of view she was so famous for. And she
did it with everything. She wrote a poem from
the perspective of a grain of sand that doesn't
care what we call it. That's from View with a
Grain of Sand. Ah. She says the window has a
beautiful view of the lake, but the lake doesn't
know it's a lake. The rock doesn't know it's
a rock. They don't know they're beautiful. They
just exist. It's this radical objectivity. She
strips away all the human ego, all our projections.
We think the world revolves around us, but Simborska
gently reminds us that the stone, the cloud,
and the beetle really don't care about our politics
or our wars. It's humbling. It is. And in a strange
way, it's liberating. She also had this deep
philosophical obsession with the idea of not
knowing. Yes. In her Nobel lecture, which is
a masterpiece, by the way, everyone should read
it, she talked about the phrase, I don't know.
She said, those three words, I don't know, are
three of the most important, powerful words a
human can say. Why? Why is that so important?
Because fanatics always know. Hitler knew. Stalin
knew. Terrorists know. They're absolutely certain
of their truth. And that certainty is what allows
them to do terrible things. Poets, at least poets
like her, are the ones who admit they don't know.
They're the ones who keep exploring, who keep
asking questions. She said inspiration itself
is born from a continuous, I don't know. Now,
she wasn't just sitting around contemplating
the void. She had a day job for most of her life.
She was an editor. A very dedicated one. She
was on the staff of the weekly magazine Ishii
Literaki, which means literary life, from 1953
all the way to 1981. That is a massive chunk
of her life, 28 years. And she ran a book review
column there that I find absolutely delightful.
It was called Lecturee Naraboiskoe. Non -required
reading. This column is legendary in Poland.
You know, most literary editors, they want to
review the serious new novels, the big philosophical
treatises. Szymborska, she would review the books
that nobody else would touch. Like what? Give
me some examples. A History of Buttons, A Guide
to Birdwatching, A Handbook on How to Repair
Vacuum Cleaners, Gardening Almanacs, Biographies
of Obscure Opera Singers. Why? Was she mocking
them? Was it ironic? No. That is the absolute
beauty of it. She loved them. She was endlessly,
genuinely curious. She believed that a guide
to plumbing tells us just as much about human
nature, our need to fix things, our constant
struggle against entropy, as a great novel does.
She could find poetry and profound insight in
the instruction manual for a toaster. It connects
back to that idea of fragments, doesn't it? You
can find the entire universe in a button. Exactly.
Many of these essays were later published as
books, and they are funny, insightful, and incredibly
warm. They show a mind that is interested in
everything. Nothing human is alien to her. She
was also a translator, right? Yes, primarily
from French. She translated French Baroque poetry,
particularly Agrippa d 'Aubigné. Which is heavy,
difficult stuff. Baroque poetry is incredibly
complex, structural, rigid. Very intricate, very
formal, which probably honed her own skills and
precision. If you can successfully translate
Baroque French poetry into Polish, you learn
how to weigh every single syllable, every comma.
So for decades, she is this respected, slightly
eccentric, very private editor and poet in Krakow.
She's well known in Poland, certainly, but she
isn't a global superstar. And then 1996 happens.
The big one. The phone call from Stockholm. The
Nobel Prize in Literature. How does she react
to that? Because this is a woman who famously
cut the cord on her telephone so she wouldn't
have to talk to people she didn't know. Well,
for a private person who values her quiet time
in her trash can, above all else, it was a catastrophe.
She famously called it the Stockholm Tragedy.
She was joking, but only half joking. It completely
disrupted her life. Suddenly, the entire world
wanted a piece of her. Journalists were camping
out on her doorstep. Her phone, when she finally
plugged it back in, never stopped ringing. She
hated the fuss. But the work, the work suddenly
went global. That is the immense upside of the
tragedy. Her work was translated into Arabic,
Hebrew, Japanese, Persian, Chinese, but essentially
every major European language. People in Tokyo
and Tehran and New York were suddenly reading
about that cat in the empty apartment in Krakow.
It's amazing how universal her very specific,
very Polish irony. turned out to be. Because
at its core, she deals with human nature, not
just Polish nature. Loss is loss, love is love,
doubt is doubt, no matter what language you speak.
She got other major awards, too. The Goethe Prize
in 1991, the Herder Prize in 1995. And in 2011,
near the end of her life, she received the Order
of the White Eagle. That's the biggest one in
Poland. It's the highest state order in the country.
A huge honor. And she was made an honorary citizen
of Krakow, which probably meant just as much
to her. Let's look at the books that got her
there. If a listener today wants to pick up Simborska,
what are the key titles they're going to see?
Well, you'd probably skip the early socialist
stuff unless you're a scholar. The real Simborska
voice, that voice of ironic precision, begins
to emerge in her 1957 collection, Calling Out
to Yeti. Calling Out to Yeti. I just love that
title. It feels so futile. You're yelling at
a monster that might not even exist. Exactly.
It's a perfect metaphor for her break from the
certainty of Stalinism. Then you have salt in
1962, a great tidal basic essential stinging.
Then people on the bridge in 1986. Many critics
consider that her masterpiece. And then The End
and the Beginning in 1993. Which deals with the
aftermath of the Cold War, the feeling of what
now? And then View with a Grain of Sand came
out around the time of the Nobel in 1996. That's
the collection most English speakers start with.
And we shouldn't forget, colon -like, The Punctuation
Mark, which was published in 2005. Yes, colon.
Another brilliant title. It implies that something
is coming next. It implies the list isn't finished,
the thought isn't complete. And it was voted
the best book of 2006 by the readers of Gazzetta
Waborza. So even in her 80s, she isn't just winning
lifetime achievement awards. She's winning best
book of the year against all comers. She never
lost her touch. She never became an old master
who just repeated herself. She stayed fresh,
curious and sharp. right to the very end now
here is where it gets really interesting for
me because usually when we talk about nobel winning
poets we think of dusty libraries silence maybe
a very serious reading in a university lecture
hall but cymborska is well she's kind of pop
she is surprisingly and wonderfully embedded
in pop culture let's start with the music there
is a poem called nothing twice Nothing happens
twice. It's a beautiful philosophical musing
on Heraclitus. You can't step in the same river
twice. The poem says things like, But it's also
a banger. I mean, can I say that? It's a genuine
hit song in Poland. It's a standard. It was first
performed by a singer named Uksa Prus way back
in 1965 as a kind of jazzy ballad. Then the legendary
Polish rock band Manim... think of them like
the Polish Rolling Stones or Blondie, did a massive
rock version on their 1994 album Ruwa. A hard
rock version of a poem by a future Nobel laureate.
It's aggressive, it's loud, it has a killer guitar
riff, and it works perfectly. And then, very
recently, in 2022, the artist Sana adapted it.
Now, Sana is huge. She is the current pop princess
of Poland. She did a whole project called Sana
Spio Poesia, Sana Sings Poetry. That is like
Taylor Swift releasing an album of T .S. Eliot
covers. In terms of popularity and cultural impact,
yes. It's a testament to the fact that her lyrics,
her poems, have a natural rhythm and a universality
that just works as a pop song. They aren't elitist
or overly academic. And then there are the movies.
Yes. Her poem, Love at First Sight, has been
the engine behind some major films. Like Turn
Left, Turn Right. Exactly. The famous Asian film
starring Takeshi Kaneshiro. The entire plot is
based on the central idea of that poem. Two people
who live side by side, who pass each other constantly,
but who never meet, even though they're destined
for each other. And Krzysztof Kieślowski, the
absolute master of cinema. His final film, The
Masterpiece, Three Colors. Red. He said publicly
that it was deeply inspired by love at first
sight. The whole film is about chance, about
misconnections, about the almosts and what -ifs
of life, which is the core of that poem. It's
just wild to me that a short poem about two people
passing each other on the street can spawn multiple
feature films. It speaks to the incredible visual
nature of her writing. She sets a scene, she
directs the camera of your mind with just a few
precise words. And we have to mention the jazz
connection. Yes. In her last year, she collaborated
with the great trumpeter Tomás Daco. A giant
of European jazz. A true legend. He was so inspired
by their collaboration and by her poetry that
after she died, he dedicated his next album on
the prestigious ECM label to her memory. It was
called Wisawa, released in 2013. Jazz feels like
the right genre for her. It's improvisational,
but within a structure. It's precise, but also
a little smoky and mysterious. I completely agree.
It fits her rhythm perfectly. So she passed away
in 2012. February 1st, 2012. At home in her apartment
in Krakow. Was it peaceful? Yes. By all accounts,
it was. She died in her sleep. She had been battling
lung cancer. She was a famous lifelong smoker.
But she died surrounded by friends and relatives.
And true to form, she was working right up until
the end. She was. She was working on new poetry.
She didn't have the strength to arrange the final
order of the poems for the collection, but they
were published posthumously later that year in
a book called Weestersey. Which means... Enough.
Enough. What a perfect, powerful final word.
It's like she's telling us, OK, that's it. Stop
looking for more. This is enough. And in 2013,
the Wizeroso -Symborska Award was established
to honor her legacy. It's now one of the most
important literary prizes in Poland. But. The
story doesn't quite end there, does it? And this
is where we have to talk about 2024. Because
if Szymborska's entire life was about the human
touch, the personal filter, the trash can, and
the uncertainty of existence, what happened in
2024 feels like a battle for her soul. The AI
controversy. It's a bizarre final chapter. Set
the scene for us. What exactly happened? Okay,
so in 2024, the president of the Wasara Szymborska
Foundation, a man named Mikaj Ruzanek, who, by
the way, was her personal secretary for many
years and has seriously protected her legacy,
he signed an agreement with a local radio station,
Polsky Radio's OOF Radio Krakow. And what was
this agreement for? To let the station use archival
voice recordings of Simborska to train an artificial
intelligence model. They created a synthetic
Simborska, a vocal deepfake. A deepfake poet.
And what did they do with it? They used it for
an interview -like program. They had an AI Simborska
commenting on current events, answering questions
that she was never asked in her life. Oh boy,
I can see where this is going. How did that go
down? Not well. It was broadcast on October 29,
2024, and it was swiftly and roundly condemned.
Polish audiences hated it. Media producers, other
writers, they all hated it. It caused a massive
public backlash against the foundation and the
radio station. Why do you think the reaction
was so visceral? I mean, we see AI being used
everywhere now. Why did this specific instance
strike such a raw nerve? Think about everything
we have just discussed for the last hour. Think
about the central metaphor of her life, the trash
can. The trash can represents editing. It represents
choice. Human judgment. Exactly. Szymborska published
350 poems because she threw away thousands. She
filtered. She agonized over every single word.
And AI doesn't have a trash can. It doesn't have
taste. It doesn't have doubt. It just generates
content based on probability patterns. So to
put new words in her mouth. is a fundamental
violation of her silence. She was a woman who
carefully, deliberately chose when to speak and
when not to speak. To have a robot endlessly
generating chatter in her voice is the absolute
antithesis of who she was. And there's the biological
context that the Nobel Committee mentioned. Yes.
Her poetry was always grounded in the fragility
and the reality of the human body. The cat that
needs to eat, the lungs that breathe smoke, the
heart that stops beating. An AI has no biological
context. It cannot understand death. It can only
simulate the language of death. It has no body,
no pain, no joy. It is the ultimate irony. It
is. And not the good kind of irony. Not the Zimborska
kind that reveals a deeper truth. This was a
shallow irony that obscured it. It treated her
unique human voice as a brand asset to be exploited,
rather than the authentic expression of a human
soul. It raises such huge, troubling questions
about legacy. Just because we can bring her voice
back with technology, does that mean we should?
I think the Polish public's answer to that was
a resounding no. And I can't help but think she
would have written a brilliant, devastating poem
about this. Oh, absolutely. I can almost hear
it. The robot in the empty studio or the algorithm's
dream of consciousness. She would have found
it darkly funny, but also terrifying. I think
she would have pitied the robot for having all
the words, but none of the meaning. I agree.
So let's bring this deep dive in for a landing.
We've looked at the girl from Prowant. The railroad
worker stamping ID cards to survive. The socialist
realist true believer. The disillusioned dissident.
The Nobel winner who hid from the press. And
the unlikely pop culture icon. She was a woman
of so many contradictions. A socialist who became
a symbol of intellectual freedom. A recluse who
became a global celebrity. A writer of very few
words who inspired endless conversation and art.
For our listeners, for the learners out there,
I think the big takeaway for me. is about the
power of those fragments. You don't need to write
the 1 ,000 -page history of the war to explain
the war. Sometimes you just need to describe
the cat in the empty apartment. And the importance
of the trash can. In a world of information overload,
where we are just bombarded with content, AI
-generated or otherwise, there is immense value
in editing, in silence, in waiting until you
have the right word, not just any word. And also,
just the power... of acknowledging that you might
have been wrong in the past her political journey
shows that you can change your mind you can grow
you could have the courage to say i was wrong
or to say i don't know the courage to admit that
is what leads to true wisdom i want to leave
you all with a final thought today we talked
about her poem some like poetry where she says
maybe Two in a thousand people really like poetry.
But then we see her selling out bookstores, inspiring
rock concerts, and having her poems turned into
blockbuster movies. The data seems to contradict
the hypothesis. It totally does. So here's the
question. Are the barriers to art real? Or do
we just build them up in our heads? Maybe two
in a thousand like poetry with a capital P, the
kind they force you to memorize and analyze in
school. But maybe millions of people like the
truth when it's told with irony and precision.
Or, to bring it all back to 2024, if an AI can
mimic her voice perfectly, does it matter if
the soul isn't there? Would Simborska herself
have viewed a robot mimicking her voice as the
ultimate chilling ironic precision? Or the final
tragic victory of the biological context being
erased forever? That is a question she has left
for us to answer. Thanks for diving deep with
us. We'll see you on the next one. Boop -bop.