CIVIL SOCIETY
6/15/07
A EurasiaNet Book Review by Elizabeth Kiem
Travels with Herodotus
Ryszard Kapuscinski
Knopf, June 11, 2007
288 pp.
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Ryszard Kapuscinski is identified in his author bio as "Poland’s most celebrated foreign correspondent," which is a bit like calling Herodotus "Helicarnassus" most famous father of history." Origins are slightly less relevant than destination for both the Greek and the Pole, and both have defined their lives by leaving home.
Kapuscinski is one of the 20th century’s great chroniclers. For three decades he traveled the third world, an eyewitness to Africa’s independence, Latin America’s conflict, Iran’s revolution, and dozens of political upheavals and popular movements. A skilled reporter, Kapuscinski’s real talent was in harnessing the news of the day, and placing it not only in historical context, but also fitting it into a broader philosophy of man.
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| Travels with Herodotus, Ryszard Kapuscinski, Knopf, June 11, 2007, 288 pp. |
Travels with Herodotus is a reflection on the journalist’s trade. As Kapuscinski’s first posthumous book (he died early this year), it is less informative than works like Shah of Shahs or Imperium, and also less cohesive. The travels in question do not follow those of the ancient Greek in geography – only a few dozen pages tell of Kapuscinski’s time in Mediterranean or Near Eastern ports – instead, the book focuses on Herodotus’ method, his motivation, and his curiosity.
"How does Herodotus work?" Kapuscinski asks. "How does he travel?"
These sound like rhetorical questions at first, and indeed, they set up the larger discussion of the role of the foreign correspondent and the author’s personal retrospective. But in the mid-1950’s, the confluence of two events in Kapuscinski’s life made answers to these questions imperative: the first was the decision of his editors to send him, a rookie reporter, to India. The second was the publication of The Histories into Polish. For Cold War dispatches from a none-too-near abroad, Kapuscinski would turn to a fifth century BC guide to help him work and to help him travel.
Finding Herodotus’ relevance even in the post-Stalin thaw is a promising start to Travels, which shuttles between memoir, theory, and lengthy synopses of the events in Herodotus’ The Histories.
In India, Kapuscinski experiences his first recognition of a difficulty that Herodotus would have known even more acutely: "I understood nothing. … Language struck me at that moment as something material, something with a physical dimension, a wall rising up in the middle of the road and preventing my going further, closing off the world, making it unattainable." This frustration is in response to his battles not with Hindi, but with English, a language that he conceivably shared with some of the locals. Underlying this recollection of an early humiliation, one can hear the author asking, "What would Herodotus do?"
But Kapuscinski’s debt to Herodotus goes beyond work tips and inspiration, and sometimes muddies his tale. Revisiting 20th century conflicts in Africa, still accompanied by the book that has become his talisman, the threads weaving modern and ancient begin to fail. The book’s midsection tries to digest the fall of an Ethiopian Emperor and the rise of opposition guerilla armies in Somalia and Eritrea, while recapping the Greco-Persian War. Kapuscinski argues the logic of the irony: "I felt more deeply about the destruction of Athens … and the sinking of the Persian fleet struck me as more tragic than yet another mutiny in Congo. The world I was experiencing was not only the African one, about which I was supposed to be writing …, but also that one which far from here vanished hundreds of years ago." It is clearly more difficult to maintain the same level of interest in his retold tales than it is in his original reporting.
More problematic, to some critics, are indications that Kapuscinski may have shared with Herodotus a tendency to embroider his nonfiction. Recent rebukes found in The Times Literary Supplement and in Slate.com take the author to task for unsubstantiated or even unsubstantiatable reporting. If these accusations are true, it is one of the more unfortunate attributes borrowed from his predecessor, who wrote great tales about well-bred cannibals and deluded tyrants, none of them accountable to ancient fact-checkers.
Travels with Herodotus is not Kapuscinski’s best book. It suffers from both too little and too much concept. In many ways, its thesis is fundamental: great journalism will reveal great histories, but only if you expend shoe leather, cross borders, ask questions and sit quietly. But the book also links the author too closely to his mentor. Herodotus was the first multi-culturalist, asserts Kapuscinski, a "globalist" of the same mettle as today’s most successful travel writers. One wants to appreciate the author’s testament, but it means overlooking the implication of his lauding "a man possessed by a craving, a bug, a mania for knowledge, and endowed, furthermore with intellect and powers of written expression."
It shouldn’t be Kapuscinski’s job to trumpet great travel writers. Just as it never was Herodotus’.
Editor’s Note: Elizabeth Kiem is a freelance writer based in New York.
Posted June 15, 2007 © Eurasianet
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