Autor:Ian Jack Źródło: Dziennik

No reporter ever brought the world’s trouble spots to life with the vividness of the great Ryszard Kapuscinski. To mark his death this week, Ian Jack recalls his late friend’s ‘passionate curiosity’, and we publish the opening chapter of one of the Polish writer’s most acclaimed works, ‘The Soccer War’

A few years ago a party to celebrate the publication of Ryszard Kapuscinski’s book on Africa was held, properly enough, in the Polish Club in South Kensington. A few of us then walked to dinner with him at a restaurant in Kensington High Street; no more than a luxurious toddle, but someone complained that a taxi would have been a better idea, that it was really quite far. Obviously, said Kapuscinski of the complainant, he never went on a route march with the Polish army in Stalinist times.

A lot of Kapuscinski’s passionate curiosity about the world can be explained by the circumstances of his childhood. He was born in Pinsk, now in Belarus, an isolated town of unmetalled roads. He was seven before he saw his first train and 30 before he owned a telephone. During the terrible hardships of Poland’s German occupation, he and his family subsisted on pastries of flour and water and wore tree bark on their feet rather than shoes. Shoes were always one of his enthusiasms. In 1987, in an interview with Bill Buford, my predecessor at Granta, he said, “I’m obsessed with footwear.”

As Pinsk was to Warsaw, so post-war Poland was to the rest of the world. “Don’t forget that for my generation the outside world didn’t exist,” he told Buford. “Africa and India were fairy tales.” It’s useful to remember this when we think of Kapuscinski’s writing. He came to places fresh, without the preconceptions and cultural baggage of an English or American writer, and he was determined to describe what they were like as vividly as he could.

As a foreign reporter for the Polish Press Agency he saw an awful lot - Africa, South America, Asia, 28 revolutions in the wake of European de-colonisation - but his quick reports couldn’t begin to describe the rich complexity of the reality in front of him. Agency reporters, filing daily, were, as he described them, “terrible victims of information”. His books could never have been written without this experience, but their success as literature is owed to a different side of Kapuscinski. Before he was a reporter, he was a poet and short-story writer: his sentences, with their rhythms and images and careful selection of the persuading detail, could have been written by a fine novelist.

He used to wonder where the novelists were when he covered riots, wars and coups. Why were they all back in Europe tinkering with their “little domestic stories” about marriage and divorce? Why weren’t they here in the thick of it, grappling with the events that mattered? Very few writers answered this call, and he had few rivals in the business of depicting the troubled reality of poor countries and people. (VS Naipaul is one of them, and, perhaps not coincidentally, is from another place, Trinidad, which was well off the beaten track.)

The world to Kapuscinski was silva rerum, the forest of things, and he believed that “to capture it you have to penetrate it as completely as possible”. He came to be known as a literary reporter, but often saw his work more accurately as “literature by foot”. The long march has ended for him, but he has shown us unforgettable views.

źródło: kapuscinski.info