the competing claims of free individuals on the one hand, and on the
other, communities bound by values and traditions. Esperantists
reconcile liberalism and communitarianism by freely choosing a
tradition of ideals.
But as much as I respect Esperantists for making this choice, and
for the gorgeous language and culture they have made, they are also
the victims of their own mythology. Specifically, they uphold the
myth that Esperanto’s vaunted political neutrality (which has its
own unhandsome history) removes it from the arena of politics. On
the contrary, Esperanto is essential y political, as I have argued to
roomfuls of disconcerted Esperantists; it was created to enable
diverse peoples to talk not only past their differences but also about
them. Zamenhof envisioned multiethnic cities, states, and continents
—indeed, a multiethnic world—using Esperanto for the sake of
reconciliation and harmony. I want to honor the achievement and
longevity of Esperanto, but even more to herald its untapped
potential to bring us closer to political justice. Esperanto’s greatest
power of all is to be powerless and yet to compel us to move from
bafflement to understanding, from conflict to resolution.
Bridge of Words began as a biography of Zamenhof, who, like the
subject of my biography Emma Lazarus, was a modern Jew of the
pogrom-ridden 1880s, trying to steer a course between universalism
and particularism. But because Zamenhof gave his universal
language to its users, Esperanto is their creation, too. Hence this
book is a biography of Esperanto’s collective creators, the Esperanto
community, and a report from its trenches. And like the universal
language, a hybrid of several tongues, this book is a hybrid of
cultural history and memoir. Each of the four parts pairs a historical
narrative with a memoir of my sojourns, visits, on five continents,
among samideanoj—which is how Esperantists refer to one another,
invoking the commonality of vague “same-idea-ness.”
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. Zamenhof’s 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!):
1) “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 “skiktröntgen”—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?
2) 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
René 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.
Chapter 1 of Genesis represents both divine and human speech,
and while God and Adam seem to understand one another—no one
asks for translation or expresses befuddlement—what each does with
language is clearly different. God creates with it, Adam names with
it, and their languages differ as much as “Let there be light” differs