Home » Education & Career » Esperanto » Esperanto Literature Part Two

Esperanto Literature Part Two

© David Poulson

During the lonely years before he met Klara, Ludovik Zamenhof created a distinctive literary style for his new language, quite distinctive and not based on the style of any of the other languages he knew.

Confronted with irrefutable evidence that thousands of people were learning Esperanto and dozens were using it to either translate works from their national literature or write original pieces themselves, Zamenhof knew that he had two tasks of great importance to accomplish.

First, he had to provide a style guide to aspiring authors so that the new language could develop in a way that allowed freedom but prevented chaos. And second he had to demonstrate that the literary medium he had created was capable of expressing the world's greatest masterpieces.

The way he met the second challenge could hardly have been more courageous. Only seven years after the publication of The First Book,(La Unua Libro) in 1894, Zamenhof published a translation of Hamlet.

This was an extremely difficult task. Zamenhof was a doctor, not a Shakespearean scholar. Nor was his command of the English language very good. His German was much better and he therefore relied heavily, but not wholly, on a German translation of Hamlet. As a result, Zamenhof's translation is not a great version of Hamlet, considered as a faithful rendition of the English text. But in another way, it is a great Hamlet. It is a beautiful piece of writing and although Shakespeare's mighty rhetorical engines are muted, the rhetoric of Zamenhof's version of this superb play is clear, mellifluous and dramatic.

A quick web search with Alta Vista revealed millions of pages containing the word "Hamlet" but you might like to check out this one - Hamlet

Other Esperanto translations of dramatic verse followed in 1907 and 1908: Goethe's Iphigenia in Tauris, Moliere's Georges Dandin, and Schiller's The Robbers. In 1907 Zamenhof also published a translation of The Government Inspector by Gogol.

Web sites of interest are as follows:

1. For an English translation of Iphigenia (from the original Greek of Euripides), go to Iphigenia.

2. For information about Schiller, see Schiller.

In 1910 his translations of The Battle of Life by Charles Dickens and Marta, a novel written originally in Polish by Eliza Orzeskowa, appeared. (Please read the discussion on this topic for more information about this interesting lady.)

Marta was translated from Esperanto into both Chinese and Japanese, the first (but not the last) time that Esperanto was used as a "bridge language" between two national languages.