Ryszard Kapuściński's Open World
Last week, here, we paid tribute to one of the greatest journalists of our time, Ryszard Kapuściński, who died on 23 January. The latest issue of the New Yorker honours Kapuściński with "A Legendary Travel Writer's First Trip Abroad" and it contains some exquisite writing. Kapuściński arrived in New Delhi 56 years ago and was soon walking along sidewalks filled with more colour than could be found in the whole of post-Stalin Poland: "Here was a man who had laid out two rows of human teeth and some old pliers on a piece of newspaper, thereby advertising his dental services." From a bookseller, he bought Hemingway's "For Whom the Bell Tolls", which he thought would be "useful for learning English":
I returned to the hotel and opened the Hemingway, to the first sentence: "He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees." I understood nothing. I had a small English-Polish pocket dictionary, the only one available in Warsaw. I managed to find the word "brown," but none of the others. I proceeded to the next sentence: "The mountainside sloped gently." Again — not a word. "There was a stream alongside." The more I tried to understand this text, the more discouraged I became. I felt trapped. Besieged by language. Language struck me at that moment as something material, something with a physical dimension, a wall rising up in the middle of the road and blocking my way, closing off the world, making it unattainable.
But Kapuściński adopted a new strategy. One that many language learners could learn from:
Cast into deep water, I didn’t want to drown. I realized that only language could save me. I began cramming words, night and day. I placed a cold towel on my temples, feeling as if my head were bursting. I was never without the Hemingway, but now I skipped the descriptive passages, which I couldn’t understand, and read the dialogue:“How many are you?” Robert Jordan asked.
“We are seven and there are two women.”
“Two?”
“Yes.”I understood all of that! And this, too:
“Augustín is a very good man,” Anselmo said.
“You know him well?”
“Yes. For a long time.”I walked around the city, copying down signs, the names of goods in stores, words overheard at bus stops. In movie theatres, I scribbled blindly, in darkness, the words on the screen; I noted the slogans on banners carried by demonstrators in the streets. I approached India not through images, sounds, and smells but through words; and not the words of the indigenous Hindi but those of a foreign, imposed tongue, which by then had so fully taken root there that it was for me an indispensable key to the country.
If you, like us, can be spellbound by storytelling, "A Legendary Travel Writer's First Trip Abroad" will transfix you. Ryszard Kapuściński was truly a magical writer.
