Travels with Herodotus
by Ryszard Kapuscinski, trans. Klara Glowczewska. Allen Lane. Pages 275. 

Ryszard Kapuscinski died in January, aged 74. Travels With Herodotus was originally published in Krakow in 2004, a distinguished addition to a highly distinguished oeuvre, and it has been rendered into very good English by Klara Glowczewska. It is still not clear to me whether the Herodotus text with which Kapuscinski travelled the world was in ancient Greek or modern Polish. Even if the latter, for an amateur (in all senses) Kapuscinski displays a sophisticated appreciation of his source.

This is both a rattling good read, and a superior work of reflective instruction. Of course, Kapuscinski was not just a traveller, any more than Herodotus in the fifth century BCE had been. He was, in the word favoured in this translation, a reporter, and his Herodotus was not only the Father of History (and, truth to tell, some Lies too) but also of Reportage. Travels With Herodotus is riding a pretty tall and powerful wave of both Herodotean scholarship. and of non-academic interest in the man and his work.

Herodotus’s cosmos, though, was very much more circumscribed than Kapuscinski’s, veteran observer of allegedly no fewer than 27 revolutions and coups. (Herodotus would have liked the symbolism of thrice times nine). China, sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America — none was even dreamed of in Herodotus’s philosophy; not to mention the ex-Soviet empire of which Kapuscinski’s Imperium (1994) stands as a towering witness.

Born in Pinsk, now in Belarus, in 1932, Kapuscinski, who placed immense weight on human remembrance, could recollect graphically in that memoir his experiences as a young boy in Poland in 1939.

Here, memory begins to speak in 1951, as the author listens to a lecture by a distinguished Polish historian of ancient slavery, and yet more insistently in 1956, when as an officially accredited journalist on The Banner of Youth he was briefed to undertake an assignment in unimaginably alien and distant India. To accompany him, his editrix presented him with his golden book, his ever-faithful companion to be: a text of Herodotus. Around his reading and exposition of the ancient Greek writer, Kapuscinski weaves in deft past-present counterpoint a series of brilliantly edited accounts of his own journalistic experiences, some almost as trying as those terrifying tales of individual mutilation and mass slaughter that crop up all too readily in the Histories of Herodotus.

And in his fertile imagination, Kapuscinski conjures up for himself, and for us, a vivid vignette of Herodotus the reporter on the road, asking questions, questions, questions. More than this, he has the knack of making us go behind Herodotus’s text, asking of it questions without end. Sadly, even Kapuscinski’s capaciously generous citation of Herodotus cannot find space for the tale to end all his wonderful tales. Once upon a time... (dramatic date about 500 BCE) the Persian Great King Darius summoned representatives of two of the many peoples thronging his multinational capital of Susa in western Iran: Greeks and Indians. He wanted, as an enlightened as well as omnipotent ruler, to carry out a comparative ethnographic experiment involving one of the most deeply identity-laden areas of all human conventions: funerary customs. How much money, Darius first asked the Greeks, must I bribe you with to abandon the custom of your ancestors, that is cremation, and adopt the custom of these Indians here, that is cannibalism of their relatives’ corpses? Don’t even think about it, the Greeks replied indignantly. Asking the same question in reverse of the Indians, Darius received an even more indignant, even more horrified, response.

What is significant is what Herodotus does not say. He does not cast aspersions, as the average Greek in his audience would have done, on the ghastly barbarity of these Indian savages. Instead, with cosmopolitanist evenhandedness, he remarks that this story illustrates how every people always prefers its own traditional customs to those of every other, believing them moreover to be not just relatively superior but absolutely the best.

Kapuscinski, with his animating spirit of cultural humility, would surely endorse that lesson. Other not-so-gentle Herodotean lessons, about revenge, retribution, crime and punishment, might profitably be applied today to any number of global hotspots. His optimistic observation that "We stand in darkness surrounded by light" might well serve as his epitaph. Look to the end, indeed.

From the early 1960s onwards, Kapuscinski published books of increasing literary craftsmanship characterised by sophisticated narrative technique, psychological portraits of characters, a wealth of stylization and metaphor and unusual imagery that serves as means of interpreting the perceived world. Kapuscinski’s best-known book, The Emperor, concerns itself with the decline of Haile Selassie’s anachronistic regime in Ethiopia. Shah of Shahs, on the fall of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran, and Imperium, about the last days of the Soviet Union. In a 2006 interview with Reuters, Kapuscinski said that he wrote for "people everywhere still young enough to be curious about the world."

— By arrangement with The Independent

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