Ryszard Kapuściński: between Polish and Anglophone travel writing

Abstract

Ryszard Kapuściński is one of the very few non-English language travel writers whose books are included in the canon of Anglophone travel writing studies. This article attempts to present Kapuściński's literary output from the perspective of generic differences and similarities between Polish and Anglophone travel writing. Kapuściński's early books are shown to have been written within the paradigm of the genre of reportaż podróżniczy [travel reportage]. His two books from the turn of the 1970s and 1980s – The Emperor and The Shah of Shahs – are treated as “polyphonic travels”. Kapuściński's late books – Imperium, The Shadow of the Sun and Travels with Herodotus – are analysed in the context of the influence on them of Anglo-American travel books, especially those written by Bruce Chatwin, V.S. Naipaul and Paul Theroux.

Keywords:

• Kapuściński
• travel writing genres
• travel book
• travel reportage
• narrative persona
• intertextuality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I have borrowed the term “polyphonic travels” from Casey Blanton's essay (2014) on Kapuściński, in which she refers to the following of his books as “polyphonic travels”: Another Day of Life, The Emperor and The Shah of Shahs. In this essay I refer to Another Day of Life (as well as to The Soccer War) as “borderline books” sharing the features of both “travel reportage” and “polyphonic travels”.

2. Moroz (2013, 67–114) argued that in the British literary tradition the travel book as a genre was launched in the middle of the eighteenth century with such narratives as Henry Fielding's The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1755) and Tobias Smollett's Travels through France and Italy (1766). Others scholars, who have made a similar, although not as generically radical claim, include Carl Thompson, Barbara Korte and Casey Blanton. Thompson in his Travel Writing (2011, 118, my emphasis) suggested that the year 1750 should be treated as a watershed in travel writing development and that “the lack of focus upon the narratorial self in many pre-1750 travel accounts […] derives to some extent, from differences not so much in the travellers themselves as in generic conventions associated with the travelogue form”. Korte (2000, 14) in English Travel Writing: From Pilgrimages to Colonial Explorations stated that this type of book “did not appear until the genre was taken over by the professional travel writers like Fielding and Smollett”. Blanton (2002, 103–104) in Travel Writing: the Self and the World observed that the Smollett/Sterne debate of the 1760s “reveals for the first time that the travel book is accepted as a genre, even one worth arguing about”.

3. On Kapuściński's idiosyncratic treatment of the term “the New Journalism” see also, for example: “An Interview with Ryszard Kapuscinski: Writing about Suffering” (1998).

4. A selection of fragments from all six volumes of Lapidarium was translated by Andrzej Duszenko. It is available at http://duszenko.northern.edu/lapidarium.