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Kabe (Conclusion)

© David Poulson

Kabe became active in the Esperanto movement in 1903 and between that date and his surprising withdrawal in 1911 his achievements were truly extraordinary. In 1906 he was already Vice-President of the "Lingva Komitato", the forerunner of the Academy of Esperanto,and also in that year he published his Vortaro. This was a dictionary but not a two-way dictionary, ie Esperanto-Polish, Polish Esperanto. In the Vortaro Kabe defined all the words in the Esperanto language, (now nearly 20 years old), in Esperanto. The definitions are very clear, very precise and very elegantly expressed.

To see a photograph of Kabe with other leading members of the Language Committee, go to: http://www-city.europeonline.com/home/zs...

Grabowski is in the same photograph. Unfortunately,you will see that in a version of this photograph published in Z. Adam's Historio de Esperanto, published in 1912, Kabe has really disappeared! A disgraceful and inexcusable bit of censorship, but an indication of how shocked and angry at least one contemporary Esperantist was at Kabe's "defection"! Fortunately the truth will out.

(Suite 101 has its own Topic devoted to Censorship and Banned Books, written by Rick Russell, and you will find it at: http://www.suite101.com/welcome.cfm/cens...

In 1907, Kabe published his translation of Boleslaw Prus's great novel The Pharaoh, an epic story of Rameses XIII and his brave but doomed struggle to reclaim the power of the Ramides Pharaohs from the all-powerful Egyptian priesthood, and avert the impending collapse of the XXth Dynasty.

How Kabe managed this enormous amount of work in so short a space of time is a mystery to me. I have a copy of La Faraono myself and am re-reading it at the moment. There are three volumes which contain just over 950 pages. I think that any kind of translation of such a huge book done so quickly and out of, not into one's own native language would have my respect. But this wasn't just any kind of translation: it was a great translation!

Kabe's language in is pure, clear, simple, elegant and free from all characteristics of the original Polish. The "spirit" of Esperanto, ie its true international quality, lives and breathes throughout the whole work and the sentences are perfectly balanced, with every word in its proper place, and easy to read. Following Kabe's example, writers of classical Esperanto now do not use the word "unu" to indicate an indefinite article ("a" or "an"), and also avoid the use of complicated compound verb forms to express past tenses.

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