With my own eyes — a conversation with Ryszard Kapuściński about "Travels with Herodotus"

Author: KRZYSZTOF MASŁOŃ source: Rzeczpospolita date: 2004-10-02 ——————————————————————–

KRZYSZTOF MASŁOŃ: What was the impulse for writing “Travels with Herodotus”? We rather expected a different book: perhaps about Latin America, perhaps about your native Pinsk — and here you take the reader back in time by a mere 2,500 years.

RYSZARD KAPUŚCIŃSKI: You forget that I am a historian by training, so there is nothing strange in my interest in the past, even one as distant as Herodotus’s. Working on this book brought me a great deal of satisfaction: with the same appetite with which I once crossed borders in space, I now crossed borders in time. And Herodotus’s Histories are great, underrated literature.

Underrated? Historians of antiquity cite the work constantly.

Because Herodotus has been appropriated by classicists, who see in the Histories only a source of information about that Europe, that world. Whereas it is a superb, pioneering literary work — the first great European prose of any kind. Before it there were epics and poems, tragedies written for the theatre, but not prose. And what prose! The Histories have a splendid dramaturgy, a first-class psychology, they carry a great charge of anthropology, and they are wonderfully written.

I take it that you have promoted Herodotus, but that in doing so you have also shown yourself — the young reporter making his first foreign journeys, to India and China in the mid-1950s, and soon making himself at home in Africa and, as The Shadow of the Sun shows, coming to know it to its very entrails.

Before starting on my latest book I gathered 140 titles. A dozen or so dealt with Herodotus himself, about whom, in truth, very little is known. There are more hypotheses here than certainties. I was not tempted to write yet another book about the same thing, especially as I saw no need for it; instead I thought I would follow a different track and recall a little of my beginnings as a reporter, which I had never spoken about. And I remembered how I used to travel with Herodotus’s Histories around a world that had suddenly opened up before me. How I would read Herodotus and be delighted by him.

And after 11 September 2001 the world became very interested in… the world. And I do not conceal that there was one further reason for writing Travels with Herodotus. People began ringing me from everywhere, asking for comments on Asia, on Iraq, on Islam. I was invited to conferences and pressed for interviews. Before I knew it several months had passed in which I had not written a single word. Time was slipping away and my writing was standing still. I said: enough — and from then on, when I was asked what I was working on, I answered: “On the Middle East.” “How terribly interesting,” came the reply, but I would break in at once to add that it was Middle Eastern matters from 2,500 years ago. “Ah, thank you, then.” “Not at all.”

So in truth “Travels with Herodotus” came out of contrariness.

A little. But — for myself — I rediscovered the whole beauty of that literature. It is so deep, there is such loveliness of language in it, quite dazzling, that I plunged into the Histories completely, discovering them for myself once again.

To some degree, though, you have written a book about Herodotus.

The question is: to what degree? It is Travels with Herodotus, not Herodotus. A vast literature has grown up around him, though it is somewhat archaic today. For historical scholarship has changed. Once it was enough to know two or three history textbooks and you could say you knew practically everything. History was presented linearly, and only a new, postmodern research perspective overthrew that linear order, introducing an extraordinary variety of interpretations, of points of view and of reflection. Now, to know the past, one really has to plunge into it, because there are so many schools, so many propositions, so many new threads, that it takes an ability to move through the thicket. And then we see how extraordinarily rich, polemical and interesting the discipline has become. Within my means, I made that effort.

What struck you most in the “Histories”?

The author’s respect for others and his humility — a great sense of humility towards his audience. Herodotus thinks constantly about how to gather as much knowledge as possible and how to pass it on to his listeners. This is still a time when the ability to read and write is very rare. Transmission is oral; Herodotus is going to recite the Histories to his hearers and receive money from them for it. So he has to keep in mind the need to hold his audience’s attention, to interest them, or they will not pay him. The Histories therefore had to be gripping. And they are. The book is full of extraordinarily interesting anecdotes accompanying serious, deep reflection. And the Histories are aimed at the mentality of the provincial, because it was to provincials that he explained that they were neither the only ones nor the most important. That the world is rich and various. Herodotus widened the human horizon. He was the first to bring the concept of the globe into human thinking; one might say he was the first globalist.

He clearly did not lack ambition. What interested me most was what Herodotus wrote in the margins, as it were. Not about the war, but rather about how ordinary people live, what they do and so on.

But please remember that the war he presented, the conquests of Darius and Xerxes, was a world war, because that was the world then. Herodotus’s genius showed itself in that he intuitively saw in that world conflict a clash between East and West, between Asia and Europe. First he shows the conflict, recalls how the Persian empire arose and what drove it to conquest. He shows in black and white that the engine of every empire is expansion, that those Persian kings always asked the same question: what have we not yet taken, not yet mastered, where are we not yet present? So it was suggested to them that they conquer Thrace, or the Scythians, and they were already organising expeditions, without regard to whether they made sense or not. Because they wanted to have everything. Herodotus shows the mechanism by which an empire is created and takes shape, and behind it lies a boundless need for domination and rule. The limit here is the limit of the world. And at the same time the author of the Histories shows another mechanism — the fall of an empire, the collapse of its expansive force.

And it collapses because…

It runs into a force it cannot match. That may be some people, but it may also be a value — and such a value, Herodotus says, is the sense of freedom. For here is the Persian commander Xerxes standing face to face with an opponent who says: no. Everyone around submits, tries somehow to fall into line, to adapt, in order to survive — and suddenly little Athens (little, because it then numbered around a hundred thousand inhabitants, and after subtracting slaves and women only thirty thousand citizens) puts up resistance for the sole reason that the Athenians have a strongly developed sense of freedom and are attached to their democracy. And suddenly that great army of the world — made up of the tribes Herodotus enumerates, driven forward with whips by Xerxes’s men, a gigantic mass armed to the teeth — cannot manage, because someone loved freedom. It is at this point that all historical and battle literature begins and ends, because afterwards we shall have to do exclusively with repetitions of the same motif. And that message of freedom contained in the Histories is what fascinates me most. Meticulous enquiry into whether some place Herodotus wrote about was called this and not that impoverishes that great text. That great fabric which Herodotus wove in conditions we cannot imagine. He had no documentation at all; he could trust only human memory, since he was writing about events he had not lived through, which took place before he was born. And here another great subject of the Histories opens up — the subject of memory.

Herodotus’s travelling companions, his slaves, must have been important to him. They could not only confirm what he was told; they were also a very particular kind of memory for him — a living one.

They were carriers of memory. But although the memory of people in those days was far more alive and capacious than ours — because it was more exercised — Herodotus struggles constantly with the problem of how far he can trust the stories he hears. That is why he gives different versions, notes that he is not certain of what he is saying at that moment, that he heard it from some priest. And he names him, reveals the source of the information, sometimes adding that the information he obtained does not seem probable to him.

Have you ever caught Herodotus out in a lie?

It would not be right to speak of a lie; rather of a mistake or of something left unsaid. The discoveries of scholars, above all archaeologists, keep confirming his descriptions, which are often very precise. For Herodotus, whenever he could, checked the stories he had heard. When he learned of the pyramids he made his way there, in terrible heat, sometimes on foot, to see them with his own eyes. And that was a mere thousand kilometres. In those days!

You too write about the improbable heat in Khartoum, which made it impossible to cross to the other side of the street, let alone go on longer expeditions. Were you never tempted, in such conditions, to give up on checking information and give your imagination a little rein?

Never, because that would have been the end of me as a reporter. What is more, with the means of communication available in Africa in the 1960s, the only way of checking what was going on was to come to the scene. Besides, the characteristic feature of all war communiqués — all of them — is lying. All sides in a war lie, and very cynically. One English historian wrote a book about the 1972 Arab-Israeli war in which he showed, by adding up the figures in both sides’ communiqués, that the losses reported were almost three times greater than the strength of the armies fighting. For instance, the destruction of 600 tanks was reported, although only 260 took part in the operations in total.

Another important book, The First Casualty, was written by my friend Philip Knightley, also a journalist. It argues that the first casualty of every conflict is always the truth. The author set out a chronicle of events from the Crimean to the Vietnam war, comparing what happened with what was written. It is appalling how far the picture of every war is falsified in relation to what is actually going on. The first move of commanders and general staffs is to cut off the press, to keep journalists out, because they might verify the content of the communiqués issued. In war the only certain way of verifying information is to check it yourself on the spot. And I did that many times. When it was said in Angola that some town had been taken, I would go there and find that it was untrue, that it was still in the other side’s hands. And the only proof of the truth of my words was to attest it with my own person, my own presence — I was there, I filed my copy from there. As for fantasising: reality is far more fascinating than the best invention.

You do not have to convince me, but I shall insist that there is a limit to human endurance, a fear of danger, a fear of death. That is something a reporter, since Herodotus’s day, has had to cope with.

There are things one does out of one’s own need. Nobody forces you. Even in journalism there is no compulsion to become a correspondent; one can take up something else, or not even leave one’s desk. There are specialisations that contain no element of effort or risk. But there is no shortage of people drawn to this kind of work, who find it a passion. It cannot be defined in categories of rationality or material gain.

And do you know that I always toned my writing down, thinking that if I wrote it as it really was they would not believe me and would say I was making it up? I deliberately cut back the adjectives, greyed the description, impoverished it — and reality was far more dramatic, far more terrible. But a person who had not been in contact with it would have accused me of exaggeration, of invention. So my efforts went in the opposite direction: to make the picture as acceptable as possible.

Writing without adjectives was presumably forced on you by working for a press agency.

That was indeed a good school of concision, terseness, concreteness. Starting with the most prosaic matter: if one word in a dispatch cost half a dollar, and I had fifty dollars to describe, say, some coup d’état, then I had to write a hundred words, no more. And I need hardly convince you how scarce hard currency was in those days.

Money — an important matter. In “Travels” you describe your first expedition, to India. It was 1956, war had just broken out in the Middle East over Suez, where our ship the “Batory” was stranded — the ship on which you were to return to Poland from Bombay. I can picture you: a very young journalist from a communist country, with no knowledge of the language and with his money running out.

I lived very poorly, and in India and in Africa one can survive on very little. I never had any particular requirements, culinary ones for instance, so I managed. And at that point in India I simply waited. A young man has inexhaustible reserves of optimism in him.

In fact money is not the greatest problem in a reporter’s work. It becomes important only once you have adopted a high standard of living. An American writer has to earn a million dollars; I do not. He has to have villas in Florida and California; I do not. He travelled the world with a whole retinue; I was on my own.

But a Western correspondent with his own office and plenty of money could organise a network of informants, had translators, guides and guaranteed means of communication. You, as you write, for a time did not even have access to a radio. It beggars belief.

They are incomparable things. Today we have the opposite problem: then there was a lack of information from a given place; now there is a surfeit of it and a correspondent has 115 versions of the same event in front of him.

And the result is that he sits in front of the television, hooked up to the internet, with a mobile phone in his hand. And his belly grows.

That is why reportage is dying out, which I regret. After years one does not remember surnames, place names, dates — but one remembers some scene, some image, a meeting by a fire, say, or a conversation in the shade of a mango tree.

From Maoist China, though, you brought back no descriptions of such meetings. Perhaps even Herodotus could not have managed there?

That is a very abstract question.

You yourself wrote about the Great Wall of China and about the millions of lesser walls raised there around every individual.

Indeed, the six months I spent in that China was a dreadful experience for me.

You no longer had language difficulties, since you communicated in Russian, but the trouble was that, under constant surveillance, you could effectively do nothing on your own account. Was no material, no reportage from China, demanded of you?

I had the comfort of nothing being demanded of me. I went out under a journalistic exchange between “Sztandar Młodych”, where I worked, and the Beijing editorial office of “Zhongguo”. We were then going through a short-lived warming of Polish-Chinese relations. But extraordinarily important things were happening in my newsroom — “Po prostu” had just been closed, and our team stood in solidarity with the weekly Gomułka had liquidated. So nobody had a mind for Chinese affairs, and I was forgotten.

The direction of your first trips seems to have been accidental and entirely beyond your control.

Because I very much wanted to go anywhere at all. I went to India, though I had been thinking of Czechoslovakia. I had not been anywhere, after all, had seen nothing.

It was more the crossing of a border itself than any particular country that mattered to you.

Those borders worked on the imagination: the empty fields, the wire entanglements. Another world.

In your case a reporter’s experience was to bear fruit in many books, once classified as literary non-fiction. That whole division within literature has turned out to be too contrived.

A very great deal has changed — practically everything. Reportage emancipated itself, and to such a degree that today newspapers do not want to print it; they cut reportage to a minimum. A different form has won, more informational, smaller in scale, and reportage has found its place in literature, which has even taken on certain organisational forms. For instance, for a second year now, together with Günter Grass, I am an honorary chairman of the Lettre Ulysses Award, a prize patronised by the German edition of “Lettre Internationale” and called, perhaps with some exaggeration, the Nobel of reportage. In any case the total of the prizes — last year’s laureate was Anna Politkovskaya for her reportage from Chechnya — exceeds a hundred thousand euros. This year, in Berlin, I shall be presenting the prize to the second laureate in its history. And I noticed on that occasion that among the candidates for the Lettre Ulysses Award there is not a single journalist employed by any newsroom or agency.

They all work on their own account?

Yes. They have their publishers, who give them money for their journeys, or they look for and find sponsors. They travel the world and write books, extracts from which appear in magazines. But nobody is on a salary, though many of them began work in newsrooms, from which they fled at the first moment they achieved some measure of material independence. On the other hand, volumes of reportage are published by writers — Andrzej Stasiuk, for instance, whose latest book Jadąc do Babadag came out of a reporter’s design. The genre we call literary reportage, and which in English is called literary journalism or new journalism, has entirely detached itself from its original source, the newspaper.

One has to get used to that and count on good books by reporter-writers. But I do rather miss the deeper reporting one waits for so eagerly when events such as those recently in Ossetia occur.

One cannot expect literary reportage from today’s correspondents. They are set tasks of immediacy and instantaneousness, which they have to meet. So they transmit an image and a piece of information as fast as possible; we wait in vain for the background, for the depth of the event being shown. Newsrooms look different today too. In my day, when I came into the office the editor-in-chief would tear into me, asking what I was doing there and when I was going to get down to work. My coming into the office was equivalent to my not working. I was permitted to bring in material, put it on the boss’s desk and clear off at once. And now, I hear, journalists sit around in newsrooms all day.

We have the internet, email and telephones at our disposal, and by making use of these blessings of modern technology we ought to be producing better and better newspapers.

Journalists ring me from Buenos Aires or Toronto, wanting to conduct an “interview by phone”. I never agree, on principle. For me an interview is an interaction, a conversation — as with you at this moment — face to face.

On that point I agree with you. It turns my stomach when, asking for a conversation, I hear: “Perhaps you could send me an email with the questions, and I shall answer them and send them straight back — by email, naturally.” But, comparing the journalism of the past with that of today, I recalled what you said earlier: that the communiqués of every war lie. And my knowledge of Iraq, after listening to hundreds of reports from Camp Babylon, has not increased one jot.

There is a fundamental difference between a reporter and a correspondent filing bulletins. The latter is needed to transmit immediate information — and the former? I do not want to speak about this, but today in Iraq a reporter with a Polish passport can be in serious trouble as the representative of an occupying country. A pity, because Iraq — a multinational, multi-religious country — is going through very deep changes at present, and what is happening there is enthralling. But I would not count on interesting reportage from there by Polish authors.

One more paradox. On one side we have cameras, flashbulbs, highly advanced communications technology and a helpless correspondent who knows next to nothing. On the other we can picture Herodotus travelling with his guide from settlement to settlement, talking with people, listening to their stories, writing them down, and then arranging those stories into one great “Histories”.

There will always be a certain group of people — readers, listeners, viewers — suffering from a hunger for knowledge, a hunger for depth, whom the superficiality of an account will not merely fail to satisfy but will irritate. What they are looking for they will find neither in fiction nor in news. That sphere of knowing the world, of feeling and living it, can be encompassed only by literary reportage. By nothing else.

Interview by Krzysztof Masłoń