Travels with Herodotus Vintage International

Travels with Herodotus Vintage International

Reviewed by Tahir Shah

A year ago, while on an official visit to Ethiopia, I was given a tour of the Imperial Palace in Addis Ababa by the president. He showed me the treasure vaults in the basement where ancient Ethiopian crowns sit alongside other national treasures, including a vial of moon dust presented by NASA and a signed portrait of JFK, furnished by Jackie O. And I was taken into the bedroom of Emperor Haile Selassie, which has been left untouched in the decades since he was smothered with a pillow during a coup d’etat. On the nightstand were the emperor’s medications, and in his closet a line of starched white uniforms, all in extra small. As I stood there, amazed that the palace’s interior could have escaped the anarchy that had swept the surrounding capital, I found myself wishing that a certain unassuming Polish journalist could be there with me to share the experience.

His name was Ryszard Kapuscinski, and he was a character right out of a Graham Greene novel.

As World War II slipped into the Cold War, developing nations were lured fervently by Washington and Moscow. The front line was often a despotic African state such as Angola or Zaire, or a tumultuous Central Asian republic such as Afghanistan. “Third World” guerrilla conflicts were covered by a hardcore group of Western reporters, most of them backed by legendary expense accounts. But Kapuscinski lived in a world apart. A correspondent for the Polish News Agency, he could hardly afford to file his stories by Telex, let alone hire helicopters or personal security. But unlike his suave competitors at the international networks, he became known for treating the stories he was sent to cover with a gentle sensitivity that was almost unknown in the business. Africa was the cornerstone of his writing life. He considered it his second home. During his long career he observed 27 coups and revolutions and reported from a roll call of hotspots — among them Uganda, Zanzibar and Ethiopia.

Kapuscinski famously kept two notebooks — one for journalism and another for his own form of reportage-based literature. His unique style won him many awards, translations and an enormous international following. He died in January of this year, and his last book, published posthumously in English, is called Travels with Herodotus. The Greek’s 5th-century B.C. Histories, presented to Kapuscinski by his editor as he stepped out on his first foreign assignment, was his traveling companion on almost all his journeys.

Travels with Herodotus is a work of art: so eloquent, so simple, that you find yourself marveling at its prose, its gentle observation and the rhythm of the words. And you find yourself applauding such good translation as well. Kapuscinski reminisces on his first view of the Nile, back in 1960; on his great love, India; and on the time he watched Louis Armstrong play to a bemused audience in the Sudan. “He greeted everyone,” Kapuscinski writes, “raising into the air the hand holding his golden trumpet, and said into the cheap, crackling microphone that he was pleased to be playing in Khartoum, and not only pleased, but downright delighted, after which he broke into his full, loose, infectious laugh. It was laughter that invited others to laugh along, but the audience remained aloofly silent, not quite certain how to behave.”

All through the book, Herodotus is by Kapuscinski’s side, a traveling companion, mentor and trusted friend throughout a long career. He reflects on the Greek historian’s vision of the world he knew, and of the lands through which he himself traveled. My only criticism is that such fine writing doesn’t need a gimmick, if the use of Herodotus’s great work could be construed as that. And of course some may consider this yet another work by an author sometimes regarded as being loose with his facts. Even if Kapuscinski did meddle with the truth from time to time, I would say he understood the subjects of his reportage and their environment in a way that’s rare. For me, this is a travel book that all students of writing and of literature ought to read, not so much to learn what to put into their writing, as to glean what to leave out.

The deeper, tacit message in Travels with Herodotus is surely that journalism now, with its celebrity roving correspondents who jet in and out of conflicts, misses the point. This new brand of reporting never connects with the subtleties and with the people on whose land trials and tribulations fall. Kapuscinski will be remembered for a kind of writing and a standard seldom present in the reportage we read today; just as he will be remembered for a humility, a selflessness, that touched every word he wrote.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

User Ratings and Reviews

2 Stars Seems Dated
I seem to be one of only a few who did not love this book. The author’s observations are insightful and well written. His observations are about countries from the 1950s and very dated. His gift for observing things cannot compensate this, at least not for me.

5 Stars The best book of 2008 (on my list of have-reads)
I am celebrating the first day of 2009 by reviewing the best book I read in 2008. And the winner is — “Travels with Herodotus,” by Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, who died of a fast cancer in early 2007. This book, along with “The Other,” was published posthumously.

Here is a man, landlocked and controlled by communism, whose greatest dream was to cross the border, just go over and return. A couple of years later, his editor sent him to India (!) with a copy of Herodotus’s “Histories.” This book was to accompany Kapuscinski for the rest of his life. And profoundly direct him.

“Travels” is a compilation of commentaries on some of his travels, Herodotus and his book, and its application to his own stories on the road. It is framed in memorable language–clear, vivid, and pictorial.

“He had a gray, ravaged face, covered in wrinkles. A musty, cheap suit hung loosely on this thin, bony frame….Tears were flowing down his cheeks. And a moment later I heard a suppressed but nevertheless distinct sob. “I’m sorry,” he said to me. “I’m sorry. But I didn’t believe that I would return.”

“It was December 1956. People were still coming out of the gulags” (38).

On Amazon’s Product Page, RK’s friend Tahir Shah tells the reader that RK kept two notebooks on his trips. One was for his news stories; the other kept his travel notes that lead to his books. RK reveals his journalist’s mind early on to ask all kinds of questions about Herodotus. What kind of toys did he play with? Who did he sit next to in school? Did his mother hug him goodnight? Where did he die? Under what circumstances? He reveals the journalist’s propensity to ask questions.

When RK visited China for stories, he came to see the Great Wall as a metaphor….”to shut oneself in, fence oneself off” (59). This is the second assignment, the first being India, where RK discovered himself as The Other, which became the title of the second posthumously published book.

In his chapter on memory RK ruminates on what memory is and why Herodotus undertook his vast traveling plans. Because memory is elusive, he wanted to “prevent the traces of human events from being erased by time,” so he set out on his “enqueries,” which RK terms “investigations.” He wanders the world, meeting people, listening to what they tell him, or as RK terms him: Herodotus is the first globalist. But he is also “a reporter, an anthropologist, an ethnographer, a historian” (79). Herodotus is “the first to discover the world’s multicultural nature” and that we must know and embrace “others” (80).

When RK first set out to “cross the border’ of Poland, he had no idea he would cover news in Africa, India, China, Malaysia, Central and South American. And in reading and studying Herodotus, he learns much about the world. In places where he had to wait, he spent it pouring over Herodotus’s words and retells many of the stories therein.

If you saw the movie “300″ with Gerard Butler, you may remember how huge Xerxes was–a literal giant. Herodotus makes no mention of such size, but does describe Xerxes in terms writ large. In other words, Xerxes was larger than life. This story is just one of many that RK retells from Herodotus, each more fascinating than the one before.

“Travels with Herodotus” is rich with details, observations, anecdotes, stories that require crackling fires. It is the story of Ryszard Kapuscinski’s travels, it is the story of Herodotus’s travels. It is must reading and will enrich your life more than you can imagine.

“His [Herodotus's] most important discovery? That there are many worlds. And that each is different. Each is important” (264). We could say that about RK’s work, as well.

5 Stars A great valedictory from a superb author
Ryszard Kapuscinski’s works — often described as “literary reportage” — transcended genres. They blended travel with history, current affairs with political theory, biography with philosophy. And all with wit and sensistivity — a rare and remarkable accomplishment.

So it’s somehow fitting that Kapuscinski’s final book should be the one where he looks back at how his peripatetic life and, for that matter, how his yearning to peer over the horizon (literally and rhetorically) took root in his childhood in a Polish village. Kapuscinski didn’t discover Herodotus until much later (at that point, he notes, the Polish translation was “looked away in a cupboard”, unpublished.) But Herodotus’s pioneering work accompanies him on his first voyage, to India, and he somehow forms a bond with the long-dead adventurer. “Herodotus wanders the world, meets people, listent to what they tell him.” So does Kapuscinski, and both are wide-eyed at their discoveries of new, strange lands. Both — although Kapuscinski is too modest to make such a claim for himself — create memorable prose that capture the imaginations of readers.

In a sense, Kapuscinski, even as he tells stories about his experiences in countries ranging from Egypt to the Congo (and interweaving those with tales from Herodotus), is shedding light on the human urge to roam. “What set him into motion?” he muses of Herodotus. “Made him act? compelled him to undertake the hardships of travel?” The conclusion he reaches might be applied to the author himself, and to any journalist: “The desire to be there, to see it at any cost, to experience it no matter what.”

Thankfully, those of us who won’t have the opportunity or ability to venture into the places that Kapuscinski (or Herodotus) did, or missed a unique chance, can share his (their) experiences through this book — a triumphant final accomplishment by this great writer.

5 Stars Awesome book.
Two stories in one book. One is what Kapuscinski see, second the world in Herodotus eyes. I love his book, because he gives me another perspective on live and I can learn a lot too.

5 Stars Makes you want to read Herodotus
While I read Herodotus many years ago, this book made me dust it off and reread it again. A great book for travellers, and to get you in the mood for your next adventure.

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