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Many Esperantists have devoted themselves
to the creation of a considerable body of literature in
the last hundred years. Much of this literature consists
of translations from a large number of languages. Much
of it consists of original work. Let us first take a
look at the works in translation and then at the
original works.
From Literatures Large and Small
Zamenhof understood that there was a big
difference between a plan for a language and a
living language. In order to show that the new
language could do what any other language could do, he
translated a large number of works of world literature
into Esperanto. Up until a very short time before his
death, during the First World War, he was working on
his translation of the Jewish Bible from the original
Hebrew.
A great many Esperantists have followed
in his footsteps. Among the works that have been
translated into Esperanto are the Finnish epic, The
Kalevala, the English children’s book, Winnie the
Pooh, the great masterpiece of Spanish literature,
Don Quixote, the great masterpiece of Italian
literature, The Divine Comedy, The great
masterpiece of German literature Faust, many
plays of Shakespeare including Hamlet, King
Lear and The Tempest, and many masterpieces
of French Literature including Molière’s Le Bourgeois
Gentilhomme and Racine’s Phaedre. In addition
to these we have the Bhagavad Gita from Sanskrit,
The Koran from Arabic, the Bible from
Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, Plato’s Republic from
Greek, and works translated from Chinese, Japanese,
Hungarian, Macedonian, ancient Icelandic, Estonian,
Korean, Dutch, Latin, Serbo-Croatian, Bulgarian,
Swedish, Norwegian and so on.
In one way there is nothing remarkable
about this. There are many more works translated from a
variety of languages into English or French or German
than there are works translated into Esperanto. You
might admit that it is a curious and interesting fact
that a great many works have been translated into
Esperanto but chances are you would prefer to read them
as translated into your native language.
This works very well for those who speak
one of the world’s great languages, a language which has
translations from a great panoply of world literature. For those who speak one of the so-called minor languages
which may not have a large number of translations of
world literary masterpieces, the availability of
Esperanto translations could prove very helpful.
There is, however, something special
about a number of these translations. When a work is
translated from a foreign language into English, say,
the translator is often a native speaker of English who
has learned the foreign language as a second language.
However, when a work is translated into Esperanto, the
translator is usually a native speaker of the language
in which the work was originally written.
At the United Nations when a document is
translated from English into Chinese, the translator is
normally a native speaker of the Chinese language who
has studied English extensively. On the other hand when
a document is translated from Chinese into English the
translator is normally a native speaker of the English
language who has studied Chinese extensively. This is
because it is very hard to find someone, even on the
level of the best professional translators, who can
write as well in a foreign language as they can in their
own language. Even though professional translators have
spent tens of thousands of hours with a foreign language
they will not know that language on the same level that
they know their native tongue.
Esperanto, however, is so much easier
than national languages that it can be
thoroughly mastered after a great deal of
hard work. Thus translators can learn how to write
Esperanto as well as they can write their native tongue. Knowing both their native language and Esperanto
thoroughly, they are in an excellent position to do a
particularly fine job of translating into Esperanto.
Sometimes these translations are
wonderfully done. Sometimes they are less wonderfully
done. However, when translations into Esperanto are well
done, the translator has had a little edge because he or
she, being a native speaker of the source language, is
in a special position to catch the nuances of the
original, nuances which are sometimes missed by
translators who are translating from a language that is
not their own.
I had an interesting experience in this
regard. I translated one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s
Sherlock Holmes stories, “The Man With the Twisted Lip”,
into Esperanto. I sent it to Claude Piron who very
kindly corrected it. In some cases he corrected
grammatical errors. In a great many places he showed me
a number of ways in which the translation could be
stylistically improved. However, he found that my
translation was very accurate.
He went to a library and got a French
translation of the same story and then compared it with
my Esperanto translation. Where Mrs. Watson was doing
needlework in the original English, in the French
version Mrs. Watson was knitting. Where Watson
straightened up in his chair in the original English, in
the French version he stood up. There were a good number
of little inaccuracies of this nature. In my Esperanto
translation, as stylistically imperfect as it might have
been, there were no such little inaccuracies.
Because English is my native language I
understood what Doyle wrote much more accurately than
that particular French translator. Because Esperanto is
a language that can be learned to a very high level in a
relatively short time, I was able to accurately
translate Doyle’s words.
Many of the people who translate works
into Esperanto speak languages which are generally
classified as minor languages. Writers in these
so-called minor languages are rarely considered for the
Nobel Prize for literature because their languages have
not been studied by the judges and because works from
their languages are rarely translated into what might be
called the major world languages. Esperanto gives
writers from these “minor” languages a chance to find an
audience which, although very small, is distributed over
the entire world.
Original Literature in Esperanto
Over the century or so of its existence
Esperanto has accumulated a considerable body of
original works. Major novels have been published in the
language. A great deal of original poetry has been
written. Short stories have come out. Essays have
appeared.
Some of this work has been of poor
quality, some of good quality, some of outstanding
quality. Here are three examples of very fine original
writing in Esperanto:
A Long Poem
In 1992 a little volume, Lasta Ĉevalo
by Josef Rumler, appeared. It consisted of one long poem
of about 450 lines. Rumler had previously published
three collections of his poetry in his native Czech
language. In 1978 the poet, who was then in his
mid-fifties, learned Esperanto. When Rumler was seventy,
the full version of Lasta Ĉevalo came out. Here
is the opening strophe of the poem, the title of which
means “Last Horse” or “A Last Horse”:
Pasas ĉevalo en mi tra la valo
en mia animo de limo al limo
ĝis ties senlimo pasas ĉevalo
ĉevalo la mimo de mia animo
pasas ĉevalo de valo al valo
en mia animo tra mia animo
moviĝas trotas ĉevalo galopas ĉevalo
saltas ĉevalo danceskas ĉevalo
flugnaĝas ĉevalo en la aero freŝa aero
tuj ĉe la tero
laŭ ritmo de nia komuna afero
afero mistero
herbriĉa afero ŝaŭmsanga afero
de l’senta sfero
The accent in Esperanto always falls on
the next-to-the-last syllable. Rumler takes advantage of
that fact in this poem to give it a galloping rhythm. Here is a translation of these lines:
There passes a horse in me through the
valley
in my soul from border to border
up to its boundlessness passes a horse
a horse that’s the mimic of my soul
there passes a horse from valley to
valley
in my soul through my soul
a horse is moving, trotting, galloping, a
horse is jumping, a horse is moving like a dancer
a horse is flyswimming in the air fresh
air right at the earth
according to the rhythm of our shared
affair
an affair that is a mystery
an affair that is rich in grass a
blood-foam affair
of the feeling sphere
I am not pretending that my translation
does justice to the original, but even through the dim
window of this translation something of the magic of the
original might be sensed. Some of the nuances
would require a masterful translator to render.
It says a great deal for Esperanto that a
poet can learn the language in his fifties and then
produce a masterpiece like Lasta Ĉevalo.
A Novel
Trevor Steele, a young Australian author,
brought out a novel, Sed Nur Fragmento (But Only
a Fragment) in 1987. This work of nearly 450 pages tells
the story of Nikolaj Ivanoviĉ Maklin, a Russian
scientist in the 19th century who goes to live among the
natives on an enormous island in the southern
hemisphere, an island which is referred to only as “la
Verda Insulo” (the Green Island). On this island, a
fictional counterpart to New Guinea, Maklin studies not
only the people and their customs but the flora and
fauna and geography as well. When he arrives Maklin is a
strict rationalist in the mold of his mentor, a German
professor. However, on the island, and later in
“civilized society” in Queensland, in Australia, this
Russian rationalist undergoes experiences which
transform his world-view. Nikolaj Ivanoviĉ Maklin comes
to realize that the life which we see, which we
experience here is only a fragment of an enormously
greater whole that is beyond our comprehension.
Whereas Rumler stretches the bounds of
the language, Trevor Steele employs a classically clear
prose to guide his readers into the mystery.
A Book About a War
One of the most moving books ever written
in Esperanto is Spomenka Štimec’s Kroata Milita
Noktlibro (Nightbook of the Croatian War). In this
short book, barely a hundred pages long, the author
describes the experiences of Esperantists and other
ordinary citizens in the disastrous war which broke out
when Yugoslavia fell apart. Although both she and those
whom she loves suffered terribly on account of what
Serbs did, Štimec writes a book which calls for peace, a
book which presents all of the pain of war while
renouncing vengeance.
Štimec’s style is at the same time very
simple, clear and poetic. One short paragraph
demonstrates the efficacy of this pure style:
Tio kio aŭdeblis de la fenestro estis
paserĉirpo. La paseroj konversaciis sur la pirarbo. Kia
privilegia afero: esti vekita de la paseroj kaj ne de la
sireno.
The chirping of sparrows could be heard
from the window. The sparrows were speaking to each
other in the pear tree. What a privilege it was to be
woken by the sparrows and not by the siren.
This simple, deeply moving book has
appeared in Japanese and German translations.
The Need for Esperanto Literature
Instead of providing a long list of some
of the thousands of works by Esperanto poets and prose
writers, I have written about three individual works
which moved me deeply. In doing so I have tried to give
a sense that Esperanto has successfully served as a
vehicle for outstanding literature.
It may be asked what Esperanto’s use as a
literary language has to do with the Esperanto dream
presented at the beginning of this book. Surely a
language does not have to have a great literary
potential to serve as an easy-to-learn communications
tool.
It would, in fact, be easy to plan a
language that could be learned in even less time than
Esperanto. That would not be a difficult challenge at
all. Up until now thousands of plans for international
languages have been devised. However, of all of those
plans only one has led to a language which is used by at
least hundreds of thousands of speakers all over the
world. Most of the others never got out of the planning
stage. Esperanto has persisted for more than a century. Although interest in Esperanto has died out in some
places, at the same time interest has developed in other
places. If there are very few Esperantists in India
where there once was a budding movement, there is a
growing number in Korea which hosted the Universala
Kongreso de Esperanto in 1994, the largest
international meeting in that country in that year.
Why has Esperanto become more than simply
a plan for a language? Why has it become a living tongue
used by at least hundreds of thousands of people today?
Why does it persist long after it became apparent that
the world was not ready to adopt it as the global
interlanguage?
One of the reasons may be because of its
literature. Authors who create poems and novels, readers
who enjoy poems and novels in a language which they have
worked to make their own, acquire a special feeling for
that language. Just as an American wandering through
some Central or Eastern European city is delighted to
hear another person speaking American English, so
Esperantists are delighted when they get a chance to
share their language with the members of their small
international community who live in some far-off part of
the world. They touch each other, either directly,
through face-to-face contact when they visit each
other’s lands, or through correspondence by paper mail
or by e-mail, or by means of the Esperanto discussion
group on the Internet, or by writing or reading poems,
novels, stories, essays or biographical accounts.
It is this kind of feeling that has made
Esperanto a living language and has kept it a living
language. This special feeling is due in no small part
to the common, shared literature that has been created
in this unique tongue, a language which does not belong
to just one nation or a group of nations but which
belongs equally to anyone who makes the effort to learn
it.
Chapter 20 A Still
Easier Language?
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