Travels with Herodotus

Written by a Polish journalist this is a book in two strands. In one he reviews some of his past assignments, in the other he reviews his reading and relationship to Herodotus and his Histories. I enjoyed both. The fish out of water beginner who is entranced by every country he visits becomes a seasoned journalist but still retains some of that wonder. His interpretation of Herodotus was equally fascinating. He examines his technique as well as the content and proposes that Herodotus should be know n as the first journalist and The Histories would be better called The Investigation and is the first piece of reportage. I liked both strands and they way the interlinked.
I must re-read Herodotus.

"Herodotus is by turns surprised, astounded, delighted, terrified by things. To some he simply gives no credence, knowing how easily people can be carried away by fantasy."(p 182)

This was my introduction to the world of Ryszard Kapuscinski. And what an introduction. I was impressed and intrigued with his fine writing style and the way that he was able to interpolate his companion, The Histories of Herodotus, with his youthful travels in India, China, and beyond. Having read Herodotus' work fairly recently this was even more a delight as I marveled at the interpretations Kapuscinski shares with the reader as he travels the world. He comes full circle back to the Mediterranean Sea that was central to Herodotus and the Greeks. Ending with show more a visit to Halicarnassus where Herodotus was born he bridges the time that has passed since that day with a meditation on the meaning of history. I subsequently read his The Shadow of the Sun and look forward to other of Kapuscinski's books show less

The world-traveled Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuścinśki had a special affinity for the ancient Greek historian Herodotus. Herodotus, in Kapuścinśki’s estimation, was himself a world-traveled journalist by the time he wrote his famous Histories. It’s an audacious move to write a memoir in parallel to such a venerable book, but that, thankfully, is just what Kapuścinśki has done in Travels with Herodotus.

Travels with Herodotus is a marvel of concise, open-ended insight—or “outsight,” more accurately, since both Kapuścinśki and Herodotus are concerned more with anthropology than psychology. Travels is also that rare book that teaches writing as it entertains. For teachers, Travels is a curricular field day, bringing show more structure and focus to a wide array of subjects, from science to art, from the ethics of violence to the perplexities of love. For lovers of travel writing, Kapuścinśki has created an engine of armchair transportation that moves through both time and space. For students of the reporter’s craft, Kapuścinśki is patient and profound.

“We depend on others,” he writes: “reportage is perhaps the form of writing most reliant on the collective.” Travels is an unpacking of this idea through a reading of Herodotus, of “how he gathered his raw material and then wove from it his immense and rich tapestry.” This is “precisely the point worth delving into,” and Kapuścinśki’s years of experience as a foreign correspondent give him an immense and rich perspective with which to draw lessons of concise imagination from Herodotus.

What I most admire about this book is the way in which Kapuścinśki doesn’t just respect difference but actively engages with it. Until he died in 2007, Kapuścinśki studied dozens of languages, literatures, folk ways and political systems—cultures—and developed a mature, rational, soulful style capable of bringing the masses to the particular.

Here’s an example from “a small Congolese town” where he reported on life under the gendarmes who practiced “all manner of villainy, brutishness, and bestiality.” Conducting interviews with a group of gendarmes, he thought about what else was present: “a huge swath of world history, which already set us against one another many centuries ago.” Slavery and colonialism have left scars “passed down for years in tribal stories, and the men whom I am about to encounter would have been reared… on legends ending with a promise of a day of retribution.” What happens? Kapuścinśki whips out a pack of cigarettes and they “smoke the entire pack, right away, until not a puff of smoke is left!”

Kapuścinśki writes for learners and with the faith that art, as writing, has the power to transform lives through empathy and shared experience. Such persons are rare, though: “The average person is not especially curious about the world.” The world is a “condition” best dealt with with as little effort as possible. “Whereas learning about the world is labor, and a great, all-consuming one at that.” Whether it’s by way of “curiosity,” “a hunger for experience,” or “an addiction to wonderment,” Kapuścinśki weaves two worlds together, his own twentieth century with Herodotus’s fifth-century B.C., and brings them both to life.

Originally published on Curled Up With A Good Book.

Of related interest: The Landmark Herodotus. show less

I discovered Kapuscinski many years ago through an issue of Granta and told myself I must read more... Not disappointed by this one, though I approached it with some trepidation, thanks to the dreadful Mr Kilner, my soporific history teacher at grammar school when I was 12, when Ancient Greece was on the curriculum. If only we could have had someone like Kapuscinski, who highlights all the juicy bits. Here he relates his early travels as a reporter, sent out raw from Poland to China, Africa and elsewhere, always accompanied by The Histories, which inspired and intrigued him. The writing flows from his pen like an easy-running stream, brilliantly translated (one would never guess it is a translation). Next time I travel I will go with show more Kapuscinski.
This edition (Folio Society) is illustrated with the author's black and white photos. For some reason, American spelling is used, and there are several typos, which I always find annoying in these "fine" editions. show less

One of the magical things about reading is that it puts the reader directly in touch with the mind of the writer. Unfortunately, this is only a one-way street. But Ryszard Kapuscinski has seemingly performed the impossible: He somehow got Herodotus to answer questions about himself that he never directly addressed in his monumental The Histories. We know next to nothing of the facts of Herodotus' life: He came from Halicarnassus, an ancient seaport in western Asia Minor, now Bodrum, Turkey; he abided for a time in Athens where he was unable to obtain citizenship, so he eventually settled in an obscure Greek colony in the inner arch of the foot of Italy called Thurii.

To American readers, at least, Ryszard Kapuscinski (1932-2007) isn't show more exactly a household name. But it turns out that he was one of the most respected international journalists around. In addition to Travels with Herodotus, he wrote books on some very interesting subjects including, for example, The Emperor, about the decline of Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia; Shah of Shahs, about the last days of the Shah of Iran; and Imperium, about the fall of the Soviet Union.

Kapuscinski first heard of Herodotus while attending university in 1951 Poland. This was a time when books were not readily available as they are now, and even something as seemingly innocuous as a Polish translation of Herodotus' Histories was locked away in a closet before it even got printed. As Kapuscinski wrote:

. . . all of 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?

Herodotus — the Polish version — was finally published in 1955 when a "thaw" was beginning to take place. Kapuscinski got a job with a newspaper and eventually was sent to India as a foreign correspondent. He was given "a present, for the road." It was a copy of Herodotus, The Histories.

Kapuscinski not only carried the book with him, but he actually began to read it! And thus began a lifelong collaboration with the author of this ancient text. Judging from Kapuscinski's manner of storytelling, it would appear that his journalism mimics that of Herodotus in many subtle ways. Some critics who weren't all that enamored of his style of journalism probably didn't understand how it evolved from his study of Herodotus. One writer even dubbed his style "magic journalism," sort of a nonfiction variation on Gabriel Garcia Marquez's magic realism. This is amusing but it entirely misses the point. As Kapuscinski says: "Herodotus's book arose from travel; it is world literature's first great work of reportage. Its author has reportorial instincts, a journalistic eye and ear." Kapuscinski's career as a newspaper's foreign correspondent also arose from travel, and it probably didn't take him long to realize that in Herodotus he had serendipitously been handed access to the perfect prototype of his own budding craft. For him The Histories served as a reporter's handbook.

He began to ask questions: How does Herodotus work? As a diplomat, a spy, a tourist, a wanderer? No. Herodotus was "a reporter, an anthropologist, an ethnographer, a historian." What is the goal of Herodotus' journeys? How does he travel? By analyzing the book from a writer's standpoint, he began to gain insights into his own writing. And here was the key:

One must read Herodotus's book — and every great book — repeatedly; with each reading it will reveal another layer, previously overlooked themes, images and meanings. For within every great book there are several others.

While Kapuscinski had been given the book as a traveling companion, he found eventually that he had been on two journeys — first, as a foreign correspondent; and second, as a traveler with Herodotus on his various journeys of inquiry. In a similar way, through Travels with Herodotus, we are getting to know two fascinating writers and their work. Kapuscinski presents the broad outlines of The Histories in the contexts of his various foreign assignments — among others, in India and China, Congo in the midst of civil war and Algiers in the aftermath of a coup. The circumstances in each locale inform Kapuscinski's reading of Herodotus and conversely, Herodotus' enquiries inform Kapuscinski's reporting of unfolding events.

Through his travels — mostly in the third world — Kapuscinski often found himself in situations that were as primitive as those Herodotus encountered, and this is probably one reason why The Histories resonated for him. But traveling, whether as a reporter or as a mere tourist, has much in common with reading great literature and has profound effects:

A journey, after all, neither begins in the instant we set out, nor ends when we have reached our doorstep once again. It starts much earlier and is never really over, because the film of memory continues running on inside us long after we have come to a physical standstill. Indeed, there exists something like a contagion of travel, and the disease is essentially incurable.

If one finds the prospect of reading The Histories too daunting, one cannot go wrong by dipping a toe into the waters through Travels with Herodotus. This is one of those books . . . show less

18/2021. This is a travel book describing how Ryszard Kapuscinski's reading of ancient Greek author Herodotus influenced his perceptions and writing as a journalist. I've read plenty of travel writing and journalism by foreign correspondents but this book made me think and even provoked one entirely fresh perspective. Sometimes it's useful for journalists and historians to ask questions for curiosity's sake without necessarily expecting those questions to be fully answerable.

Quotes

On border walls, written before 2007: "That is how the world’s energy is wasted. In complete irrationality! Complete futility! For the Great Wall — and it is gigantic, a wall-fortress, stretching for thousands of kilometres through uninhabited mountains show more and wilderness, an object of pride and, as I have mentioned, one of the wonders of the world — is also proof of a kind of human weakness, of an aberration, of a horrifying mistake; it is evidence of a historical inability of people in this part of the planet to communicate, to confer and jointly determine how best to deploy enormous reserves of human energy and intellect."

On war: "In the realm of human affairs, admittedly, one also needs a pretext. It is important to give it the rank of a universal imperative or of a divine commandment. The range of choices is not great: either it is that we must defend ourselves, or that we have an obligation to help others, or that we are fulfilling heaven’s will. The optimal pretext would link all three of these motives. The attackers should appear in the glory of the anointed, in the role of those who have found favour in his chosen god’s eye."

In conclusion: "The past does not exist. There are only infinite renderings of it." show less

One of the finest travel narratives I've read, this book does justice to Herodotus' work with a broad scope, poetic language, and no fear to discover and examine the truths of humanity.