Hi PoppaGator,

I don't spend much time browsing the BS threads, so I was unaware of this one until Ebbie PM'd me today. I am indeed an active Mudcatter (I joined in September of 2000) and at least two of my recent posts topside have mentioned Esperanto: this one in the NW Folklife thread and this one in the "Aloha 'oe" thread.

I can't post at great length at the moment because I'm busy preparing to fly to Austin, Texas, for the annual convention of the Esperanto League for North America June 9-13. (Any 'Catters in the Austin area, I'd be happy to meet you; the convention is at Concordia University.) At the convention, I will publish my Esperanto translations of Melville's Jimmy Rose and Harvey Cox's "Jesus and the Koran"; declaim my Esperanto version of Brannan's "Where the Lion Roareth and the Wang-Doodle Mourneth"; give a talk (with demo) on how to make and eat sushi; lead a Christian worship service and participate in an interfaith one; present a talk on American Indian Literature; and hopefully get in some good old Esperanto folksinging. In the light of your comment that you'd "study Irish or Yiddish before taking up Esperanto. They may be "dead languages" (or almost-dead), but at least they both have interesting and worthwhile literary traditions" it is interesting that the theme of the Austin convention is "Literaturo". The featured guests will be the Chinese Esperanto author and translator Laŭlum and the South African (now resident in Texas) Esperanto poet Edwin de Kock. The notion that Esperanto does not have an interesting and worthwhile literary tradition is one of many erroneous notions about the language and its community. Esperanto literature has had a significant impact on the literary culture of the Far East, playing a particularly important role in left-labor, communist and feminist circles in both China and Japan. Ba Jin, a Chinese literary lion and vice president of the People's Republic, wrote a novel in Chinese that was a response to the original-in-Esperanto novel "Printempo en la aŭtuno" by Julio Baghy. Laŭlum (who will be in Austin) in turn translated Ba Jin's novel into Esperanto. Borrow Esperanta Antologio (through InterLibrary Loan if your local library doesn't have it) for a nice immersion-method 800-page introduction to a century of original Esperanto poetry. The fact that Baghy's Viktimoj or Szathmári's Vojaĝo al Kazohinio or Pič's Litomiŝla Tombejo hasn't been published in English does not in fact mean they are not significant and interesting novels written in Esperanto. Studying the differences between Newell's and Zamenhof's Hamletoj (and between each and Shakespeare's or Gide's) is an interesting exercise from a number of angles. None of which is to disparage the literary traditions of Irish and Yiddish, both of which I highly esteem though the former I can't really read.

Or read Ulrich Lins's La Danĝera Lingvo about the persecution and martyrdom of Esperantists through the years (both Hitler and Stalin interned and interred many many Esperantists).

I have been an active Esperanto speaker for more than thirty years, and while I don't think Esperanto is "poised to depose English" or anything, I also don't think we're any less well positioned now than we were when I was new at it. Although it is true that in the death of John Paul II we lost our most prominent public speaker; as far as I know Benedict doesn't speak Esperanto, though perhaps he'll learn it in time for the Urbi et orbi...

Anyhow what with Folklife this weekend and then Austin in two weeks I won't have much of a chance to follow this post up for awhile, but I look forward to rejoining the debate after the middle of June.

Haruo