Esperanto world than in the general population; it literally
transforms a world of peoples into a familia rondo, a family circle.)
But Wayne’s not much of a traveler; “I’m a stay-at-home,
midwestern guy.” Not once in our conversation does he bring up the
movement; the Universal Congress, which he does not attend; nor
the interna ideo.
“Esperantists imagine enormous projects—great ideas—and then:
who’s going to do this? And they look at one another and then at
their feet. They feel they have to spread the ideals and the language,
but I don’t. It’s the same with my religion. It’s mine; I don’t need to
convince anyone else. If Esperanto brings me together with two or
three interesting people here and there, great. It usually does.
Esperanto may be a moveable feast, but NASK is Brigadoon—a
magical town that comes into being once a year, then just as
mysteriously disappears.”
One afternoon, Wayne presents me with a yellowed, dog-eared
copy of the famous 1952 Kvaropo (Quartet), a breakthrough debut
for the “Scottish school” of Esperanto poets: William Auld, Reto
Rossetti, John Sharp Dinwoodie, and John Francis. This copy has
been sitting for decades in the traveling NASK library, but Wayne
tells me to keep it, as a kind of therapy—for the book, that is. “The
best thing for it,” he says, handing me the book, “is to be read.” We
read a few poems aloud. Wayne points out that Esperanto poetics
frowns upon rhyming suffixes (including rhymed verb endings, a
staple for Italian sonneteers) as third-rate technique. In fact, there is
a name for it—adasismo—a word coined by one of the earliest
Esperanto poets, Antoni Grabowski, from the chief offense: rhyming
-adas endings (kuradas, “continues to run”; staradas, “continues to
stand”). The term adasismo appears in the 1932 Parnasa Gvidlibro
(Parnassian Guidebook), the first handbook of Esperanto poetics.
Co-authored by the two preeminent men of Esperanto letters, the
Hungarian poet Kálmán Kalocsay and the French grammarian and
lexicographer Gaston Waringhien, the Gvidlibro is famous for its
witty rhyming satires of bad poetic practice.
Also on the NASK bookshelf is the Esperanta Antologio, a classic
anthology first published in 1958, edited by William Auld. I’d been
introduced to it a few months earlier by *Humphrey Tonkin, an
eminent man of letters in the Esperanto world and a professor
emeritus of English Renaissance literature. When I met him at his
home in Hartford, Connecticut, he greeted me in white khakis, a
blue seersucker shirt, and moccasins. With a pink complexion and
bushy white brows, he looks like an actor playing a university
president, which is what he was, from 1989 to 1998, at the
University of Hartford.
An Esperantist for more than half a century, Tonkin explained
that Esperanto’s system of word building offers poets a fantastic
degree of flexibility. Sometimes these constructions are clunky;
moreover, since almost all Esperanto words are accented on the
penultimate syllable, they are hard to scan in poetic meter, which
generally alternates strong and weak beats. Sometimes neologisms
are coined to avoid them, but poets have another arrow in their
quiver: eliding the “o” ending of singular nouns, which shifts the
accent to the final syllable. But even without neologisms,
agglutination is a small price to pay for turning Clark Kent roots
into superwords, garbing the most everyday vocabulary with a dark
cape of metaphor.
Before I ever uttered a sentence in Esperanto, Tonkin walked me
through one of his favorite poems, a tiny gem by Victor Sadler:
Mi
(kiam en la kuniklejo de via sako
Vi furioze fosas pro bileto, kiu
Tre verŝajne jam eskapis)
Amas vin.
(Kien, cetere, vi metis
Mian koron?)
A literal rendering in English would go something like this:
I(when in the rabbit-hole of your bag
You furiously dig for a ticket
Which probably already escaped)
Love you.
(Where, by the way, did you put
My heart?)
In English, a hybrid of Anglo-Saxon and French, we are spoiled
for lexical choice; kuniklejo might be translated “rabbit-hole,”
“warren,” or “hutch.” Esperanto’s scarcer resources, however, turn
out to be a great boon. Calling the handbag a kuniklejo magically
turns it into a rabbity place instead of comparing it to a “hole” or
“warren” or “hutch.” In the first stanza, the subject “I” is trailed by a
long parenthetical modifier which provides the atmosphere in which
the declarative statement “I love you” lives and breathes. Even after
the delayed verb and adjective appear, the image of the woman
furiously digging in her bag arrives whole and indelibly, the raison
d’être of the poet’s love.
The importance of the adverbial phrase in Sadler’s poem points to
a truth about adverbs: they are the Esperantist poet’s most coveted
superpower. Because any root has the potential to become an
adverb by taking an -e ending, adverbs can propel Esperanto poems
into elliptical orbits, making them hard to translate. The “adverb
thing,” as one of the NASK students calls it, has made its way like a
termite into the lumber of colloquial Esperanto. Where an English
speaker might look out on a brilliant day and exclaim, “It’s sunny!”
an Esperanto speaker would say simply “Sune!” (Sunnily!) or “Brile!”
(Brilliantly!). One night, after a few beers, a student named Bernard
walks into a party to find all the folding chairs in disarray. He
pauses to take it in: “Seĝe!” is all he says—“Chairily!”—and all he
needs to say. “Kiel vivi vegane” (“How to Live Veganly”) is the name
of a leaflet Slim distributes the night he gives his gruesome
PowerPoint presentation about agribusiness. After showing a clip of
little chicks being poured into a macerating machine, he ends with a
picture of a hundo manĝata telere; a dog being eaten on bone china
“platedly.”
5. Filipo and Nini
Three days into the program, a new student arrives. He’s a pudgy,
florid man with white hair and a sparse, floury beard, around fifty,
introducing himself as Filipo Vinbergo de Los-anĝeloso. An
Esperanto first name is not uncommon at Esperanto gatherings, but
a surname? Okay, Philip Weinberg from LA, have it your way. On both
hands he wears compression bandages, from which protrude ten
swollen fingers. I introduce myself and ask him the old standby: “Pri
kio vi laboras?” (What work do you do?) Amid the ensuing avalanche
of expression, I can’t catch his job. I’d later discover that he doesn’t
have one, and who or what supports him—a pension? family?
disability insurance?—is a subject he never broaches, nor do I.
At dinner, Filipo tells me he’s an amateur lexicographer: “My
friend Charles, from Nigeria, and I have written an Ibo-Esperanto
dictionary,” he says breathlessly. “We noted the usage codes in the
big dictionaries and transposed each of them into colors to be used
to teach Ibo children Esperanto.” I’m not sure who’s teaching Ibo