Ayer falleció el periodista polaco Ryszard Kapuscinski. Solo para tener en cuenta, Kapuscinski si bien era historiador, su trabajo periodístico fue más allá de su formación académica. Para él "todo periodista es un historiador. Lo que hace es investigar, explorar, describir la historia en su desarrollo. En el buen periodismo, además de la descripción de un aconteicimiento, está también la explicación de por qué sucedió".
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Adjunto las notas aparecidas en el New York Times y El Mundo.es sobre su muerte, además del link de Wikipedia donde pueden leer su biografía y principales libros (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kapuscinski).
http://www.elmundo.es/elmundo/2007/01/24/comunicacion/1169630294.html?a=...
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Fallece en Varsovia el escritor y reportero polaco Ryszard Kapuscinski
EFE | ELMUNDO.ES
VARSOVIA | MADRID.- El destacado escritor y reportero polaco Ryszard Kapuscinski ha fallecido en Varsovia, a los 74 años de edad. El escritor, que sufría de una grave enfermedad, fue sometido a una complicada operación el pasado sábado.
Kapuscinski nació en 1932 en la localidad de Pinsk, que entonces formaba parte de Polonia. Escritor, periodista y ensayista se licenció en Historia en la Universidad de Varsovia.
Considerado uno de los mejores reporteros del mundo, fue miembro de varios consejos editoriales y desde 1962 compaginó sus colaboraciones periodísticas con la actividad literaria.
Es autor de 19 libros, de los que se han vendido cerca de un millón de ejemplares y por los que ha recibido numerosos galardones.
Entre sus obras más conocidas se encuentra 'Ébano', considerada por muchos expertos su mejor libro, en la que a través de varios reportajes describe diferentes países de África. Otras de sus obras son 'La guerra del fútbol', en la que habla sobre diversos conflictos africanos y latinoamericanos; 'Viajes con Herodoto' o 'Los cínicos no sirven para este oficio'.
Fue también un viajero incansable por los rincones más remotos de Rusia, cuya realidad narró en su libro 'El imperio' en el que relató el derrumbe de la Unión Soviética y cómo vivían sus habitantes, con temor y esperanza.
Kapuscinski trabajó como corresponsal de guerra para la agencia de noticias Polish Press desde 1958 hasta 1981, años en los que cubrió cerca de 17 revoluciones en 12 países del tercer mundo y donde cosechó un gran éxito gracias a su peculiar estilo. También colaboró con publicaciones como 'The New York Times', 'Time' o el alemán 'Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung', lo que le valió ser considerado uno de los mejores reporteros del mundo.
Nombrado doctor 'honoris causa' por la Universidad de Silesia en 1997 y por la Ramon Llull en 2005, ha obtenido diversos galardones por su creación literaria como el premio Alfred Jurzykowski (Nueva York, 1994), el Hansischer Goethe (Hamburgo, 1998), o el Imegna (Italia, 2000).
Toda su creación, pero también sus ideas sobre la profesión de periodista, que consideraba una misión y una vocación, pero no una fuente de dinero, le mereció muchos premios, entre ellos el premio del Pen Club polaco en 1989 y el Premio Príncipe de Asturias de las Comunicaciones y las Humanidades en el 2003.
También recibió el pasado mes de mayo el V Premio de Periodismo Miguel Gil Moreno que conceden la editorial Random House Mondadori y la Fundación Miguel Gil Moreno.
Kapuscinski, que en los últimos meses vio mermada su salud hasta el punto de tener dificultades para andar y moverse, no dejó en ningún momento la máquina de escribir.
Fue operado el pasado sábado porque los médicos consideraron que solamente una intervención quirúrgica podía devolverle la salud o, por lo menos, frenar su deterioro. Según fuentes médicas, no se le despertó de la anestesia hasta este lunes porque lo veían demasiado débil.
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/24/world/europe/24kapuscinski.html?pagewa...
January 24, 2007
Ryszard Kapuscinski, Polish Writer of Shimmering Allegories and News, Dies at 74
By MICHAEL T. KAUFMAN
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 yesterday 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.
Mr. Kapuscinski (pronounced ka-poos-CHIN-ski) 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 far 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 Mr. 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 neighbors after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The book that introduced Mr. 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, Mr. Kapuscinski began writing for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine and the British journal Granta.
Though each of Mr. 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.
Mr. 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 the third world.
“I have always rediscovered my home, rediscovered Pinsk, in Africa, in Asia, in Latin America,” he said.
Mr. 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 World War II. His family eventually made its way to Warsaw, where Mr. Kapuscinski’s father fought with resistance groups.
Mr. 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.
Mr. 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 Mr. 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 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 on 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, British Columbia, in the 1970s. There was no immediate information on his survivors.
In 1981, after he had committed 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 traveled 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.”
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