From Ryszard Kapuściński to Bill Buford

The two articles from Ryszard Kapuściński’s “Unfinished Notebooks” that he refers to in this letter were published in Granta 15 and 16 as Warsaw Diary Parts 1 and 2 in Spring and Summer 1985. These were the first articles that Kapuscinski contributed to the Magazine, in total he has had eleven pieces published, the most recent in Winter 2004. All his articles are translated from Polish, but here he writes to Bill Buford in English.

It reads:

Dear Bill Buford:

thank you for your letter from 4th January 1985, and for all your patient telephone calls!

I’ve red with pleasure and wonder all the reviews you sent me. I totally agree with them, and I sincerely admire your achievement! GRANTA is a great quarterly, and it is a magazine which corresponds very much with my idea of what a perfect literary magazine should be!

For me it will be a great honour to be published in your magazine, and for this purpose I enclose fragments of the book I’m writing now /a draft title – “Unfinished Notebooks”/. This is a collection of 22 of my notebooks which I started to write / and never finished, becayse of new assignments/, in different times, and different parts of the world. The book is a selection of impressions, reflections, aphorisms about contemporary world, and a condition of the man – i.e. all what xxxx is left out of a press-cable.

With warmest regards

Ryszard Kapuściński