The Life, Work of Poet Wislawa Szymborska

In 1996, Wislawa Szymborska was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. She was little known outside of her native Poland, but the award helped make her a major figure in modern world literature. Szymborska died Wednesday in Poland at age 88. Earlier today, I spoke to Szymborska’s longtime translator, Clare Cavanagh, professor of Slavic languages and comparative literature at Northwestern University, about the poet’s life and work:

A transcript will be posted soon.

Editor’s note: In 1996, poet Robert Hass appeared on the NewsHour to talk about Szymborska after she won the Nobel Prize. You can read that transcript here. And in 1999, poet Robert Pinsky read one of Szymborska’s poems on the program. You can find that here.

Photo by Mariusz Kubik.