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From: donh@netcom.com (Don HARLOW)
Subject: Re: Great Esperanto literature (was: Re: Esperanto? The EU?)
Message-ID: <donhD4Ms9p.Iqp@netcom.com>
Organization: Esperanto League for North America, Inc.
References: <3i0p01$8i8@masala.cc.uh.edu> <3i629t$m7f@fido.asd.sgi.com> <donhD49B7v.14L@netcom.com> <3ibs82$fac@fido.asd.sgi.com>
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Date: Sun, 26 Feb 1995 23:37:00 GMT
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Sender: donh@netcom5.netcom.com

livesey@solntze.engr.sgi.com (Jon Livesey) skribis en lastatempa afisxo <3ibs82$fac@fido.asd.sgi.com>:
>In article <donhD49B7v.14L@netcom.com>, donh@netcom.com (Don HARLOW) writes:
>|> livesey@solntze.engr.sgi.com (Jon Livesey) skribis en lastatempa afisxo <3i629t$m7f@fido.asd.sgi.com>:
>|> >In article <donhD46q0y.GKt@netcom.com>, donh@netcom.com (Don HARLOW) writes:
>|> >|> >
>|> >|> This is a sort of cleft stick to be caught in. If I said, "Shakespeare, 
>|> >|> Tolstoy and Cervantes," would you then say that translated literature 
>|> >|> doesn't count? And if I said, "Auld, Kalocsay, Baghy and Miyamoto," 
>|> >|> would you then say that you'd never heard of them? (Which, since they 
>|> >|> wrote/write in Esperanto, would not be too surprising...)
>|> >
>|> >That's a pretty bad argument, since there are many writers who did not
>|> >write in English, but of whom most educated anglophones have heard
>|> >and recognize as great writers.
>|> >
>|> The exceptions that you mention, by 
>|> the way, are mostly from previous centuries -- strangely, there were 
>|> very few Esperanto-writing authors, great or otherwise, prior to the 
>|> twentieth century.
>
>"Mostly from previous centuries"?   Mann, Singer, Boll, Gorki, 
>Sartre, Genet, Malraux, Celine, Maiakovski, Solzhenytsin,
>Remarque.
>
>Sure, they're definitely all from previous centuries.   :-)
>
Who was it who was grumbling about "bait-and-switch" a thread or so ago?

When you quote Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Tolstoy at me as typical 
great authors, I immediately think: (a) authors who have succeed in 
escaping from their cultural-linguistic ghetto to attain a global 
audience, and (b) authors who have succeeded in maintaining that global 
audience for a number of generations. (b) is absolutely not true for 
any of the authors you quote at me (and where, by the way, are 
Hemingway and Steinbeck in your list??), and even (a) is not true 
for some of them.

Take Solzhenitsyn, Majakovskij and Gorjkij as examples. S. wrote primarily 
from, for and about a specific milieu -- outside it, he was pretty much 
at sea, as his output (or non-output) during his sojourn in Vermont 
shows. The works he did produce while he was at home escaped from 
Russia largely because what he had to say about his homeland was 
popular in the west -- because it confirmed what westerners believed 
about the situation in Russia. Now that the Soviet Union is a dead 
issue, S. is gradually fading from consciousness as well. In what 
bookstore today can you buy copies of _One Day in the Life of Ivan 
Denisovitch_, _Cancer Ward_, or _The First Circle_? Where, for that 
matter, is _The Gulag Archipelago_? Frankly, I doubt whether S.'s 
staying power will outlast the first decade of the new century.

(The best Solzhenitsyn I've ever heard consisted of a couple of 
his short stories, not widely know in the West because their 
criticism of communist society was less direct than that in his 
more popular long works. They were read -- in Esperanto -- by their 
translator, Nikolai Rytjkov, one evening at the 1970 world Esperanto 
conference in Vienna. The Russian embassy objected to having N.R. 
on the program reading S., but the Austrian government -- whose 
president at that time was an Esperantist, Franz Jonas -- told them 
to kiss off.)

Majakovskij and Gorjkij wrote from, for and about that same milieu -- 
but from a somewhat different point of view, one that was not 
terribly popular outside Russia. As far as I can tell, neither of them 
has ever attracted a significant audience beyond the Russian-speaking 
world, even the relatively ephemeral one that Solzhenitsyn did.
Gorjkij at least had a city named after him, but not for long.

(Where, by the way, do you find Remarque today? The only place I 
ever ran across him was in the Pasadena Public Library -- where for 
some reason they had Esperanto translations of _All Quiet on the 
Western Front_ [En Okcidento Nenio Nova] and _The Road Back_, the 
sequel which I've never seen in English...

I could add other names to your list of authors well-known (even 
internationally) in this century -- Jorge Amado, for instance, or 
Lu Xun (or, pace Mr. Chau, Guo Moruo), or Yukio Mishima. Whether 
any of them (and any on your list) will ever qualify as "great" 
in the sense of Shakespeare, Cervantes and even Tolstoy is a 
matter for somebody's great-grandchildren.

In another posting, you ask me to name one native-Esperanto author 
who has been translated into English. Huh? Is this now a criterion 
for literature of world significance? So Khomeini had no cause to 
put out a hit on Salman Rushdie for _Satanic Verses_, which was 
written in a language not native to Rushdie? So Joseph Conrad's 
_Heart of Darkness_ isn't worth reading (and the derivative movie 
_Apocalypse Now_ isn't worth seeing) because Conrad chose to write 
in a language which wasn't his native tongue? So whence the "native" 
bit? And why English? Why not some other language? Julio Baghy's 
_Printempo en au^tuno_ (Springtime in Autumn) got considerably better 
exposure, in terms of number of readers, by being translated (by a 
young Chinese Esperantist named Li, back in the late twenties or 
early thirties) into Chinese -- and it so impressed young Mr. Li 
himself that he was inspired to write his own novel (about arranged 
marriages and their consequences) with a similar atitle, _Autumn 
in Springtime_, which was published under his pen name Bakin 
(which I think most Chinese readers here will recognize, though you, 
Mr. Livesey, probably won't). Tibor Sekelj's _Kumewawa, Son of the 
Jungle_ has been translated from Esperanto and published in more than 
twenty languages (not necessarily including English) -- which does 
not mean that _Kumewawa_ is necessarily great literature. And if you 
went to see the movie _Sliver_, you got a look at a film that appears 
to have been at least inspired by a book originally written in 
Esperanto (Jean Forge's _Mr. Tot Ac^etas Mil Okulojn_ [Mr. Tot Buys 
a Thousand Eyes]), probably via Fritz Lang's _The Thousand Eyes of 
Dr. Mabuse_, which explicitly credits Forge (under his real name, 
Jan Fethke).

Escaping one's cultural ghetto is largely a matter of luck. Escaping 
to a certain location is a matter of even greater luck. Marko Rauhamaa 
lists a series of Finnish authors who are for the most part unknown 
in the English-speaking world, but who are considered greats in 
Finland (most of us at least know that Mika Waltari is or was a 
writer; a few would recognize the name of Tove Jansson, though most 
would not know that she is a woman -- Marko, oni cetere j^us reeldonis 
_Muminvalon_ en Esperanto). Esperantists would not recognize Waltari's 
name, but are familiar with some of the works of Jansson, Lonnrot and 
Kivi. (At least one American was familiar with Lonnrot's work -- he 
inspired the form of Longfellow's _Hiawatha_ -- but then Longfellow 
himself, who would certainly have been on your list a century ago, is 
today largely forgotten. Such a fleeting thing, fame.)

Oh, and at some point you ask: Why aren't I busy translating from 
Esperanto into English? Sorry, son, that's not my bag. When I have 
time (which is not often), I prefer to go in the other direction. 
For one thing, it's easier, and gives me more opportunity to play 
with words (English is such a _petrified_ language). For another 
thing, I enjoy showing off the stuff I like in my native language's 
literature to people who may never have had any access to it (I 
think of my English class at the Randers Statsskole in Denmark -- 
Byrial, literumado? -- plowing their way through Dickens' _Nicholas 
Nickleby_, sentence by carefully explained sentence, and never taking 
so much as a bit of pleasure from the story). So, if you check out 
my URL (see my .sig), you can find my Esperanto translations of Fortune's 
_Blood Thirst_, Lovecraft's _Pickman's Model_, Kipling's _Rikki-tikki-
tavi_, Banjo Paterson's "Waltzing Matilda", William Blake's "Jerusalem", 
and my collaboration (at a ninety-year distance) with E. M. Robinson on 
Edward Everett Hale's _The Man Without a Country_. But, I forget, 
according to the testimony of a couple of other people who've posted 
here, you haven't got any interest in seeing what Esperanto is _really_ 
about, do you. Sorry I made the suggestion...

Hope this makes a few points clear. Try avoiding that ol' "bait and 
switch" in future, please.



-- 
Don HARLOW			donh@netcom.com
Esperanto League for N.A.       elna@netcom.com (800) 828-5944
ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/el/elna/elna.html         Esperanto
ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/do/donh/donh.html 
