(no subject)
Around 4am this morning, after waking up for some reason, I grabbed one of the New Yorkers I had neglected of late and started flipping through. Since I almost always like the Personal Histories in the magazine, I paused there and was thrilled to see a story by one of my favorite writers, Ryszard Kapuscinski. I read it greedily and found out more about this man's extaordinary life, the article being a memoir of his first trip abroad (for those of you who didn't click on the link, Kapuscinski was the Polish Press Agency's first, and for a long time only, foreign correspondent). His first assignment was to India, I guess in the late '50s. The description of his voyage there is brilliant, detailing a stopover in Rome and the culture shock that came with being in front of the Iron Curtain. He found himself in India with no plan and no knowledge of the language. I have to admit that I found it quite funny that this Polish man's first lessons in English were based on the creative, sing-song version found on Delhi's streets and trying to read Hemingway. The rest of the story involves brief depictions of the regions of India he managed to visit during the time that he could bear to stay away from home, and his return trip via Kabul and Moscow. After coming to the end of the article I thought it was a wonderful idea that his writing got published in the New Yorker a few months before his latest book, Travels with Herodotus, was to be published in the US. I turned to the section on the magazine's Contributors hoping to find some reference to the new book, but instead I found out that Ryszard Kapuscinski died a few weeks ago.
Today I looked for more details on his life and found an interview and another recollection from Kapuscinski on the Granta website (I first heard about him and his book The Soccer War in an advertisement in an old copy of Granta Magazine). And I read some of the obituaries. It seems strange and a bit sad that a man who spent much of his life reporting from over 50 countries, who "witnessed 27 coups or revolutions and was sentenced to death 4 times", and who kept traveling into his later years, should die after a heart operation in a hospital in Warsaw.
Today I looked for more details on his life and found an interview and another recollection from Kapuscinski on the Granta website (I first heard about him and his book The Soccer War in an advertisement in an old copy of Granta Magazine). And I read some of the obituaries. It seems strange and a bit sad that a man who spent much of his life reporting from over 50 countries, who "witnessed 27 coups or revolutions and was sentenced to death 4 times", and who kept traveling into his later years, should die after a heart operation in a hospital in Warsaw.