This Is My Hobby Horse

Don’t ask why, but I’ve always been fascinated by Esperanto. In fact, at the first bookstore I ever worked at — Schuler Books and Music — I helped create a mini Esperanto section.

Of course these books didn’t really sell, which I blamed on the fact that Esperanto is pretty much a dead language from a bygone moment of idealism . . . Which, according to Norman Berdichevsky, isn’t really the case:

Only twenty years ago, the one hundredth anniversary of the language was celebrated by a massive World Congress in Beijing, China and resulted in major feature stories on the cover pages of Time, Newsweek and U.S. News and World Report that all objectively and favorably reviewed its achievements and quite rightly wondered why the language has not received more support from international organizations that continue to waste enormous sums of money on multiple and simultaneous translations and interpreting.

Nevertheless, articles continue to appear by scores of journalists or commentators who have met Esperanto for the first time and express amazement that it has not disappeared as has been predicted in every decade since its inception in 1887. They ignore such milestones as the favorable resolutions passed by the League of Nations and the United Nations encouraging its instruction and use. It comes as a shock that there are many tens of thousands (very possibly hundreds of thousands) of Esperanto speakers who use it in every sense as a “living language” capable of generating a loyalty and devotion among its community of speakers. These include those who learned it as children from their parents. All of them continue to shape and change it and have invested it with the deepest emotions and have even generated their own cosmopolitan literature, culture and slang without a physical homeland.

This article is quite fascinating, documenting the history of invented languages, and various reasons why they never caught on.

It makes as much sense to denigrate Esperanto as to ridicule Welsh, Estonian or Catalan. Of course, “educated” people would never venture an opinion or mock a national language about which they know nothing for fear of offending a particular nationality and being “politically incorrect” but Esperanto is fair game for cynics and may provoke an off the cuff comparison with “Klingon” (imaginary language of aliens from outer space). The critics and the cynics are wholly ignorant of Esperanto’s real enemies with real power who took it seriously enough to put tens of thousands of its proponents to death or imprison them for decades.

(Berdichevsky also cites a priceless quote from Hitler about this: “As long as the Jew has not become the master of the other peoples, he must speak their languages whether he likes it or not, but as soon as they became his slaves, they would all have to learn a universal language (Esperanto, for instance!)”)

And there’s even a bit about literature in Esperanto:

For them, it represents a kind of Frankenstein-like invention “without a soul.” Mary Jackson, (so eminently sensible about almost all else), in her commentary “Volapük – Esperanto for losers” (New English Review, December 2006), concludes that Esperanto must be “soulless”. She is also convinced there is no Esperanto literature worth reading. I know there IS – both original literature in Esperanto and works translated from Esperanto into English and dozens of other languages. Moreover, a Scottish Esperantist, William Auld, was a recent candidate for the Noble Prize in literature but he, as well as other great Esperanto writers, such as Sandor Szathmari, Raymond Schwartz, Julio Baghy, Ferenc Szligayi, Kalman Kalocsay, Jean Forge, Gaston Waringheim and Claude Piron may be just names that evoke a shoulder shrug but their works have been read and appreciated and held in the highest regard by the speakers and readers of a language that indeed has a culture if not a homeland.