This is a reply which I wrote to a post on Reddit: “Why is Esperanto like this?". I am glad that I took the time to put in to words why I care about old books in Esperanto. It helped me make sense of my project of reading La Baza Legolisto.
For a moment, I want to put aside the whole discussion of “Why is Esperanto culture like this?” and “Why not have more interesting/contemporary stuff in Esperanto?”
About 100 year old books in Esperanto: There is something deeply fascinating about Esperanto literature that is hard to put across to non-geeks because the history of Esperanto is so unique. The language is only ~140 years old. So, in a sense, a 100 year old document is going almost all the way back to the very beginnings of the written history.
In contrast to English, where the language has dramatically changed over its written history, Esperanto has stayed very consistent. You can read pretty much anything going back to the very beginnings and it will make sense. Very little has changed. Last year, I got a copy of an early novel Pro Iŝtar (1924) and it read wonderfully.
A few years back, I took a week long literature course with István Ertl at NASK. He said that one notable feature of Esperanto literature is that a normal person can essentially read all of it. Completely. Everything that matters. This just isn’t possible in other languages. People spend their whole careers trying to get their heads around tiny-tiny fractions of English literature, for example. There just aren’t enough hours in a human lifetime to, say, read everything every written about Shakespeare. But, in Esperanto, you can.
Pace kaj ame!
Published: Jan 17, 2025
Last Modified: Jan 17, 2025
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