He went into the beyond Nobel-less, like Joyce and Proust and Nabokov, but to many who read him he was as iconic: “deity” was used, more than once, in his assorted funeral songs. While desperate formulations such as “world literature” conjure up bongos, beads, and sitting Indian-style, the books Kapuscisnki wrote may actually qualify, as evocative and singular in English as they are in their native (and what is said to be austerely fine) Polish. For many of us, the day of his death was a dark cold day. Until 1983, most Western readers would have mistaken the man for Polish espresso. Thanks to the efforts of the husband-and-wife team of William R. Brand and Katarzyna Mroczkowska-Brand, Kapuscinski’s first book to appear in English was The Emperor (originally published in Polish in 1978), a spell-casting oral history of Haile Selassie’s rule over Ethiopia. The Emperor was followed in 1985 by what many believe to be his masterpiece, Shah of Shahs (originally published in 1982), a short, tense, fragmentary account of the 1979 Iranian revolution.
