Kapuscinski

[David Powelstock]

I thought some SEELANGers might be interested in this appreciation of
Ryszard Kapuscinski, which appeared in today's NY Times.
 
David
David Powelstock
Asst. Prof. of Russian & East European Literatures
Chair, Program in Russian & East European Studies
Brandeis University
GRALL, MS 024
Waltham, MA  02454-9110
781.736.3347 (Office) 
 
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Ryszard Kapuscinski 
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG

Where does the truth of history lie? In coups and revolutions, in wars and
treaties and the chronicles of our textbook heroes and antiheroes? Or does
it lie in the pulse of ordinary life, in a dailiness that looks almost
hallucinatory if you venture outside it? I think of Ryszard Kapuscinski, who
died at 74 on Jan. 23, as an emissary between those two versions of history.
His writing life divides between the conventional reporting he did for the
Polish press agency PAP — a voluntary slavery, as he described it, that made
the whole world available to him — and the literary journalism that has
found its way into books like “Imperium,” “The Soccer War” and “The
Emperor.”

He was both witness and reporter, and an enduring reminder of the fact that
the two are not the same.

In October 2003, Mr. Kapuscinski gave a talk in Berlin called “Herodotus and
the Art of Noticing.” The art of noticing is a fine phrase, in part because
it implies the writer’s presence in the midst of what he is observing. But
for Mr. Kapuscinski the art of noticing also says something about language.
“How could I describe a jungle in the language of the press?” he asked.

Mr. Kapuscinski lived in a kind of journalistic exile, always traveling,
always moving on to the next big story, in Africa, Latin America and the
former Soviet Union. Nothing feeds the art of noticing like a sense of
dislocation. And what Mr. Kapuscinski noticed was that the reality of life
as it is lived overwhelms what he called “the everyday language of
information that we use in the media.” 

It is worth resisting the temptation to push Mr. Kapuscinski to the far
literary edge of journalism, to insist on his kinship with writers he
himself named — Capote and Mailer and García Márquez. To me he belongs to
the very heart of this journalistic enterprise because he was such a sound
critic of it. In his work he reminds us again and again how profound our
senses are — what a foundation they are for everything we call intellect —
and how little we remember to use them. 


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