Both Sides of the Bridge : THE SOCCER WAR <i> By Ryszard Kapuscinski translated from the Polish by William Brand (Alfred A. Knopf: $21; 234 pp.) </i>

“It’s good to stand in the crowd. To applaud together with them, laugh and get angry. Then you can feel their patience and strength, their devotion and their power.”

I never met Ryszard Kapuscinski in the days when he roamed Africa and Latin America for the Polish Press Agency and Polityika. That was in the ‘60s, mainly, when the Third World was bubbling with mass movements, charismatic leaders and hope--just born and short-lived--that in the new day of post-colonialism and popular revolt, things would change utterly.

I stood to one side of the crowd, along with other American or British or French correspondents. Or I walked with the crowd, but in careful professional impassiveness; counting, getting quotes, taking notes. Feeling superior to the press mavericks: the unhinged Yugoslav waving a painted prayer stick, the German free-lancer astride a tractor and hollering “Fidel!,” the Japanese in a new guayabera and a cane-cutter’s hat; all whooping along with the demonstrators. Clowns, I thought. What about detachment?

Hmm.

I don’t know what Kapuscinski wrote in those days for his editors. Quite probably not exactly what they printed or transmitted. Instead of sticking around for a press agency’s daily dose of communiques, he was constantly wandering off, disappearing, turning up weeks later, sick or arrested. Polish embassies had to be alerted. And then, of course, he would get in trouble for reporting the Third World’s chaotic truth and not the tidy truth of the Second World, as we called Eastern Europe in those days. Tidier than our own truth, though that, coming from the Western side of the Cold War, was usually tidier than it should have been.

Kapuscinski became one of the great journalists of our time. The evidence is in two extraordinary books that appeared here in the ‘80s, one about the Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, the other about the Shah of Iran. They were, of course, about far more than that. They did for parts of the Third World what Rebecca West--equally quirky, willful and, like the invite-imprison cycle of a trap, utterly open and utterly opinionated--did for the Balkans 50 years ago in “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.”

To go abroad in the late 1950s was a startling liberation for a young Polish journalist working to tight domestic Party command. Had Kapuscinski been sent to Washington or London, the difference would have been minor, comforts aside. But nobody had any very precise notion about Africa in those days, and when a party line did arrive, it was months late. By that time he had bought an ancient car and was headed south from Juba.

No wonder Kapuscinski had such a hunger for the unknown and unprescribed, for its smallest and most incongruous details. There is a superficial parallel between his impressionistic style and the New Journalism that surfaced a few years later. But there is a fundamental difference.

The New Journalists, by and large, drew their material into themselves, straining it and coloring it through their sensibilities. Kapuscinski launched himself upon his material and seemed to abandon himself in it. Like Zbigniew Herbert, who stormed out of equivalent Polish constrictions in the ‘50s, seized on the history of Western art and civilization, swallowed it whole and made it new, Kapuscinski all but literally gives birth to himself in the Nigerian hinterland and the desert of the Ogaden.

Compared to “The Emperor” and “Shah of Shahs,” “The Soccer War” is a scrappy miscellany. Rather too pointedly, Kapuscinski lets us know it. “Plan for a Book That Could Have Started Right Here” is the title of one of his pieces, and there are several others in the same vein, or vein-opening. The pieces draw upon old journalism and, he tells us, such a thing grows stale after a few days and moldy after a week.

He is partly right. “The Soccer War” replays material he gathered and wrote about in the ‘60s and early ‘70s: the civil wars in the Congo and Nigeria, the rise and fall of Algeria’s Mohammed Ben Bella, the endless death in the war between Ethiopia and Somalia, a Central American border war. The individual portraits--of Lumumba, Nkrumah and Ben Bella, for example--are acute and suggestive but seem dated. Even more dated are the political summaries. Kapuscinski is not really doing retrospectives or viewing things in hindsight.

What he is doing is telling of encounters and offering insights that are as arresting, provocative and moving as ever. Twenty and 30 years later, he is still making things new. Perhaps the swing of the world has helped. Take his thoughts on silence, and on journalism’s need to explore what is not in the news.

“People who write history devote too much attention to so-called events heard round the world, while neglecting the periods of silence. This neglect reveals the absence of that infallible intuition that every mother has when her child falls suddenly silent in its room. A mother knows that this silence signifies something bad. That the silence is hiding something.”

What is not in the news is what will be. Kapuscinski, were he still a foot-slogging journalist, would have been with the Kurds three years ago.

Even at this distance in time, Kapuscinski’s journalistic encounters and his unexpected discoveries in the roughest parts of the world remain vivid. He writes beautifully; more to the point, out of every hard-won detail, there is a reflection that springs from that detail only, and not from any prepackaged notions.

There are still bits that flash out, page after page. His description of a tropical night:

“It is too stuffy. Damp, sticky air fills the room. But then, it’s not air. It’s wet cotton. Inhale, and it’s like swallowing a ball of cotton dipped in warm water. . . . Time stands still. Sleep will not come. At 6 in the morning, the same invariable 6 in the morning all year round, the sun rises. Its rays increase the dead steam-bath closeness. You should get up. But you don’t have the strength. You don’t tie your shoes because the effort of bending over is too much.”

There is a note on the Nankani practice of tattooing their faces. They have done it since slave-trader days. It was to make themselves ugly. “Ugly and free are the same word in Nankani.”

Detained by pro-Lumumba gendarmes who take him for a Belgian, he explains that he is a Polish Communist and, thus, on their side. “What a shame that so many people in this world look like Belgians,” a gendarme says. What do the distinctions of policy and means among the powerful parts of the world signify to the powerless parts?

In Ogaden, the drought makes a mockery of the long struggle between Ethiopians and Somalis. The nomads die, either way. Here is Kapuscinski’s chronology:

“The desert grew larger, became enormous, had no boundaries. First the sheep fell and later the goats. Then the children began to die, and later the asses fell. Next the women died. Anyone who comes across a tea-kettle or a pot while walking will find the remains of the woman nearby. Next the camels fell.”

All those who travel and write are building a bridge between the world they come from and the world they discover. The best writers know and record the agony, the near-impossibility of keeping both sides of the bridge in view. One side or the other--who one is, or what one finds--will shrink sooner or later and become an abstraction.

In a final chapter, sardonically entitled “Dispatches”--that sleek journalistic term--Kapuscinski lets himself fall into incoherence as he tells of trying to explain snow and other Western things to a Ghanaian village headman. The incoherence is the eloquence of a rare writer who refuses to settle on either side of his bridge.