Author: William R. Brand. Source: http://alfaomega.webnode.com/products/ryszard-kapu/ Date of publication: 2010-03-09

We met Ryszard Kapuściński in Kraków, on a muggy day, in late spring 1981. In the pocket of his beige jacket he had a pack of “Radomskie” cigarettes. He said to me: “With that beard you look like a mujahideen.”

He was not an author frequently published outside Poland, and Kasia and I had never before translated a whole book. After nine months of trying, we still had no publisher and had translated only one third of “The Emperor”. We would probably have given up, if not for one thing he said to us that day.

We had started work on “The Emperor” in spring 1980, still in the USA.

Abe Rosenthal, a colleague from St. John Fisher College where I was teaching at the time, had published several non-academic books and had an agent in New York. He agreed to let me try to convince him about “The Emperor”. When I had finished, he looked out of the window at the snowstorm, and said: “Fine, so we have here a book written by a Polish journalist. About Ethiopia. And you’re asking whether my New York agent would be interested in publishing it. Let me explain to you how the publishing market works.”

We sent substantial samples of the translation to at least a dozen of the best publishing houses. From some we received polite rejections.

Kasia wrote to Kapuściński asking for contacts. Thanks to the kindness of Wiktor Osiatyński, we made contact with Alvin Toffler — but even he, a master of non-fiction bestsellers, was unable to help us.

That winter we moved to Kraków, arriving on the day when “Solidarność” reached an agreement with the government on free Saturdays.

Over the following few months we would find an hour or two here and there to work on the translation.

In Polish I was barely able to say more than “I’ll be right back”. When working on the translation Kasia would first propose a literal rendering. Listening to her comments, I tried to understand (or rather to imagine) the nuances of meaning she was describing and the logic that guided the author in his choice of words — in a situation where almost every word was new to me. It was like solving a crossword — more in the British than the American style. Because Kasia is as she is, there were many cases where her first “rough” version of a translation was immediately so good that all I had to do was write it down. At other moments — especially when we still had no publisher — we wondered whether what we were doing made any sense at all.

That is precisely why our first meeting with Kapuściński was so important. After exchanging preliminary courtesies, Kasia showed him a list of a dozen or so passages about which we had doubts.

We sat three together, uncomfortably squeezed around a rough brown tablecloth covering a round, folding table, in the attic of a small house in Szopena Street, trying to decide whether a given sentence in English had anything in common with the sentence in Polish. The worst were the adjectives — strange, apparently somewhat archaic.

Ryszard solved our problem. “Listen” — it seems to me he was remembering how it is said in English, I can see him leaning back and raising his hands — “do as you see fit, as long as you enjoy it!” And then he looked at his watch, and we accompanied him — passing the Mikro cinema on the way — to a meeting with students in the Collegium Novum.

Like characters in a bad film in which everyone keeps talking about Wilhelm Reich, in one instant we were freed from all doubts and inhibitions.

I would return from classes to find Kasia bent over pages (or rather large squared sheets — no other paper was available in those days), which she was filling one after another. I would sit up at nights, scribbling away. Then we would sit down together. We revelled in the splendour of this particular linguistic universe.

I had a ticket for a flight to the States and the date of departure was approaching, so we made a great effort to finish the translation. To be precise: we finished it, corrected it, and then polished it once more.

In America time dragged slowly — without counting down the days to an invasion or a general strike.

I prepared a final, thoroughly refined version of “The Emperor”. The work was soon done.

Then I was seized by terror. The time had come to find a publisher — that is, to attempt something we had been trying unsuccessfully with our sample less than a year earlier. I managed this fear by working day and night to prepare an even more refined version.

In the week before my return to Poland I drove several times to the library at the University of Pittsburgh. In the bibliography section I studied enormous guides to the publishing market — books that cost hundreds of dollars. Instead of finding consolation, however, I was only sinking deeper into pessimism. As I read, nothing could be worse than an unsolicited submission — a typescript that had not been commissioned, which arrives at a publisher and lands in the slush pile, the mass of texts that the most junior editorial assistants had to take home and chew through at night. The only way to avoid catastrophe was to have a super-agent (and we had not managed to find even an ordinary agent) or to “hit the jackpot — to reach that one dream editor.” The publishing guides contained no advice on finding the ideal editor, only lists of names.

Driving to the library for the last time, I had no plan.

I dragged myself to the periodicals reading room and lit a cigarette, staring at the façade of the Carnegie Museum, coated in soot like Kraków Town Hall. Idly, looking for something to distract my attention, I reached for a copy of “The New Yorker” lying nearby and began to leaf through the advertisements: for furs, champagne, and diamonds. Suddenly my attention was caught by a rarity — a page covered in text. The article was about Helen Wolff, widow of Kurt Wolff, the pre-war publisher of Kafka. This refugee from Nazi Germany was a cult figure in New York. The foundation of her long career was her translations of outstanding European authors. Pasternak, Grass, Simenon, Frisch, Italo Calvino — she was the publisher of all of them.

I rushed to the publishing guides in search of her address.

Early on Monday morning, just before leaving for the airport, I sent the typescript together with a letter addressed to Helen Wolff at the Harcourt Brace Jovanovich publishing house.

Already back in Kraków, waiting for any response did not seem so real. We had other worries. The situation in the country seemed to resemble more and more a whirlpool dragging one into an abyss. We were expecting our first child, due in the new year. The greatest problem was how to get food. As for Kapuściński’s book, we had already done everything we could. Given the efficiency of the postal service, we could perhaps expect a reply before the child was born.

After a few weeks a telegram arrived from Helen Wolff. A few lines in English, glued to a grey postal form, contained the information that Mrs Wolff would call on Sunday. In those days persons waiting for a long-distance call would sit by the telephone and wait sometimes whole days. In this case we did not have to wait long. On the line from across the ocean, in a connection prone to breaking up, Mrs Wolff had a warm voice and went straight to the point.

Kapuściński had established me as his agent. I bought a ticket to New York to sign the contract.

30 November, I remember, it was snowing. I passed the fenced area of the meteorological station in Kraków Park, which was inhabited by a blind cat condemned to eat food left for it by people who themselves were having trouble obtaining food for themselves and their families. A small, faded sticker promoting the Independent Trade Union of MO Officers still stuck to the door of the old electrical substation next to the news-stand and the fish burger stall, opposite the Mikro cinema and the headquarters of the secret police. Nowhere in the world had ever been so remote from New York. Kraków seemed defenceless, and I was glad to sort things out in the States and return for my first Christmas in Poland, and soon afterwards for the birth of our child.

I signed the contract not with Helen Wolff, who had retired, but with her successor, Drenka Willen, the publisher of Milovan Djilas. The matter took about half an hour.

I had some time to kill before the return journey. A few weeks at most. But then came 13 December.

Poland was cut off from the world more tightly than Ethiopia. I tried to send Kasia a message through the Voice of America, but had nothing sensible to say. I called the Eastern European section of the US State Department. Instead of helping me, they wanted to obtain information themselves. From Kapuściński I had a number for someone at the Polish Mission to the UN. When I finally managed to get through and asked the diplomat about conditions and a possible return date to Poland, he told me he had had no contact with Warsaw since 13 December.

One morning the lawyer from Harcourt Brace called. It was clear he did not want to talk about style.

He said he needed certain statements and attestations.

I informed him that the signing of any statements and attestations by Mr Kapuściński would not be possible until the situation in Poland was clarified.

“It is not necessarily something that Mr Kapuściński must sign,” he said. He needed statements and attestations from the Ethiopian citizens described in the book. He wanted signed, notarially certified statements containing their real names and addresses, in which they would guarantee the truth of their testimonies and release the publisher from any legal liability.

These people, I replied, are palace officials hiding from the Marxist revolutionary regime. They spoke to the author secretly, on condition of complete anonymity. The very attempt to make contact with them might mean mortal danger for them.

Matters are such, said the lawyer, that the all-pervasive atmosphere of litigation is more dangerous than the Marxist revolutionary movement. No publisher can afford to publish a book in which one person says anything about another, because the person concerned by the utterance can simply sue the publisher, accusing it of defamation. Unless it is notarially certified that what that person said is true. And if any information published in the book — and not previously notarially certified — harms anyone, then that person can sue the publisher. We are speaking of suits worth millions of dollars. Every person quoted in any book must provide an authenticating statement. Until those documents are presented by the author or his representatives, the contract regarding publication will not be legally binding.

At this point he quoted the relevant passages of the contract I had signed with such pride a dozen or so days earlier.

Give me a little time, I said. I’ll call you back.

That was all I needed: not only had martial law been declared, but the publication of “The Emperor” was blocked too. I called back and suggested a fairly vague formula concerning the professional methods of interviewing employed by the author, and reassured him again that no passage in the book would lead to the identification of specific persons, and that the author and his representative were ready to take upon themselves responsibility for any claims arising in Ethiopia. The lawyer bought my arguments.

Kapuściński managed to come to New York for the publication of “The Emperor” in 1983. There he stood in the publishing house reception with a radiant smile and two large carrier bags filled with books, papers, photocopies, and letters. He said he would do everything to ensure that the book made its mark and succeeded. That very afternoon, at a reception at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, he activated all the contacts he had managed to make in various countries over a quarter of a century. People liked to talk with him, not only because he is intelligent and full of ideas, but because he believes in what he says, looks his interlocutor straight in the eye, and — most importantly — because he genuinely, visibly blossoms, entering into interaction with other people, at the moment of meeting, when he can listen. He is interested in people.

I think that lies the key to his successes. He treats people as individuals worthy of interest. Spinning theoretical considerations, he extends this assumption to whole countries, continents, and cultures. He understands the world because he understands individual people, and he cares about them in a way that many imitate and others do not even bother to imitate.

He was always considerate and easy to work with, even when our views on rhythm and sentence length differed.

When I came to Warsaw, he would take me in his dark blue Lada to his flat on Wola, where, as he said, he would isolate himself for endlessly long days, refraining from reading before he was able to begin writing. He shared the latest gossip; he was no optimist, he talked about the possibility of a classic military coup in Poland. At the suggestion that we would outlive the Soviet Union, he objected. “Empires fall slowly,” he said.

He was generous in many ways, even in the most mundane matters. After a meeting in Kraków concerning the translation of “Shah of Shahs”, he gave me a lift to a conference centre beyond Tarnów where I was to run a seminar. I learnt later that on the outskirts of Warsaw he ran out of petrol and had to hitchhike home. I felt terrible about it, but he only laughed and said it had happened to him to get stuck in worse places.

The academic year was devoted to teaching, the summer to translations.

When the ribbon in the typewriter was so worn that it could no longer be used for writing, I would go to Axmann’s on Świętego Krzyża Street. The typewriters and mechanical calculators strewn across the floor looked as though they had been waiting since the 1930s for their owners to collect them. Nowhere in Kraków, including Axmann’s shop, could you get a new typewriter ribbon. But if you stood there long enough, with a pleading expression, they would finally agree to exchange it — they would take the worn ribbon, unwind a slightly less worn one from the spool of one of the machines waiting for repair, and transfer it to the customer’s spool.

A4 typing paper was also unobtainable.

Ordinary school exercise books, which could be bought at news-stands, consisted of A4 sheets folded in half and stapled in the town of Strzegom. I would buy these exercise books, remove the staples, and type out Kapuściński’s books in English on them. However many times I bent the sheets back the other way, the crease from the fold always remained. In the middle of the sheet there were holes — traces of the removed staples. Sometimes faint rust stains highlighted these holes. I wondered what people in New York thought on receiving the latest Kapuściński book, consisting of barely legible text covering perforated paper.

After a finished day’s work on the translation of “Another Day of Life” I would go for a walk. The summer of 1987 had arrived — in which the Wiedeńska café in the Cloth Hall opened the first outdoor seating area on the Market Square with lighting. Until eleven in the evening one could order coffee. In the darkness surrounding the café children were playing guitars and riding skateboards. Some were talking in Italian. Once or twice that summer I even heard English. A lean youth with a red beard was monotonously beating a tall African drum, but I still did not feel the new rhythm it was beating. “Empires fall slowly,” said a voice in my head.

The crucial moment for “The Emperor” in the USA came with John Updike’s extremely positive review in “The New Yorker”. Such praise from one of the best authors in the country, in the best magazine, is a guarantee of success. It was clear, even in 1983, that Kapuściński had a firmly established position in America as a cult author. Readers would look for his books year after year. In other words, he began his career in America by becoming a classic.

Nearly a quarter of a century ago Americans travelled less and knew less about the world than they do today. Nor were they as afraid of the world as they are today. Poland, a newly discovered country, was attractive and played an important role in the media. These factors meant that “The Emperor” was received in a fairly open manner. Its message about Ethiopia was read as a wise meditation on the limits of what is achievable in the Third World, while the allegorical resemblance to the situation in Poland, which was often mentioned, transformed the book into a magical parable about change. Of course what was truly magical was the quality of the book itself.

The next Kapuściński book, “Shah of Shahs”, brought the subject of Iran, which was at the centre of American attention — the Shah had been an important ally, and the hostages in the embassy in Teheran were Americans. Soon one of the released hostages began to speak — among other things — about excessive indulgence towards Iranians, and worse, about factual inaccuracies in Kapuściński’s account.

Americans can be literal-minded. The first question about any book is: “Is it fiction or non-fiction?” In recent decades there have been repeated scandals connected with “fabricating facts” by reporters at leading newspapers. This atmosphere dumbfounds literal-minded literary critics: if Kapuściński’s books are so full of literary beauty, how is it possible that they belong to non-fiction? They cannot be treated as textbooks of the history of Ethiopia or Iran? Shock! Horror! Critics sometimes represent the same type of thinking that characterised the lawyer from Harcourt who demanded notarised certifications from the characters of “The Emperor”. This is, however, a marginal phenomenon.

In the USA Kapuściński was something new. There were already writers creating in the same current, but they rarely ventured abroad. Kapuściński acknowledged his debt to new journalism, including Tom Wolfe. Many readers saw in him a Hunter Thompson — the creator of gonzo journalism — only without cocaine. The Third World in Kapuściński’s descriptions was more psychedelically exotic than Thompson’s “underbelly of the American beast”.

In Great Britain, by contrast, Kapuściński fitted into a familiar model of journalism. For a long time British writers had been travelling to unknown regions of the world, miraculously escaping death, and returning home to describe it all ironically. Richard Burton, Rebecca West, and Robert Byron are classic representatives of this current. At precisely the same moment at which Kapuściński stepped onto the scene in the 1980s, there was a process of democratisation of both travel and travel writing. It was said that to write a bestseller one need only randomly select two places on earth and ride a bicycle from one to the other. This was a natural niche, created as if directly for Kapuściński. The fashionable magazine “Granta” was publishing extreme travel accounts containing descriptions of taking drugs unknown to anyone or contracting diseases unknown to anyone on trails untrodden by tourist crowds. Kapuściński’s stories, especially those from the book known in the USA as “The Soccer War” and in Great Britain as “The Football War” (whose table of contents only slightly resembles that of the Polish book “Wojna futbolowa”), surpassed the prose of British literary tourists. “Granta” captured Kapuściński and made him one of its flagship writers.

The demand for his work was in the mid-1980s so great that a certain short passage from “Busz po polsku” I had to translate on the spot, at a free table in the crowded offices of “Granta” in an attic in Cambridge, before the editor agreed to take me out to lunch. Lunch turned out to be an ordinary pub meal, but printing any of the passages from “Busz” always gave me enormous pleasure. I still believe it is a great pity that Kapuściński’s first book, containing some of his best and freshest works, has never been published in its entirety in English.

The English traditionally regard “abroad” as one specific place to which one travels or in which one lives (on the same principle as people in other countries say they are going to Croatia or living in Mexico). In consequence the differences between individual countries interest them mainly in the context of the price of alcohol or regulations regarding the import of cigarettes, and such questions as the relevance of Kapuściński’s work to the situation in his native Poland mean less to them than to sometimes literal-minded Americans. But it was above all in England that groups of his readers took Kapuściński’s writing almost painfully literally. He told me about how he once had to justify himself for his portrayal of Haile Selassie before a sceptical and muscular group of Rastafarians who venerated the main character of “The Emperor”. When Jonathan Miller staged his phenomenal adaptation of the book at the Royal Court Theatre in London, Ethiopian emigrants demonstrated outside the theatre.

Each of Kapuściński’s early books is already a classic. The political considerations mentioned earlier cast barely a perceptible shadow over “Shah of Shahs”. What is most astonishing about today’s fame of Kapuściński, however, is the fact that “Another Day of Life” — the least Kapuściński-like (but most Conrad-like) of his works — is mentioned in second place, right after “The Emperor”. Catching up on my reading while working on this essay, I kept coming across ecstatic admiration from critics quoting descriptive passages from this story about the collapse of Portuguese colonialism, and I would not be surprised if a film adaptation were made. The canvas is already there: a sun-blinded reporter travels back and forth along the road of death between a sensuous Portuguese beauty left in an abandoned capital and a dazzling freedom fighter who commands the fighting in the bush.

Then perhaps the real dispute will begin — which actor should play Kapuściński? For nearly a quarter of a century he himself has been brilliantly managing that role, and recognition for his life’s achievements keeps growing on both sides of the Atlantic.

Translated from English by Maria R. Brand (born 1982)

William R. Brand

born 1953 in Pennsylvania, USA. An English scholar, graduate of the Universities of Pittsburgh and Rochester. He first came to Poland in 1976. Together with his wife Katarzyna Mroczkowska-Brand, he translated “The Emperor” (1983), “Shah of Shahs” (1985), and “Another Day of Life” (1986); and himself “The Soccer War” (1990) and belletristic, historical, and memoir books. He is the author of several documentary films, among them “I Am a Polish Jew” (with Jerzy Ridan, about Rafael Scharf). He was honoured with the Polish Culture Foundation Prize (1990). He lives in Kraków.

source: kapuscinski.info