Quotes of the Day

As a 24-year-old reporter for a Warsaw youth newspaper, Ryszard Kapuscinski had never set foot outside Poland. Then, one day in 1956, his editor called him in and said he would be going to India as the paper's first foreign correspondent. Almost as an afterthought, the editor handed him "a present for the road" — a Polish translation of Herodotus' The Histories. For the next four decades, that book was the journalist's traveling companion through war, peace and journalism in Asia, Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe. As Kapuscinski writes in the newly published English translation of Travels with Herodotus, "I was quite consciously trying to learn the art of reportage, and Herodotus struck me as a valuable teacher."

That he was. The Greek writer traveled throughout the known world 25 centuries ago, describing its tribes and nations in all their diversity, and chronicling their many wars with an air of humanity and sadness. Herodotus was one of the first classical writers to leave the comfort of the agora, Kapuscinski says, and thus should be viewed "as a visionary on a world scale, an imagination capable of encompassing planetary dimensions — in short, as the first globalist."

Kapuscinski was a globalist too — and one of the most intrepid reporters since Herodotus. Before his death in January at age 74, he had been jailed 40 times, witnessed 27 coups and revolutions, survived four death sentences, contracted tuberculosis, cerebral malaria and blood poisoning, and was once doused with benzene and nearly set ablaze. "I was driving along a road from where they say no white man can come back alive," he wrote of that incident, in war-torn Nigeria. "I was driving to see if a white man could, because I had to experience everything for myself."

When he wasn't risking immolation for the Polish Press Agency, his longtime employer, Kapuscinski wrote books blending reportage, philosophical musings and novelistic grace. He remains a national hero to many in Poland, where he has been the subject of radio and TV documentaries, as well as Andrzej Wajda's 1978 feature film Rough Treatment. Salman Rushdie called his work "an astonishing blend of reportage and artistry." John le Carré hailed him as "the conjurer extraordinary of modern reportage."

Sometimes he was more conjurer than chronicler. Kapuscinski's writings, especially those on his beloved Africa, have inspired torrents of objections and corrections. His first best seller, The Emperor — an impressionistic 1978 account of the last days of Ethiopia's Haile Selassie — contains dozens of factual errors and improbable characters, like the former palace employee whose sole job for 10 years was to use a satin cloth to wipe urine from the shoes of visiting dignitaries set upon by the emperor's pet dog.

Still, these liberties do little to blunt the book's power as literature — or, perhaps more important, as an allegory of Kapuscinski's own communist-era Poland. Indeed, as The Emperor was going to press, the Polish government approved an extravagant flood-control program for the Vistula River; the author phoned in a new passage about a costly dam built by Selassie. "Everything is a metaphor," Kapuscinski once said. "My ambition is to find the universal."

More recently, Kapuscinski has been accused of spying for the very communists he satirized. Citing documents in the former secret police archives, Newsweek Polska reported last month that Kapuscinski agreed to pass along information to Poland's spy agency between 1967 and 1972, probably as a condition for being allowed to travel abroad. Such deals were not uncommon for Polish journalists under the Soviet-backed regime, and in one document his handlers complain that he never gave them anything of value. With Kapuscinski unavailable for comment, the spying allegations will remain a cloud over his career. But he was acutely aware of his journalistic critics and, though he never confessed to inaccuracy, spoke of pursuing a truth that transcended mere facts. "There are so many complaints," he once said. "Kapuscinski never mentions dates, Kapuscinski never gives us the name of the minister, he has forgotten the order of events. All that, of course, is exactly what I avoid. If those are the questions you want answered, you can visit your local library, where you will find everything you need: the newspapers of the time, the reference books, a dictionary."

Kapuscinski's work is itself something of a library, including more than two dozen volumes of biography, reportage, memoir, poetry and photography, translated into nearly 30 languages. The Emperor was the first in a projected trilogy about dictators. The second installment, Shah of Shahs, traces the rise and fall of Iran's Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. Kapuscinski labored for years on a third volume, about Uganda's Idi Amin, but apparently could not find words for his excesses. When the Soviet Union foundered in the late 1980s, he abandoned Amin and headed for Moscow. The result, Imperium, is a perceptive travelogue-memoir of living under communism and watching it collapse. Another Day of Life is a harrowing account of the 1970s Angolan civil war; The Shadow of the Sun contains the best of the author's Africa reporting; and The Soccer War recounts, among other idiocies, the lethal, football-inflamed 1969 spat between Honduras and El Salvador.

Missing from that list are works dealing with the developed West. Kapuscinski's sympathies lay with the wretched of the earth — the patient, plodding masses of countries suffused with sunshine and suffering. He began his career at a time when former colonies in Asia and Africa were gaining their independence: a big story for a communist-bloc press agency. Besides, Poland had itself been kicked around by imperial powers, so Kapuscinski knew what it was like — as he wrote in The Shadow of the Sun — "to have nothing, to wander into the unknown and wait for history to utter a kind word."

That may be why he found Herodotus good company. Travels is actually two interwoven stories: Kapuscinski's account of working in India, China, Egypt, Sudan, Congo and Ethiopia; and Herodotus' colorful observations on customs and conflicts in the equally exotic lands he visited. (Like Kapuscinski, he was accused of exaggerating for effect.) From Herodotus, Kapuscinski says he learned that "each culture requires acceptance and understanding, and that to understand it one must first come to know it."

The Greek's main subject is the costly, misguided 5th century B.C. war in which invading Persian forces were eventually repulsed by a united Athens and Sparta. Kapuscinski gets hooked by his ancient predecessor's storytelling skills. "As I immersed myself increasingly in Herodotus' book, I identified more and more, emotionally and cognitively, with the world and events that he recalls," writes Kapuscinski. "I felt more deeply about the destruction of Athens than about the latest military coup in the Sudan, and the sinking of the Persian fleet struck me as more tragic than yet another mutiny of troops in Congo." But Herodotus does more than report — he also imparts a lesson that modern-day rulers should heed. "Whoever first starts a war," warns Kapuscinski, "in Herodotus' opinion commits a crime [and] will be revenged upon and punished, be it immediately or after the passage of time."

Kapuscinski, who suffered from cancer for many years, ran out of time before he could write a long-envisioned book on his Polish homeland. But from the apartment he and his pediatrician wife Alicja shared in a working-class district of Warsaw, he pounded out articles and gave interviews right up to his final hospitalization. In contrast to Kapuscinski's astounding output, Herodotus left only The Histories. In its opening passage, the ancient scribbler declares that his purpose in writing — stunningly ambitious for the era — is "to prevent the traces of human events from being erased by time." The Histories, concludes Kapuscinski, is an "expression of man's struggle against time, against the fragility of memory ... If he doesn't write down what he has learned and experienced, that which he carries within him will perish when he does." Thus, the world's first true reporter and his modern traveling companion share both a goal and a legacy.

• DONALD MORRISON
• In his parting memoir Ryszard Kapuscinski honors the ancient Greek who went everywhere with him