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‘One day, I would very much like to go abroad’. A simple sentence, a simple wish; and over the years, as the wish came true to encompass the entire world, it resulted in a wonderful travel book — Travels with Herodotus. Ryszard Kapuscinski — the well-known Polish journalist-writer — started his career in a Polish newspaper, where he asks his editor if he could please step across the border to see what it’s like. To his surprise, he was sent to India (‘condemned’ as he puts it) with a Polish translation of Herodotus’s The Histories (written in Greek, around 440B.C.). And then to China. And all over the globe. Everywhere he went, he carried The Histories, and dipped into it, just as I now dip into the English translation of his book; and I find it as gripping, as Kapuscinski found the account of Herodotus’s journey 25 centuries ago.
Travelling around Poland ‘in a hay cart or a rickety bus, for private cars were a rarity and even a bicycle wasn’t easily to be had’, Kapuscinski boards his first-ever flight when he travels to India. Everything is a novel experience, including the bird’s-eye view from the flight window, the landscape like ‘motley patchwork quilts, grey-green tapestries, as if stretched out on the ground to dry in the sun’. India and later China prove to be culturally and linguistically challenging; he tries to learn English from a Hemmingway he picks up from a pavement hawker; he communicates with just two words — ‘problem’ and ‘no problem’ — with an Ethiopian driver; and he often marvels at how Herodotus should’ve managed, all those centuries ago…
It works because…
It is two compelling stories, of two great travellers, both equally gripping. Herodotus — although his world was only ‘Mediterranean-Near Eastern’ — set out ‘to collect new information about a country, its people, and their customs’, and in the process, laid down the rules of narrative story-telling. As Kapuscinski reasons, ‘To sell well, a story must be interesting, must contain a bit of spice, something sensational, something to send a shiver up one’s spine’. Was that why Herodotus wove in tales of Phoenicians’ abductions of young women? Besides commending Herodotus’s craft, Kapuscinski plays up the places where their journeys intersect. Take Egypt; both were fascinated with the Nile; but they reported what they saw differently. Herodotus simply tells; in his time, we learn Egyptians ‘knead dough with their feet and clay with their hands’. Kapuscinski, however, shows; he takes us to the top of a dizzyingly tall minaret in Cairo, where he was coolly mugged. All along, ancient history is overlaid with recent history; the centuries close in; and Kapuscinski tells us ‘the events described by Herodotus so absorbed me while I was in Congo that at times I experienced the dread of the approaching war between the Greeks and the Persians more vividly than I did the events of the current Congolese conflict’.
A copy for your library then? Perhaps. But if you fancy Kapuscinski’s writings (and I do), this book is a must.
And this one stays with you…
‘Old Delhi! Its narrow, dusty, fiendishly hot streets with their stifling odour of tropical fermentation. And this crowd of silently moving people, appearing and disappearing, their faces dark, humid, anonymous, closed. Quiet children, making no sound. A man stares dully at the remains of his bicycle, which has fallen apart in the middle of the street. A woman sells something wrapped in green leaves — what is it? What do those leaves enfold? A beggar demonstrates how the skin of his stomach is plastered to his spinal cord — but is this even possible?’