"Reportage in time" — a review of "Travels with Herodotus"

Author: Robert Pieńkowski source: PANI monthly, no. 12/2004 date: 2004-12-01 ——————————————————————–

They are separated by a gulf of two and a half thousand years. They are joined by a passion for knowing. Ryszard Kapuściński and his “experienced, wise guide” Herodotus.

A legend of Polish and world reportage — that is how people speak of Ryszard Kapuściński, now seventy-two. He has been travelling since 1956, when as a freshly minted student of the history faculty he made his name with a series of pieces from Nowa Huta. As a kind of reward for that achievement he was sent on a foreign assignment — to Beijing. Since then he has crossed the world tirelessly as a correspondent. “I have never in my life been on holiday and I have never travelled as a tourist,” the writer admits. He has visited Asia, Africa and the Middle East, bringing back the stories of people caught in the gears of history.

In his latest book, Travels with Herodotus, he has revealed the secret that makes his reportage so different, so memorable. That secret is a fascination, present since the beginning of his work as a journalist, with the writing and the life of Herodotus, the fifth-century-BC author of the monumental Histories. “There were periods when expeditions into the past drew me more than my current journeys as a correspondent and reporter,” he writes.

We do not know a great deal about Herodotus. His biographers hold that he was born between 490 and 480 BC in Halicarnassus, an important port city on the coast of Asia Minor. He had an uncle, a poet named Panyassis. It was probably he who developed his nephew’s love of writing and revealed to him the secrets of rhetoric and of the art of storytelling — the fruit of which is the mastery of language in the Histories. His father and uncle, participants in an unsuccessful revolt against Lygdamis, the tyrant of Halicarnassus, had to take refuge on the mountainous island of Samos. From there, presumably, Herodotus began his journeys across the world then known, gathering countless pieces of information about the history, customs and traditions of various peoples. What was the purpose? The Greek explains it himself: “Herodotus of Halicarnassus here presents the results of his enquiries, so that neither the deeds of men should fade from memory with the passage of time, nor the great and admirable works accomplished by Greeks or by barbarians pass without echo — and, among other things, explaining in particular why they made war on one another.”

It is interesting that the Greek word historia meant, in Herodotus’s day, something like “enquiries” or “investigations”. And that, Kapuściński holds, corresponded better to the author’s intentions than the present-day Polish rendering of the title as Dzieje.

Many unknowns shroud Herodotus’s life, but Kapuściński tries to bring the reader closer to the man and to his craft: “In the ideal sense we never have to do with real history, but always with a history that has been told, presented — history as, on someone’s account, it was; history as someone believes it to have been. That truth is perhaps Herodotus’s greatest discovery.” The writer calls his spiritual mentor the father of reporters. For it was Herodotus who first diagnosed the problem of the world’s division into East and West, and the conflicts between Europe and Asia arising from it, which — as it turns out — have divided the two continents for millennia. The story of the war between Greece and Persia forms the main axis of Herodotus’s work, but he does not stop at recounting it; he tries by every possible means to reach the sources of that division.

Kapuściński also tells of his own journeys: to China, where he could not understand the boundless obedience of the masses; to India, which overwhelmed him with the multitude of its gods and their worshippers; to a postcolonial Africa torn by civil wars. “But was I right to try to escape in time? Did it make any sense? For in the end we find there the very thing we thought we could escape from,” Kapuściński asks himself about his passion for reading Herodotus. In answering these questions he quotes one passage of the Histories after another. Through the collision of the two reporters’ accounts we learn how little the human being has changed. Is the Persian king Darius, seized with a mania of greatness, not like today’s dictators; and could Tomyris, the queen of the Massagetae, raging with grief after her son’s death, not be a suffering Frances Shand Kydd after the loss of Diana?

Time flows on inexorably, and it only seems to us that we change as the world around us does.