Sad news indeed, though given his recklessness I guess he was lucky to
live that long. He's a bit of a hero of mine: I reread most of his
books quite recently: Imperium is one of those astounding books.

Best

A

On 1/25/07, Halvard Johnson <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 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
>


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