Kapuściński's "Travels with Herodotus" is now in the bookshops

Author: Jarosław Mikołajewski source: Gazeta Wyborcza date: 2004-09-30 ——————————————————————–

From Friday, Ryszard Kapuściński’s latest book, “Travels with Herodotus”, is in the bookshops. His prose is a genre in itself. Inimitable.

When Kapuściński sets out on a journey — physical movement, conversation, story — nobody knows where the road will lead him. There is method in that unpredictability, and a mark of personality. There is also that particular quality of his writing, its refusal to stay inside a genre. A quality that makes it impossible to call him merely a reporter, a traveller or a historian.

Kapuściński’s latest book is as unpredictable as it is possible to be. True, it begins in an explicable way — with memories of Professor Bieżuńska-Małowist’s lectures at the University of Warsaw in 1951. But a moment later, when the author arrives at the professor’s “monotonous voice” and at “a hundred young people, most of whom do not know that Solon was great”, all assumptions give way to that pietas which is the real engine of Kapuściński’s narrative.

To the devil with ancient history, with Salamis and Themistocles. “My neighbour on the left,” the reporter writes, “was Z., a gloomy, silent lump of a lad from a village near Radomsko where, as he told it, they keep a piece of dried sausage in the house as medicine and give it to an infant to suck when it falls ill…”

The author stops at his own character, at poverty, then returns to the professor and her story in order to move on to Herodotus and to the difficulties of publishing the Histories in Poland before Stalin’s death. And to the allusions one could then detect in Herodotus. Until he reaches the very heart of the Histories, and we think that from now on it will be about nothing else. Or will it?

We set out

Our Herodotus lasts only a page and a half at this point — literally a moment — because after that moment Kapuściński begins the story of how he came into possession of the book, finally published in 1955, given to him by the editor-in-chief of “Sztandar Młodych”, where he was then working. And of his first assignment as a reporter.

And so, without noticing, we surface from the currents of reading already on the road, on a plane to Rome, then in India, in China, in Egypt, in Iran, with the same Herodotus under our arm that he received from his superior; and being Kapuściński we are also Herodotus, and at the same time inhabitants of antiquity, of the 1960s and of the beginning of the twenty-first century; and although not a single line lets us infer where we shall be or who we shall be a moment later, we finally begin to understand what Travels with Herodotus is, who Herodotus is, who Kapuściński is, and on what journey they are taking us.

There are books, and lives described in those books, that begin once and for all after some barrier is crossed or some magic formula pronounced; and however wild those lives may be, in the light of that opening incantation they become obvious and harmonious.

How a consciousness was born

Kapuściński sets out on his journeys with all his inner borders at once, ready for the encounter with the borders that lie outside, and with a great desire to cross them. All he has with him is who he is, and a book — Herodotus’s Histories. When he meets Indians he runs into the border of language, so he tries to remove that border within himself and learns English. And he runs into the next border: he realises that the English he is beginning to use is a language comprehensible to a handful of Indians. When he arrives in China that border is clearer still. And yet borders must be crossed. How? Who knows — perhaps Herodotus writes about that.

When Kapuściński travels the world as a reporter he is alone, immersed in a foreign linguistic and cultural reality. He has with him a single ally who speaks his language — the Polish edition of Herodotus. And so, in solitary travel, amid constant questions about hidden meanings and about practical solutions (the problem of language, of gaining an interlocutor’s trust, of survival), a reading of the Histories is born as a conversation with a man present only through his account from millennia ago.

That, too, is how Kapuściński’s consciousness as a reporter is born. In the travelling Herodotus the author of The Shadow of the Sun finds himself — a reporter who in his books shows the world only the spoils, leaving in the back room, behind the spoken word, the solitude, the torment of the journeys, the failures of understanding, the discomfort, the method of obtaining information.

And then, unexpectedly, through a sense of humble brotherhood with the great Greek, he finds a language for a book devoted to something entirely new — the very work of a discoverer of people and cultures.

Ryszard Kapuściński, “Podróże z Herodotem”, Znak, Cracow