Jules Verne's Voyage of Discovery
I will begin this article with a few paragraphs from Jules Verne's unfinished novel Voyage of Discovery which I discussed in the previous article. The translation is my own and has been derived from Istvan Ertl's Esperanto translation of the French original. I think that, just a look at the few sentences which follow will cause a few pangs of regret that Verne did not live long enough to complete this work. Who knows how much additional interest in Esperanto could have been generated if a completed version had been published before 1914.
"When the Minister gave his permission for Messrs Isidore Papeleu and Joseph Denizart to investigate the country from the political perspective he extended the same favour to Nicolas Vanof, a member of the Touring Club and a delegate of the Esperantist Conference."
[Translators Note. The first international conference did not take place until six months after Jules Verne died. The Touring Club, a famous contemporary organization to promote tourism and travel, published a series of articles about Esperanto in their official journal. They appeared in 1900 and 1901 and also, from April 1901, courses in Esperanto were conducted at the Touring Clubs headquarters. It was at one of these courses that Theophile Cart, who inspired the formation of the Amiens Esperanto Club two years later, himself learned the language.]
"Nicolas Vanov was a 30-year old Russian, a pleasant, charming and spontaneous individual, also an incandescent propagandist of the Esperanto language. It is scarcely conceivable how fervently this -one might say- apostle dedicated himself to the work of Dr Zamenhof. He was a great help in making it know among the Slavic people, and tirelessly competed with Cart, De Beaufront, Delfour and other adepts of this language, destined to facilitate contact between the inhabitants of the Old and New Worlds. As is generally know, Esperanto penetrated the vast regions of Central Africa several years ago, with great advantages for civilization and commerce."
After this, the reader is presented with an example of the Vanof spoke to his audience when giving a lecture on Esperanto.
"No, ladies and gentlemen, we are not talking about a language like Volapuk which will disappear after fruitless attempts to get it accepted. Esperanto cannot be compared to Volapuk! The work of Dr. Johann Schleyer was unsuitable from its birth. It needed a philologist to give to the world a new idiom which would be accessible to everyone, and the doctor was only a polyglot. His modification of the most common roots was simply capricious, and he was so careless in the way he created grammatical endings that when the endings were attached to the roots, quite illogically, they both became immediately unrecognizable."
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