A journey through history

The author’s backgrounding of modern conflicts against the great Greco-Persian war elevates this classic from being a mere journal.

Travels With Herodotus

The most compelling part of the Polish writer Ryszard Kapuscinski’s final book, Travels with
Herodotus, has to be his description, based on Herodotus’ writing, of the great Greco-Persian war waged almost 2,500 years ago. The breathtaking views of Scythian hordes and their horses, the landscapes of Asia Minor on which these battles were fought and Kapuscinski’s backgrounding of modern conflicts against these ancient wars elevates the book from mere reminisces of a long and storied journalism career into a compelling journey through history.

In Kapuscinski’s telling, his editor handed him a copy of Herodotus’ The Histories when he left Poland for India in the late 1950s on his first foreign assignment. Over the next half century, as he travelled the world reporting on wars and dictators and countries coming out from under the yoke of colonialism, it was to Herodotus that Kapuscinski turned for understanding and guidance.

Kapuscinski was born in 1932 in Pinsk, then part of the Second Polish Republic and now part of Belarus. In the tumult of the war years, his family moved to Warsaw where he went to school and university and started out as a journalist. He eventually joined the Polish Press Agency in 1958 and reported widely from the African continent for several years.

A touch of magic realism

In between his journalism dispatches, Kapuscinski had also started writing books in Polish that served as a mix of memoir and narrative non-fiction. These were not straightforward reported
pieces — rather, he blended history and travelogue and magic realism to capture the strangeness of lands and peoples in flux, caught in the cross-currents of modernisation and tradition. Travels with Herodotus was published in 2004, but mostly dealt with Kapuscinski’s experiences in the 50s and the 60s in the lands that the Greek historian had written about two millennia ago.

Given the preponderance of travelogues and historical narratives from anglophone writers for much of the 20th century, reading Kapuscinski as he travels with Herodotus as a companion provides a refreshing perspective on our world and the long shadow and echoes of wars and conflicts through the centuries.

His own childhood experiences of poverty and war and his adulthood in a communist country allowed Kapuscinski to view the countries he was covering (most of them in the third world) with an empathetic eye. The British authors, who have for so long been acclaimed as the masters of travel writing by the publishing world, very often brought with them the baggage of empire that coloured their observations and interaction with cultures that they’d ruled not too long ago.

It’s not just the post-colonial world that Kapuscinski is able to bring to life in this book, but
Herodotus as well. Not much is known about the man who is credited with fathering the discipline of historiography. His writings, as interpreted by Kapuscinski, show a curious, roving mind that recorded for posterity the comings and goings of the ancient world. Never was there a better match between two writers separated by the gulf of time — and who deserve to be read and re-read now and in the future.

The author is a Bangalore-based writer and communications professional with many published short stories and essays to her credit.

That One Book is a fortnightly column that does exactly what it says — takes up one great classic and tells you why it is (still) great. Come, raid the bookshelves with us.