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  • RevaluationKapuściński Travels with Herodotus
  • Christopher McDonough (bio)
Travels with Herodotus
by Ryszard Kapuściński
translated from the Polish by Klara Glowczewska
(Vintage International, 2007. 276 pages. $15 pb)

If Ryszard Kapuściński’s name is not better known among American readers, it is not for lack of international awards or accolades from such renowned figures as John Updike, Salman Rushdie, and Gabriel García Márquez, who hailed him as “the true master of journalism.” Breaking new ground in the world of literary reportage, Kapuściński interwove hard news with personal detail and artistic insight. “You know, sometimes, in describing what I do, I resort to the Latin phrase silva rerum, the forest of things,” he told Bill Buford in an interview with Granta. “That’s my subject: the forest of things, as I’ve seen it, living and travelling in it. To capture the world, you have to penetrate it as completely as possible.” Throughout his work, the Polish journalist again and again pushed—like his countryman, Joseph Conrad, before him—into the heart of darkness, all the while deftly balancing literary observation with lived experience.

A good instance of this vérité style is to be found in “The Soccer War,” the author’s account of the hundred-hour conflict between Honduras and El Salvador in 1969 that claimed six thousand lives. His reports from the front escaped military censorship because they were filed in Polish, but it is the finely rendered incidentals that truly capture the reader’s attention. At one point, the open truck carrying Kapuściński and other reporters is shelled and overturns amid gunfire. Lunging into some bushes off the road, he notices a colony of busy ants on the ground before him.

It wasn’t the time for observing ants, but the very sight of them marching along, the sight of another world, another reality, brought me back to consciousness. An idea came into my head: if I could control my fear enough to stop my ears for a moment and look only at these insects, I could begin to think with some sort of sense. I lay among the thick bushes plugging my ears with all my might, nose in the dirt and I watched the ants. I don’t know how long this went on. When I raised my head, I was looking into the eyes of a soldier.

To my mind, this is as close to a Homeric simile as one might ever come in an ostensible work of journalism.

Wars throughout the third world were Kapuściński’s beat, as were the falls of various governments—from Haile Selassie (The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat, 1978) to Reza Pahlavi (Shah of Shahs, 1982) to the Soviet Union (Imperium, 1993). Kapuściński’s final work, published before his death in 2007, was Travels with Herodotus, a memoir of his early years as a reporter when—sent without much preparation by his Eastern bloc newspaper to faraway places like [End Page xl] India under Nehru, China during the Cultural Revolution, and the war-torn Congo—he took with him a copy of Herodotus’s Histories in Polish translation. For many correspondents covering international events, the Greek historian of choice would have been Thucydides, the cold-eyed analyst of Realpolitik, rather than the wide-eyed, sightseeing Herodotus, for whom evidently no story was too incredible to record. Travels with Herodotus is well worth reading, not just for the author’s remarkable style and life story, but also for the sustained encounter with his ancient world-travelling counterpart.

In the Cairo of Nasser’s era, Kapuściński reflects upon Herodotus’s own journey through Egypt in the fifth century b.c. and his visits to temples already themselves thousands of years old. What can ever really be learned of others with such ancient and exotic lineages?—he seems to wonder. Later Kapuściński follows Ahmed, a seemingly friendly guide, into an obscure part of town to visit a dilapidated mosque—they climb the rickety stairs into the unlit minaret, where the guide demands his wallet and leaves him in complete darkness to...

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