It's fairly certain, I imagine, that Jules Verne did not know how to speak Esperanto when he agreed to become the first honorary president of the new Amiens Esperanto society and, since he died not long after this, on the 24th of March 1905, he may never have actually learned the language. He did, however, (as you will see in the next Topic article) know something about the structure of Esperanto, and about Dr Zamenhof too. For example, he knew that a very early prototype of Esperanto had been first "launched" at Zamenhof's 15th birthday party on the 5th of December 1878. Clearly his interest in and support for Esperanto was genuine and so he decided to help the growth of the Language in the best way he could: by discussing it in the context of a new novel.
This novel, to which I referred at the beginning of this article, was given the provisional title of Voyage d'Etudes, (in English, approximately, Voyage of Discovery, and one of the characters, Nicolas Vanof, was a very enthusiastic supporter of Esperanto. Nor was he the only Esperanto speaker in the book. However, to quote Istvan Ertl, "on the 24th of March 1905, four months before the Boulogne conference, Jules Verne died. His son Michel arranged for the publication of about a dozen novels under his father's name,some of which Michel wrote himself, just using ideas and themes from those manuscripts left behind by his father."
And this is what happened to Voyage of Discovery. Michel Verne used the 50 pages already written as the inspiration for a new novel, published in 1919 with the title: L'Etonnante Aventure de la Mission Barsac, - The Strange Adventure of the Barsac Expedition. There is no reference whatsoever to Esperanto in this work.
(New readers of this series can find here - http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/espe... - a description of the historic Boulogne Conference in an earlier Esperanto topic article called: "Boulogne and Betrayal." Please take a look at this if you haven't already seen it.)
And that's all I have space for this time. I will, however, continue the discussion of Verne's Voyage of Discovery in my next Topic article. I will also provide an English-language translation of some selected passages from this unfinished novel before moving on to consider some other aspects of Esperanto and science fiction. Meanwhile, you may care to visit this very fine web site devoted to Jules Verne:
 |
 |
| Here's the follow-up discussion on this article: | View all related messages |
For a complete listing of article comments, questions, and other discussions related to David Poulson's Esperanto topic, please visit the Discussions page.