Travels with Herodotus
Ryszard Kapuscinski
Translated by Klara Glowczewska
Allen Lane, 5.25 pounds

The way in which he understands the world is to go to the hot spot, the place where it’s boiling.” Salman Rushdie’s description of Ryszard Kapuscinski fits the man who, in the course of his decades-long career as foreign correspondent extraordinaire, survived and bore witness to over two dozen coups and revolutions across the world. Kapuscinski’s incandescent accounts of historic power shifts — the fall of emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, the collapse of Portuguese colonialism in Angola, the Islamic Revolution that overthrew the last Shah of Iran, and the final days of the Soviet Union — urged readers to look more carefully at the world.

Kapuscinski died this January, aged 74. Travels with Herodotus is his last book, a memoir about his early travels, the struggle with language, and the importance of reading to understand a culture. Books, which were so scarce in post-war Poland during his student days, accompany Kapuscinski throughout his travels. In Old Delhi he picks up a Hemingway novel and a nineteenth-century account of Hindu ways of life. On the streets of Tehran days before the Islamic Revolution, after angry demonstrations have marched past and secondhand booksellers have returned to display their collections, he picks up two albums about Persepolis.

But the volume that he dips into repeatedly during his journeys to India, China, Sudan, the Congo and elsewhere is the account of the Greek historian Herodotus. Seweryn Hammer’s translation of The Histories is gifted to Kapuscinski by his editor just before his first experience of “crossing the border”. The book goes with him on his journeys to the boiling points of the world — amid the emaciated refugees at Calcutta’s Sealdah Station, lying so still that they seem “a lifeless component of this dismal landscape”; to Nasser’s Cairo, at that moment “the hub of Third World liberation movements”; to Africa during the terrible Congolese conflict, where an encounter with two armed gendarmes prompts him to write: “I have only ever felt true loneliness in circumstances such as these — when I have stood alone face-to-face with absolute violent power. The world grows empty, silent, depopulated, and finally recedes.”

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