06:30 Hrs. Na dworze minus 8-stopniowo. Czapka sniegu na samochodzie. Szybki szczotki ruch i znikl puch. W dzienniku: Lepper podskakuje, Ryszard Kapuscinski pochowany na Powiazkach, Polska w polfinale, pokonala Rosje w szczypiorniaka.
07:45 Hrs. O tym sie mowi. O tym sie teraz mowi. Mowi caly czas - unosi sie w Polskim Radiu Toronto na fali 1320 AM. ESSO, Canadian Tire, Petro-Canada biora z rana za litr paliwa $0.84.7. Beaver $0.84.5.
RYSZARD KAPUSCINSKI
Chronicled Third World through metaphor
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 Tuesday 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. Kapuscinski 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 for 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 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 neighbours after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The book that introduced 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, Kapuscinski began writing for the New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine and the British journal Granta. Though each of 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.
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 Third World. "I have always rediscovered my home, rediscovered Pinsk, in Africa, in Asia, in Latin America," he said.
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 the Second World War. His family eventually made its way to Warsaw, where Kapuscinski's father fought with resistance groups.
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.
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 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 as 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 of 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, B.C, in the 1970s. There was no immediate information on his survivors.
In 1981, after he had commited 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 travelled 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."
The New York Times (NATIONAL POST, Thursday, January 25, 2007).
POKRZYWNICKIANA
