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From: hinsenk@cyclone.ERE.UMontreal.CA (Hinsen Konrad)
Subject: Re: Great Esperanto literature (was: Re: Esperanto? The EU?)
In-Reply-To: frenkel@ix.uucp's message of 19 Feb 1995 21:52:41 GMT
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Date: Mon, 20 Feb 1995 23:28:55 GMT
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In article <3i8ej9$bhi@masala.cc.uh.edu> frenkel@ix.uucp (David Frenkel) writes:

    OK, so you have the wares, called Esperanto, and you want the world, or
    at least Europe, to start teaching it in schools.

    So, the "customer" asks about the quality of the product. What does he
    get in response? Oh yes, a bunch of names he has never heard of, and a
    declaration that anglophones don't know anything anyway.

The analogy is not complete: Esperanto speakers don't want to "sell"
anything; they don't expect to make any profit. They want to convince
others that using Esperanto is to everyone's advantage.

    way. Show us the goods. Spend the time you put into flame wars on
    internet into translating those great Esperanto poets and writers into
    several major European (and other) languages, make sure those
    translations find their way to the bookstores, and the customers will
    see for themselves what your stuff is worth.

Some, although very few, literary works have been translated into
other languages. But it is extremely difficult economically to
do what you propose. The market success of books unfortunately
depends little on their literary quality.

    When you learn any language, they always tell you that can't learn
    a language without learning about the culture that bore it.

What "they" tell you needn't be always true. It is certainly
true that to read a novel, you need some knowledge about the
culture of its author (even when reading a translation).
But this is not true, for example, for scientific articles.
Yet no one would claim that scientific articles do not use
"language".

    Tolstoy just ain't the same in English as it is in my native Russian.

Which is partly a problem of translation and partly a consequence
of the fact that English-speaking readers tend to know less about
Russian culture and history. It certainly doesn't mean that English
as a language is worse than Russian.

    Any literature had had its roots and beginnings in a folklore.
    What is the folklore of Esperanto?

I suggest you to read Pierre Janton's book about Esperanto, which
describes its culture and literature without assuming any knowledge
of Esperanto. It is originally in French (title: L'Esperanto),
but an English translation is available.

    Esperanto was not born into or off any culture,
    unless that cute little network of good friends is considered 
    equivalent in its richness to that  a real human society, in whose
    language people love, hate, till the land, write books, sue each other,
    laugh at each other, talks to their children, and with whose words on
    their lipes they die, and so on.

All of the things mentioned above have happened in Esperanto, with
the possible exceptions of "sue each other", as there is no court
operating in Esperanto.

    New words, the funny words are usually born among the lower classes,
    and what are the "lower classes" of Esperanto?

Esperanto has been used by all "classes", from workers to academics.

    Despite all I have just said, I am always ready to change my mind, but
    not at the price of having to learn a language just to see if it has any
    good writers.

It would certainly make sense to compile a list of Esperanto literature
translated into other languages.

--
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Konrad Hinsen                     | E-Mail: hinsenk@ere.umontreal.ca
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