QUILLBLOG

Sticking up for the deceased

The Guardian reports that Newsweek Poland this week turned a spotlight on the record of journalist and writer Ryszard Kapuscinski, claiming that under communist rule he was allowed to travel freely in exchange for collaborating with the regime. The denunciation is the latest in a recent push by the current government, allegedly to purge Poland of every trace of communism.

Kapuscinski, who is widely regarded as one of the last century’s great reporters, died earlier this year, and thus isn’t around to defend himself. So Ian Traynor is doing it for him here in the Guardian Books blog.

Traynor thinks it’s not surprising that Kapuscinski, who worked for the Polish state’s news agency for most of his career, signed something to make his many travels easier. Traynor wonders if Kapuscinski had to deliver on his end of the bargain, but says he sees little evidence now to condemn the late writer.

The decades he spent on the road were mainly as an employee of PAP, the state news agency of communist Poland. It was a privileged career and it is hardly surprising that a price had to be paid. Unless he signed a piece of paper for the security service, noted Ernest Skalski, a friend of the writer and a founder of the communist bloc’s first independent newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza in Warsaw, Kapuscinski would not have been Kapuscinski, free to exercise his reportorial genius.

The real moral question is, how did he deliver on the Faustian pact? The evidence is scant that he delivered much at all. But the current Polish regime is eager to tarnish the reputations of almost anyone who thrived under the communists. By definition, any such person is suspect.

Windsor, Ontario, publisher Biblioasis will release The Things of This Earth, the first volume of Kapuscinski’s poetry to be translated into English, in the fall.

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