Long Memory; Kapuscinski's 'Travels With Herodotus' is a fitting testament.(Book review)

Byline: Andrew Nagorski

Plenty of central European writers have been obsessed with the theme of human memory. The poems of the late Polish Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz, the prose of Czech emigre Milan Kundera and the writings of countless others have focused on, as Kundera put it, how "ultimately everyone lets everything be forgotten."

No one fought harder against that than Ryszard Kapuscinski, the Polish journalist turned literary superstar who died in January at 74. And nowhere is this more explicit than in his 2004 book "Travels With Herodotus" (275 pages. Alfred A. Knopf) , now published in English for the first time. Like many of his works, this is a collage of sorts, part travel writing, part self-reflection. But as befits a work that feels almost like a last testament, it's far more of the latter. He describes how in his travels he took along Herodotus' "The Histories," snatching it up as soon as a Polish translation was available during the post-Stalinist thaw in 1955. He views the Greek who lived in the fifth century B.C. as his role model, someone who set out to see the world and record everything he could. As Herodotus put it, "The purpose is to prevent the traces of human events from being erased by time."

This was a concept that instinctively resonated with Kapuscinski. As he made his first forays as a foreign correspondent to unfamiliar ...