Kapuscinski and the secret police
Sir, – Edith Hall’s review of Ryszard Kapuscinski’s posthumous Travels with
Herodotus (September 21) is radiant with admiration and critical
appreciation of Kapuscinski’s achievements. However, in her third paragraph,
Professor Hall, surely inadvertently, does Kapuscinski’s reputation and
memory a gross disservice. Having noted that Herodotus has long been
considered “the father of lies”, she then allies this to (her) comments on
the spying charges which have recently been raised against Kapuscinski by
the pseudo-historical state-run Polish Institute of National Remembrance, a
front organization for the witch-hunt currently being inflamed across Poland
by the Prime Minister, Jaroslaw Kacynski, aided and abetted by his
Presidential twin, Lech, and by their Law and Justice party. Hall states
without qualification that “it is now known that under Communism, as foreign
correspondent for the Polish state news agency PAP, Kapuscinski also engaged
in espionage. Yet none of the retrospective dirt that became attached to his
name after 1989 can alter the candour and delicacy with which he explores
the effect of Polish political culture on the way he conducted ethnography”.
Whatever the “can alter . . .” sequence of that sentence may or may not mean,
Professor Hall will know, or should know, that the spying case against
Kapuscinski, with its obvious construction that he thereby betrayed the
principles for which his work and life are justly acclaimed, is entirely
innocent of substance, utterly devoid of proof.
The facts: on May 21 this year, the Polish edition of Newsweek reported that
it had found in Communist-era secret police archives, now held by the
Institute of National Remembrance, assorted documents which showed that from
1967 to 1972, as a PAP foreign correspondent, Ryszard Kapuscinski, using the
code names “Poet” and, later, “Vera Cruz”, had provided material for Polish
intelligence, his “mission” to collect and collate information on American
companies and citizens as well as to supply data on the US, Israeli and West
German intelligence agencies.
What, though, were the fruits of this mission? The secret police documents
reveal that in 1970, as products of his “spying”, Kapuscinski dispatched
descriptive reports on the general political situation in Latin America,
with emphasis on Cuban foreign policy and a report on the political
situation in Mexico; the “reporter-spy” also penned a number of
straightforward profiles of various people he had met during his
journalistic assignments. On his return to Poland in 1972, Kapuscinski’s
file was closed, and a 1981 secret police document, quoted by Newsweek,
concluded that he “did not pass on any essential material the secret police
was interested in”. It was common practice during the Communist era for any
Polish citizen who travelled abroad on a regular basis to sign an agreement
with the secret police, which for Kapuscinski allowed him to work abroad
while at the same time maintaining vital links with his Polish homeland and
with his family. Spying? Hardly! Kapuscinski might just as well have
provided Warsaw with blank pages.
BRUCE ROSS-SMITH
6 Bowness Avenue, Headington, Oxford.
Democracy at war
Sir, – Felipe Fernández-Armesto’s review of my War in Human Civilization
(August 10) is so breathtakingly muddled and ignorant as to verge on the
amusing. It calls for a sentence by sentence deconstruction, but there is no
space for this, and why bother. So here are just a few points. To support
his claim that it is only culture, rather than the intricate interface
between our biological make-up and cultural transformation and diversity,
that determines deadly human fighting, Fernández-Armesto ascribes the
behavioural differences between two species of chimpanzees, the common
chimpanzee and the bonobo, the one violent and the other peaceful, to
cultural differences between them. The standard definition of war is
large-scale group fighting, normally associated with the state. So the
question with respect to pre-state societies is not whether or not they had
war in that sense but whether they experienced extensive fighting and
killing. This obviously crucial question for the understanding of human
development has been hotly disputed and remained unresolved for centuries,
with most anthropologists since the Rousseauite 1960s answering in the
negative. But it now turns out that pre-state and pre-agricultural societies
regularly suffered around 25 per cent violent mortality among their men, a
far higher rate than that experienced by either premodern or modern state
societies, except in their most extremely devastating wars. The idea that
democracies are unique in their warlike behaviour, most notably that
(economically developed, affluent) democracies do not fight each other,
although they continue to fight non-democracies, was actually raised by
liberal scholars and picked up by the Clinton administration before it was
belatedly adopted by (neo-)conservatives. That Felipe Fernández-Armesto
should misunderstand, misrepresent and dismiss this highly significant
development is typical of his level of argument.
AZAR GAT
Department of Political Science, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 69978.
An-aesthetic
Sir, – I hope it is not ungracious of me, in response to Clare Pettitt’s
eloquent review of Satyr Square (August 24 & 31), if I make sure readers
of the TLS know that crediting Alberti with a Narcissus is her mistake and
not mine. The painting I was looking for in a shuttered museum was
Caravaggio’s, not Alberti’s, as is made clear in the book. On the other
hand, Ms Pettitt’s mistake is an interesting one: though Alberti never
painted a Narcissus, he did offer one of the most intriguing exegeses of
that mythological figure in On Painting: “I used to tell my friends that the
inventor of painting, according to the poets, was Narcissus . . . . What is
painting but the act of embracing by means of art the surface of the pool?”.
On the charge of being apolitical, Pettitt has me dead to rights (though one
could say that my chapter entitled “The Communist Gourmet Club” finds a
politics in being apolitical); I just don’t want anyone to think that I am
an-aesthetic.
LEONARD BARKAN
Department of Comparative Literature, Princeton University, Princeton, New
Jersey 08544.
‘God Is Not Great’
Sir, – Robert A. Davis is a distinguished theologian, so I am surprised to
discover that his entire refutation of Christopher Hitchens’s argument
(Letters, September 14) boils down to two ex cathedra pronouncements against
his scholarship, and even these are given without justification. It is not
enough to say that the business of New Testament use of prophecy is more
complicated than its portrayal in God Is Not Great. Any single book will
always have to simplify matters, and this is a book written for the popular
market so the simplification is likely to be the greater.
The question that Davis needs to ask himself is whether he believes that Old
Testament figures had visions of future events, or not. There may be a more
nuanced way of putting this, but the crux of the matter is to establish the
existence or otherwise of an entity (or series of entities) that lies
outside the physical laws of causation. If the best argument that two
professors of theology can produce concerning this major question of their
specialism (see Gerard Loughlin’s letter in the same issue) is to make ad
hominem attacks on the religious knowledge of Hitchens or Richard Dawkins,
perhaps it is time to start asking why the government continues to fund
degrees in these subjects.
JAMES MACKAY
King’s College, Strand, London WC2.
‘Girls of Riyadh’
Sir, – My name appears on the title page of Girls of Riyadh by Rajaa Alsanea
as co-translator. It might seem odd, then, that I agree fully with Stephen
Henighan, in his review of the novel (July 27), when he says that “the
scandal in the English version lies in the translation”. He is correct about
the English text’s shortcomings. But there’s a “scandal” here of which Mr
Henighan is unaware. When I submitted the translation to Penguin, complete
except for Saudi vernacular terms with which the author had promised to help
me, I was informed that the author intended to rewrite it, and thereafter I
was kept entirely out of the process. The resulting text, with its clichéd
language, erasures of Arabic idioms I had translated, and unnecessary
footnotes, does not reflect the care that I took to produce a lively,
idiomatic translation conveying the novel’s tone and language, which are
crucial to its critique of (globalized) Saudi society. Of course, my
decision to retain my name on the title page (the only decision about the
text’s final shape that the publisher allowed me!) means that I remain
partly responsible for a work that I was given no authority, ultimately, to
craft.
It is unfortunate that a novel which works partly through humour, punning and
multilingual wordplay has been “cleaned up” by the Arabic text’s author.
Perhaps the larger scandal, though, is that for some publishers and writers,
literary translators remain derivative servitors rather than creative
artists, a notion fostered by a long tradition within Euro-American letters
of the writer as solitary genius and translation as a mechanical exercise
(and now enhanced by the “star system” of today’s publishing business). That
the press and author did not take my professionalism seriously or listen to
my warnings that their choices would yield an inferior and infelicitous
result will not be a surprise to translators.
MARILYN BOOTH
Program in South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Illinois,
Urbana, Illinois 61801.
Ronald Reagan
Sir, – A number of correspondents have written to correct the one-sidedness of
your reviews of recent books on Ronald Reagan (most recently, September 14),
but none has challenged the characterization of the President as
“anti-racist”, as documented by his diary entry: “There is no place in this
land for the hate-mongers and bigots”. Against that view stands the
following, from a recent New York Times column by Paul Krugman, who reports
that Reagan, at Trent Lott’s urging, began his 1980 presidential campaign
“with a speech supporting states’ rights delivered just outside
Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights workers were murdered in
1964”.
THEODORE K. RABB
Department of History, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08544.
Kit for Kat
Sir, – I am writing with reference to the review by James Sharpe of my new
edition of Daniel Defoe’s Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions
(August 24 & 31).
I want to thank you for the lovely review. I just have a small correction. I
am a woman, not a man. The nickname “Kit”, in this case, is short for
Kathleen, not Christopher.
KIT KINCADE
Department of English, Indiana State University, Terre Haute, Indiana 47809.
