Esperanto Literature

[Stewart]

While I was reading Karinthy Ferenc's Metropole, I found myself looking around for any biographical information about him and, not being able to read Hungarian, found myself gleaning a few meagre details. His father, Karinthy Frigyes, however, was easier to find out a little bit more about. And it turns out, apart from being a writer, translator, and journalist, he was also an esperantist.

And from esperantist I went on, of course, to Esperanto, to wondering what literature would be like if that secondary language had actually caught on. Whether translated literature would be more prominent and whether we'd see more works going the route of double translation, say Greek to Esperanto to English.

Looking up a few supposedly prominent Esperanto writers, I find little of their output readily available. I don't think I've ever seen a book written in Esperanto or one even translated from the language. Has anyone?

[Eric]

The fundamental problem with Esperanto literature is that it has no cultural hinterland. In other words, it is not supported by a national or regional culture, just by a club, based in Rotterdam. The language was invented, like Volap?k and several others before it, for international travellers to communicate. Since then, it has been used in Western Europe to create organisations, many of whose members are not necessarily interested in literature as such. In the Soviet bloc, once the Stalinist persecutions were over, it was used as a means of escaping the strictures of Soviet-dominated society, and thus meeting a few foreigners. (You have to remember that Soviet-bloc citizens had huge difficulties travelling abroad.)

I've seen catalogues of Esperanto literature, but it is mostly short translations of classics, more poetry than prose. And I don't think that there is much of great literary value written in Esperanto itself. It was a nice idea, but doesn't seem to have worked very well.

[Eric]

Well, I think I nipped that discussion neatly in the bud on 28th May 2008. Not a peep since, after only two postings.

And yet...

I found recently on my shelves a book I have had for a long time, called "Libro de amo", which I take to mean "Book of Love". It was published in 1969 and may not have aroused an enormous amount of interest internationally.

And yet...

The author, the pseudonymous Arieh ben Guni (a semi-anagram of the surname of Gaston Waringhien, as I believe) was a bit of a dirty old man, by the look of things. Because this whole book consists of something very rare: original poetry in Esperanto. Which is soft porn, to boot. Very soft, by modern standards, but daring, no doubt, so far back in the 20th century. And as he was the President of the Esperanto Academy from 1963-1979, he no doubt wrote this book under a pseudonym.

Unfortunately for the author, I fear that Esperanto, with its somewhat stifling lack of synonyms, is not the best language for erotic poetry. But he did his best, and even invented a few new unofficial words in Esperanto such as:

bikino: mallarĝa mamzono kaj eteta kalsoneto, por la sun- aŭ marbanoj

erekti [pp organo] : distendi kaj rigidigi

bugri: anuskoiti

A strange book.

[Liam]

A bilingual anthology of Esperanto literature is out from the Francis Boutle Publishers, with Cornish, Occitan, Catalan, Basque and Scottish Gaelic anthologies all forthcoming.

*Note that the Breton, Manx, Galician and Norman anthologies have already been published.

[Eric]

What is the point of translating things written in languages that few people can read into a "world language" that no one wants to read?

[Liam]

What are you driving at there, Dickens?

[Eric]

What the Dickens am I driving at? Only that literature written in small languages deserves to be translated into big ones, real ones spoken by millions of people, like English, French, German, etc., rather than a great experimental easy language that, alas, never caught on and may not even be spoken by 20,000 people worldwide, let alone people interested in small literatures. I've translated eight literary books from a language spoken by no more than one million people worldwide. But I did translate these books into world language English, rather than world language Esperanto, in the hope that they might become accessible to readers all over the globe, rather than to a small coterie of linguists.

[Flint]

What the Dickens am I driving at? Only that literature written in small languages deserves to be translated into big ones, real ones spoken by millions of people, like English, French, German, etc., rather than a great experimental easy language that, alas, never caught on and may not even be spoken by 20,000 people worldwide, let alone people interested in small literatures. I've translated eight literary books from a language spoken by no more than one million people worldwide. But I did translate these books into world language English, rather than world language Esperanto, in the hope that they might become accessible to readers all over the globe, rather than to a small coterie of linguists.

Ahem, Mr Dickens, these anthologies are being/have been translated into English. Here's one example.

[Eric]

That's fine by me, Flint, but why go to the trouble of translating it into Esperanto first?

Let me be frank. I myself am a lapsed Esperantist, but I enthused at the age of about 15 and by the time I was 18 I had lost interest, because real languages such as Finnish and Swedish fascinated me more. The original idea of Dr Esperanto (i.e. Lazar Zamenhof) was for Esperanto to become a key and neutral player in international communication. The whole issue why this did not happen is a fascinating piece of language history, but as a result, very few people speak or read the language.

The most public use of the language I have ever seen was when it was used in telephone booths in Frisia, Netherlands around 1970 alongside Dutch (and maybe English too) so that foreign visitors could read the instructions about how to phone.

But literature is a major problem because so few people read Esperanto nowadays, and there is hardly any original literature at all. So all you can find is random translations of some authors, which you could better read after they'd been translated into whatever your mother-tongue is. Psychologically it is a bit like the Communist idea that property should belong to the people, i.e. everybody, but ended up in reality belonging to nobody except the impersonal state. With Esperanto there is of course no state, but the Esperanto world headquarters in Rotterdam is not enough to blow fire into the somewhat dead body of an impersonal language and its literature and give it life.

Another thing that floored Esperanto is the pronoun and adverbial area of the language, where it is rather hard to learn, because a lot of the words look like one another. And Esperanto has accents (i.e. diacritic marks) that used to be unique, hence not on most typewriters. That problem has been more or less solved by computerisation, but they have also invented a rather ugly system where accents are not used, but the effect is rather misleading with regard to pronunciation.

So I would say: good try Zamenhof! But it hasn't worked so far.

[Flint]

If I'm not mistaken, these people (Francis Boutle Publishers) are publishing English translations of literature originally written in other languages, but they are not translating it into Esperanto first. It so happens that one of these anthologies collects pieces originally written in Esperanto. That's the way I've understood it.

[Eric]

Flint, you must try to understand the point I'm making about Esperanto. Otherwise I may even call your postings "officious"...

[Flint]

I entirely subscribe your views on Esperanto. Only there's been a little misunderstanding as regards this series of anthologies, I think.