Bridge of Words

The Esperanto world is a place where minds are changed, and mine was no exception. As the memoirs in this book will show, encountering hundreds of Esperantists in far-flung places was also an encounter with myself. What I realized, during the seven years I spent speaking the language of "the hoping one," was how keenly I needed to infuse my life with hope. And living in the universal language, among people from distant countries, I realized that I had failed to understand—and make myself understood by—those closest to me. Esperanto brought me to a reckoning with the choices I had made and those I had yet to make. Had I predicted, when I began this project, the course my future would take, I'd have been very wrong. Regarding the future of Esperanto I am no prophet either, but of one thing I am sure: there will be no fina venko, when the whole world is speaking Esperanto. But Esperanto does not need to succeed in the future. It has already done so in the present, a human creation that is rare and valuable, and the intimation of a better world.

PART ONE

THE DREAM OF A UNIVERSAL

LANGUAGE

1. Zamenhofs Babel

My friend Michael was reading galleys of his new book when an email arrived.

Dear Sir,

I am the proud translator of your book into Swedish. I have two questions (there will be more, I promise!):

"She had as much success reading The Cat in the Hat as she would a CAT scan." The book The Cat in the Hat is translated into Swedish, so far so good, with the title "Katten i Hatten" which is almost the same. A CAT scan however is a "datortomografi" or "skiktrontgen"—no cats in sight. I thought of exchanging the CAT scan for "hattiska hieroglyfer'—"Hatti hieroglyphs"—they should be pretty hard to read! But then we have to shift the resemblance from "CAT-Cat scan" to "Hat-Hatti." Or would you prefer something more technical and CAT scanny?

When you come home and find the knives "behind a set of rarely used dishes," are these some kind of plates or more like bowls?

Best wishes, Anders

The email made Michael anxious. He imagined his Swedish readers coming upon "Hatti hieroglyphs," lowering the book, and staring into the middle distance, where they would find, as Anders put it, "no cats in sight." With cats become hats, scans become hieroglyphs, and dishes become plates or even bowls, was this still his book? "If only," Michael said wistfully, "I had written the book in Esperanto."

His assumption, of course, was that Esperanto was invented to be a universal language that would put us all beyond translation, and I can see why he thought so: it's an ancient dream, the dream of reversing the curse of Babel and restoring us to some lost capacity to understand language perfectly. But to put us "beyond translation" is decidedly not the project of Esperanto. Instead of deeming language to be compromised by its humanity, Zamenhof placed his confidence in human beings: both in their will toward understanding and in their recognition that understanding, at the best of times, is a fraught endeavor. A language of collective invention, he believed, would be far more likely to succeed than a language closely held, meted out, or even ostentatiously bestowed by its inventor. In fact, the more users coined new words, the more likely the language was to be widely used and cherished, for each new word traced a crossing from one language to another. Esperanto was invented not to transcend translation, but to transact it.

By aligning universal understanding with the future rather than the past, Zamenhof broke with the West's central myth of linguistic difference: the story of the Tower of Babel. Though biographers Rene Centassi and Henri Masson dubbed Zamenhof "the man who defied Babel," Zamenhof knew that to defy Babel was folly. For Zamenhof, Babel was not a curse to be reversed, but the mythic elaboration of an epistemological problem: how can we know the meaning of another person's utterance, whatever language they happen to speak?

Zamenhof was not only an acute reader of Genesis; he also spent most of a decade translating the entire Hebrew Bible into Esperanto, completing it only three years before his death. If Zamenhof doubted that there existed a unitary world language before Babel, he would have found the biblical evidence on his side. I don't simply mean the long chapter on human diversity—the "table of nations" (Genesis 10)—that immediately precedes the story of Babel. I want to suggest that even in the Garden of Eden story, the notion of an original, universal language is at best dubious.