January 24, 2007

Ryszard Kapuscinski, Polish Writer of Shimmering Allegories and News,  
Dies at 74

By MICHAEL T. KAUFMAN
Ryszard Kapuscinski, a globe-trotting journalist from Poland whose  
writing, often tinged with magical realism, brought him critical  
acclaim and a wide international readership, died yesterday in  
Warsaw. He was 74.

His death, at a hospital, was reported by PAP, the Polish news agency  
for which he had worked. No cause was given, but he was known to have  
had cancer.

Mr. Kapuscinski (pronounced ka-poos-CHIN-ski) spent some four decades  
observing and writing about conflict throughout the developing world.  
He witnessed 27 coups and revolutions. He spent his working days  
gathering information for the terse dispatches he sent to PAP, often  
from places like Ougadougou or Zanzibar.

At night, he worked on longer, descriptive essays with phantasmagoric  
touches that went far beyond the details of the day’s events, using  
allegory and metaphors to convey what was happening.

“It’s not that the story is not getting expressed” in ordinary news  
reports, he said in an interview. “It’s what surrounds the story. The  
climate, the atmosphere of the street, the feeling of the people, the  
gossip of the town; the smell; the thousands and thousands of  
elements that are part of the events you read about in 600 words of  
your morning paper.”

 From the 1970s on, these articles appeared in a series of books that  
quickly made Mr. Kapuscinski Poland’s best-known foreign  
correspondent. They later drew international attention in  
translation. The books included “The Soccer War,” which dealt with  
Latin American conflicts; “Another Day of Life,” about Angola’s civil  
war; “Shah of Shahs,” about the rise and fall of Iran’s last monarch;  
and “Imperium,” an account of his travels through Russia and its  
neighbors after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The book that introduced Mr. Kapuscinski to readers and critics  
beyond Poland was a slim one, ostensibly about Ethiopia, which he  
wrote in 1978 and which appeared in English five years later under  
the title “The Emperor.”

Subtitled “Downfall of an Autocrat” (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), the  
book on one level portrayed the lapsed life of Haile Selassie’s  
imperial court by citing the recollections of palace servants, like  
the man responsible for cleaning the shoes of visiting dignitaries.

A number of critics noted that despite the book’s documentary form,  
it provided an allegory of absolutist power everywhere. Writing in  
The New Yorker, John Updike said the book emphasized “the inevitable  
tendency of a despot, be he king, ward boss, or dictator, to prefer  
loyalty to ability in his subordinates, and to seek safety in  
stagnation.”

His fame growing, Mr. Kapuscinski began writing for The New Yorker,  
The New York Times Magazine and the British journal Granta.

Though each of Mr. Kapuscinski’s books was distinct, they all shared  
a sense of shimmering reality. There was, for instance, his account  
of the departure of Portuguese settlers from Angola as independence  
and civil war settled on the country. He described how everything of  
value, from cars to refrigerators, was leaping into boxes and  
floating off to Europe.

In preparing these articles he never took notes and used memory to  
stimulate his poetic imagination. In “Imperium,” he evoked the wintry  
cold of the old Soviet penal colonies by quoting a schoolgirl who  
said she could tell who had passed by her house by the shape of the  
tunnels they had left in the crystallized air.

Mr. Kapuscinski, the son of schoolteachers, was born March 4, 1932,  
in Pinsk, a city now in Belarus. In an interview in Granta in 1987,  
he remembered Pinsk as a polyglot city of Jews, Poles, Russians,  
Belarussians, Ukrainians and Armenians, all of whom were called  
Poleshuks.

“They were a people without a nation and without, therefore, a  
national identity,” he said. That quality, along with the poverty of  
Pinsk, inspired his empathy for the third world.

“I have always rediscovered my home, rediscovered Pinsk, in Africa,  
in Asia, in Latin America,” he said.

Mr. Kapuscinski was in elementary school when the Nazis marched into  
western Poland and the Soviets took the eastern part in 1939 at the  
outset of World War II. His family eventually made its way to Warsaw,  
where Mr. Kapuscinski’s father fought with resistance groups.

Mr. Kapuscinski received a master’s degree in history from the  
University of Warsaw. On graduation he joined the journal Sztandar  
Mlodych, The Flag of Youth, a Communist publication, and quickly  
became embroiled in the upheavals of 1956, when hard-line Stalinists  
were being challenged within the party.

Mr. Kapuscinski wrote an article describing the misery and despair of  
steel workers at a new steel plant outside of Krakow that the party  
bosses had extolled as a showpiece of proletarian culture.

The article provoked such an attack from the hard-liners that Mr.  
Kapuscinski was fired and forced into hiding. After party reformers  
later prevailed, however, the young journalist’s findings were  
confirmed by a blue-ribbon task force, and he was awarded Poland’s  
Golden Cross of Merit for the same article that had gotten him into  
trouble.

In 1962, PAP, the news agency, appointed him its only correspondent  
in the third world. He came to know Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, Ben  
Bella in Algeria, Che Guevara in Cuba and Idi Amin in Uganda. He  
covered the bloody uprising on Zanzibar in 1964 and the war between  
El Salvador and Honduras in 1970. He was in southern Angola in 1975  
when South African forces invaded.

He would travel for months at a time and then return to the two-room  
apartment in Warsaw that he shared with his wife, Alicja Mielczarek,  
a pediatrician. His daughter, Zofia, emigrated to Vancouver, British  
Columbia, in the 1970s. There was no immediate information on his  
survivors.

In 1981, after he had committed himself to the Solidarity trade union  
movement, the government of Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski stripped him of  
his journalistic credentials. He then began working with underground  
publishers, contributing poems and supporting the dissident culture.

Eventually, as his reputation abroad grew, foreign royalties and  
commissions enabled him to move to his own house in central Warsaw.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, he traveled to Moscow,  
Siberia, Georgia and Armenia, observing life there and recording the  
ravages of the Soviet era. Those travels yielded “Imperium,”  
published in the United States by Knopf in 1994.

“There is, I admit, a certain egoism, in what I write,” he once said,  
“always complaining about the heat or the hunger or the pain I feel.  
But it is terribly important to have what I write authenticated by  
its being lived. You could call it, I suppose, personal reportage,  
because the author is always present. I sometimes call it literature  
by foot.”


"A paranoid is someone who knows a little
  of what's going on."
                      --William S. Burroughs
Halvard Johnson
================
[log in to unmask]
[log in to unmask]
http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard
http://entropyandme.blogspot.com
http://imageswithoutwords.blogspot.com
http://www.hamiltonstone.org