A passage from Ryszard KapuÅ›ciÅ„ski’s Travels with Herodotus, originally published in Poland in 2004 and just published in English by Knopf. In this excerpt, the author talks about what it was like to read Herodotus–or, more specifically, why one did not have the privilege of reading Herodotus–in Poland in 1951:
The Herodotus manuscript arrived at the press just as Western radio stations began speaking of Stalin’s serious illness. The details were murky, but people were afraid of a new wave of terror and preferred to lie low, to risk nothing, to give no one any pretext, to wait things out…The censors redoubled their vigilance.
But Herodotus? A book written two and a half thousand years ago? Well, yes: because all our thinking, our looking and reading, was governed during those years by an obsession with allusion. Each word brought another one to mind; each had a double meaning, a false bottom, a hidden significance; each contained something secretly encoded, cunningly concealed. Nothing was ever plain, literal, unambiguous–from behind every gesture and word peered some referential sign, gazed a meaningfully winking eye. The man who wrote had difficulty communicating with the man who read, not only because the censor could confiscate the text en route, but also because, when the text finally reached him, the latter read something utterly different from what was clearly written, constantly asking himself: What did this author really want to tell me?
If you’ve never read Kapuscinski, this book is an excellent place to start. Then go back and read Another Day of Life, a heartbreaking memoir about civil war in Angola in 1975, as well as The Shadow of the Sun, an eye-opening collection of essays about post-colonial Africa. You’ll also want to read The Emperor (about Halle Sellasie’s reign in Ethiopia), Imperium and The Soccer War. Kapuscinski’s erudition, compassion, and knowledge of history and its influence on the present, come through in every one of his essays and longer works. I have no doubt that Kapuscinski is one of the most important writers of our time, and I’m always saddened when I speak with other writer–particularly teachers of writing–who have never read him, because he deserves, more than almost any other contemporary journalist and memoirist I know of, to be read and absorbed.
About him, Salman Rushdie wrote, “One KapuÅ›ciÅ„ski is worth more than a thousand whimpering and fantasizing scribblers. His exceptional combination of journalism and art allows us to feel so close to what KapuÅ›ciÅ„ski calls the inexpressible true image of war”.
Kapuściński died in January of this year.