For 40 years, the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński, who died in January at age 74, was, as John le Carré called him, the “conjuror extraordinary of modern reportage.” His subject was the postcolonial world—its wars, madnesses, corruptions, and sufferings. Most famous for his powerful explorations of African conflicts in The Soccer War, The Shadow of the Sun, and Another Day of Life, Kapuściński also pondered the nature of empire in books on the Soviet Union, Ethiopia, and Iran. No matter where he wandered, there was always a kinetic, restless quality to his prose, a lean style that perfectly translated the intense inquisitiveness of a perpetual mover, a nomad on the wing.
Only now, however, in the unexpectedly posthumous Travels with Herodotus (Knopf), does Poland’s (and, possibly, the world’s) greatest foreign correspondent reflect upon the idea of travel itself: not as a pleasant diversion, but as the investigative duty of a curious intellect unsettled and fascinated by history’s fickle cruelties. Kapuściński finds his alter ego in Herodotus, the most gossipy, engaging, and footloose of ancient chroniclers, the man whose Histories captured all the alien richness of the cultures surrounding the Greek world. Where we might savor Thucydides for his penetrating analyses on the dust-ups between Athens and Sparta, Herodotus is more like a favorite companion: a talkative, kindly, charming dinner-party guest who sits next to you and talks your ear off about the things he has witnessed—or, in Herodotus’ case, heard through a hundred grapevines.
Kapuściński got his first copy of Herodotus in 1956, a gift from Irena Tarłowska, his boss at the Warsaw daily Sztandar Młodych (“The Banner of Youth”), where he worked as a junior reporter. In a society ruled by the censor, like Communist Poland, Herodotus beguiles because, as our author explains, his work is a labyrinth of allusions, and allusiveness is a quality that people living under dictatorship instinctively understand. “The Histories consists of nine books,” Kapuściński notes approvingly, “and each one is allusions heaped upon allusions.” But there is also the charm of the exotic, of crossing borders. Tarłowska, in fact, gave him the book as she sent him off on his first foreign assignment (and first venture outside the Eastern Bloc), to India. Thereafter, Kapuściński carried Herodotus almost everywhere: to India, to China, then on to the Congo, Tanzania, Iran, and finally to Halicarnassus in what is now Turkey, the formerly Greek city where Herodotus was born circa 485 B.C.
Kapuściński alternates snapshots from these prodigious travels with the great drama that preoccupied Herodotus: the clash of East and West. Herodotus’ most famous ethnological excursion was to Egypt, but his focus was
the series of wars between the Greeks and the Persians that began in 547 B.C. with the ill-fated campaign of Croesus, the Greek king of Lydia, against Cyrus the Great. The wealthy Greek dictator had consulted the oracle of Delphi before attacking the Persians, got the thumbs-up, and promptly lost. Cyrus captured him and threw him on a bonfire, but Croesus was saved by a rainstorm. The two tyrants then became friends. Cyrus took Croesus along on his own doomed campaign against the fearsome Massagetae, known for their martial skill with the battle-axe, during which the Persian king was killed. The changeable fortunes of history (and we owe the word history largely to Herodotus): This is the idée fixe of both writers.
