Sur la spuroj de Julio Baghy en Budapest

Sur la spuroj de Julio Baghy en Budapest
de Gian Piero Savio.
Somero 2011. 12:07 minutoj.

Ĉi tiu video komenciĝas per kanzono kaj mencioj de hungaraj inventistoj. Estas kelkaj informoj pri la Hungara Esperanto-movado kaj Literatura Mondo. Estas mapoj kaj fotografoj de loĝejoj de Julio Baghy kaj Literatura Mondo. Enestas poemoj de Baghy kaj kaj rilataj kanzonoj (ekz. de Kajto). Oni povas eĉ aŭskulti la voĉon de Baghy.


Sur la spuroj de Julio Baghy en Budapest from Gian Piero Savio on Vimeo.

Esperanto in Berlin und Brandenburg

Jen interesa dulingva blogo pri Esperanto en Germanio, kiu enhavas multan interesan historian kaj klerigan materialon:

Esperanto in Berlin und Brandenburg

Ekzemple, enestas video de Detlev Blanke, historiaj informoj pri la germana laborista Esperanto-movado, informoj pri verkistoj.

Neciklopedio

Se vi jam tediĝas je Vikipedio, vi povas konsulti alternativan referencilon, t.e. Neciklopedio.

Ĝis nun plej plaĉas al mi la artikolo pri István Ertl.

Julia Cho: "The Language Archive"

Scenes from "The Language Archive" by Julia Cho



"Scenes from the world premiere of Julia' Cho's "The Language Archive," featuring Leo Marks, Betsy Brandt, Tony Amendola, Laura Heisler and Linda Gehringer playing at South Coast Repertory March 26 - April 25, 2010."

The Language Archive - Opening Night



Esperanto rolas en ĉi tiu teatraĵo. / Esperanto plays a role in this play:

Preview "The Language Archive" at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2011



Julia Cho



. . . kaj de ĉi tiuj videoj troveblas retligoj al pluaj videoj. Jen recenzo/ . . . and there are links from these sources to other videos. Here is a review:

"A Linguist at a Loss for Words Regarding Love" By CHARLES ISHERWOOD, The New York Times, October 17, 2010.

Ĉi tiu vide-recenzo esprimas ioman malaprobon de la teatraĵo sed laŭdas Esperanton. / These video-reviewers have some harsh remarks for the play but praise Esperanto:

AndrewAndrew Insta-Review of The Language Archive

We Shall Overcome / Venkos Ni en Gloro

"We Shall Overcome" fariĝis kvazaŭ-himno de la usona homrajta movado de la negra popolo en la 60aj jaroj. Troveblas la vortoj de la kanzono plurloke interrete, ekz.: We Shall Overcome.

Ekzistas ankaŭ Esperanta traduko: Venkos ni en gloro, esperantigis Wouter PILGER.

Laŭmemore, mi trovis kelkajn variaĵojn en la stancaro. Mi kredas ke mi memoras, sed ne trovis, stancon kiu komenciĝas "Black and white together" (blankuloj & nigruloj kune).

Jevgenij Zamjatin pri Revolucio, Entropio, Dogmo & Herezo

Jen mia ĵusa traduko (el angla traduko) de filozofiaj ideoj de Zamjatin:

Jevgenij Zamjatin pri Revolucio, Entropio, Dogmo & Herezo

Refoje, jen la citaĵaro el anglalingva verko:

Yevgeny Zamyatin on Revolution, Entropy, Dogma and Heresy

Mi esperas iam trovi pluajn verkojn de Zamjatin en Esperanto.

Ninieslando (2)

Mi antaŭe raportis pri "Ninieslando", novelo de Howard Waldrop en la antologio Warriors (militistoj) sub redakcio de George R. R. Martin & Gardner Dozois. Estas interese, ke Esperanto lastatempe aperas en historia fikcio, ĉi-kaze fantazia. Mi ne scias, ĉu la "eraroj" ĉi tie estas intencaj tordoj aŭ sciomanko flanke de la aŭtoro. Jen lia erara enkonduko al la historio de Esperanto:

It was one of the ironies of these times that in that far‑off golden summer of 1914, when "some damn fool thing in the Balkans" was leading to its inevitable climax, Tommy's brother Fred, who was then eighteen, had been chosen as a delegate of the Birmingham Working‑Men's Esperanto Association to go as a representative to the Twenty‑fourth Annual Esperanto Conference in Basel, Switzerland. The Esperanto Conference had been to take place in the last days of July and the first days of August. (Fred had been to France before with a gang of school chums and was no stranger to travel.)

The Esperanto Conference was to celebrate the twenty‑fourth anniversary of Zamenhof's artificial language, invented to bring better understanding between peoples through the use of an easy‑to‑learn, totally regular invented language—the thinking being that if all people spoke the same language (recognizing a pre‑Babel dream), they would see that they were all one people, with common dreams and goals, and would slowly lose nationalism and religious partisanship through the use of the common tongue.

There had been other artificial languages since—Volapuk had had quite a few adherents around the turn of the century—but none had had the cachet of Esperanto, the first and best of them.

Mi ne malkaŝos la finon de la rakonto. Kompreneble, "Ninieslando" estas, en reala Esperanto, "Nenieslando" = angla "No Man's Land", t.e. areo en batalkampo kiun regas neniu lando. Ĉi-kaze, temas pri sekreta taĉmento—kaŝa societo—kiu organizas eskapon el la Milito (la Unua Mondmilito). Oni enkondukas Tommy tiu"land"en, kie li povas denove paroli Esperanton kaj preskaŭ forgesas la anglan, ĝis . . .

Bertrand Russell pri pensado

Bertrand Russell laŭdas la revolucian karakteron de pensado, en angla kaj Esperanto:

Laŭde de penso, Beĉjo (blogo), 2011-06-08

Steampunked at a glance

Here is a handy blog introduction to the Steampunk ethos:

Steampunk'd at The Private Library, 26 May 2011.

No mention of conlangs here, but as I've blogged on this subject before, I thought this would be another useful in, and besides, I'm a fan of the Private Library. Maybe this will give you some ideas on the age in which artificial languages gained mass movements for the first time.

Zamenhof's 150th birthday on PRI's 'The World' radio

Paging Dr. Esperanto, and what not to say in Ireland’s parliament
By Patrick Cox, PRI's The World, December 17, 2009

An old program commemorating Zamenhof's 150th birthday, with links, as well as a sound file on Esperanto.  This broadcast also deals with words proscribed by the Irish Parliament.

Arika Okrent and Esther Schor are interviewed, with some attention to the Jewish roots of Zamenhof's creation. Okrent sees the late 19th century as the era of social engineering experiments. Schor discusses Zamenhof's background and motivations, as well as the egalitarian ethic of the Esperanto movement. And of course Incubus is mentioned. Okrent's moral: hand over your language and alow others to ruin its perfection, if you want it to succeed. At the end there's a recording of "The Girl from Ipanema" in Esperanto.

As an appendix, Cox gives us more of Schor's interview beyond the limits of the original broadcast format. She expands on Zamenhof's background, including his early preoccupation with the Jewish question, his desire to reform the Jewish religion, his project to reform Yiddish, his participation in the Zionist movement, projects all eventually abandoned for Esperanto. Schor describes Zamenhof's intervention and strategy for Esperanto in some detail, as well as the growth of the language over the ensuing 122 years. She mentions neologisms in connection with the ability to form compound words. Cox finds it difficult to pin down the motivations of Esperantists. Schor learned Esperanto to undertake her scholarly project; there are diverse motivations for others. She acquits herself very well in her presentation of the Esperanto world. Schor's forthcoming book on Esperanto is announced.

The Esperanto segment of this radio program comprises the first 20 minutes, 30 seconds. The rest concerns the Irish Parliament. This is an exceptionally fair treatment of Esperanto.

Leendert (Lodewijk Cornelius / Leen) Cornelius Deij (1919-2011)

La 31an de majo 2011 mortis eminenta esperantisto Leendert C[ornelius] Deij (konata ankaŭ kiel Lodewijk Cornelius Deij aŭ Leen Deij), kiu antaŭ multaj jardekoj verkis faman poemon pri la Holokaŭsto, "Al la Juda Foririnto" (trovebla miareteje).

Por pluaj informoj kaj recenzoj rigardu Leendert Deij (OLE).

Jen lia blogo:

La muelejo de Leen Deij

. . . kaj rilata artikolo:

90-jara la Civita dojeno

Jen kelkaj poemoj:

La lasta Judo (2008, pri "kristalnokto") poemo de Leen Deij

Nokte Sur Ferdeko, kantas Kajto, aŭtoras L. DEIJ kaj Nanne KALMA

Konko de Leen Deij, kantas Kajto

Du etuloj, rimoj de Leen Deij

La infana angulo: La akvo-rato - Heni kaj I-A - Nia hundo - La Akvoĉevalo de Leen Deij

Aŭtostrato de Leen Deij

Jen eseo:

“La islamano” ne ekzistas de Leen Deij

Nekrologe:

La plej bona amiko de mia patrino mortis hieraŭ de Nicole

la nederlanda esperantisto Leen Deij [kun foto] de Nicole

La Esperanta Civito nekrologas:

La esperanta popolo funebras pro Leen Deij

Civitano Leen Deij publike honorita

Bob Dylan 70-jara

Jen omaĝo fare de de Anton Oberndorfer ĉe Esperanta Retradio:

Bob Dylan 70-jara

La artikolo en Vikipedio pri Bob Dylan estas magra.

Pluraj kanzonoj estas tradukitaj Esperanten, sed mi ne disponas nun pri listo.

Karel Čapek & Esperanto (6)

Jen biografia enkonduko sone kaj tekste:

La ĉeĥa verkisto Karel Čapek de Anton Oberndorfer ĉe Esperanta Retradio

Li rememorigas pri la sonregistraĵoj de Poŝrakontoj de Ĉapek.

Ninieslando

“Warriors” edited by George R. R. Martin & Gardner Dozois (Reviewed by Robert Thompson), Fantasy Book Critic, March 1, 2010.

“Ninieslando” by Howard Waldrop. “Ninieslando” is one of those stories that starts off in one direction before suddenly veering off onto another. In this case, “Ninieslando” begins as what appears to be more historical fiction, particularly a realistic glimpse at trench warfare during World War I. But then the protagonist discovers a secret society based on the principles of the real life artificial language Esperanto and their plan to start a “New World of brotherhood”, and things start to get weird, but in a good way...

Joseph Skibell accepts prize, gives speech

Jen akcepto de premio de la Juda Libro-Konsilaro kun parolado de premiita verkisto Joseph Skibell:

Loneliness and the Novel, Jewish Book Council Blog, June 6, 2011.

"Joseph Skibell, 2011 Sami Rohr Prize Choice Award recipient and author of A Curable Romantic, shares his remarks from the 2011 Sami Rohr Priza Gala."

Jevgenij Zamjatin, sovetrusa verkisto, obstina herezulo

Antaŭ pli ol 40 jaroj mi legis verkojn de Jevgenij Zamjatin—nehaveblaj tiutempe en Sovetunio—en anglaj tradukoj. Precipe mi legis la pioniran malutopian romanon Ni kaj antologion da eseoj. Mi ankaŭ havis antologion da noveloj, kaj post multaj jaroj aperis aliaj tradukoj. En Esperanto mi konstatas nur la indikitajn du artikolojn en Vikipedio.

Mi kompilis kelkajn citaĵojn el eseoj de Zamjatin, kiu reliefigas ŝlosilajn konceptojn:

Yevgeny Zamyatin on Revolution, Entropy, Dogma and Heresy
[Jevgenij Zamjatin pri Revolucio, Entropio, Dogmoj & Herezoj]

Se mi ne trovos plu en Esperanto, mi devos almenaŭ traduki tiun retpaĝon el la angla.

Gramsci, language, Esperanto

In the late 1980s I investigated Antonio Gramsci's views on language including his hostility to the Esperanto movement. On a totally different track, encountering the Gramsci boom in the '90s I developed serious reservations about the transference of Gramsci's notion of organic intellectuals to contemporary circumstances. All of my suspicions were confirmed. I know I've mentioned this here and there but I don't recall writing anything systematic about it. But here are a couple short commentaries:

Antonio Gramsci, Organic Intellectuals, and the Division of Labor 

Marxism & Totality & Gramsci & Della Volpe

None of this touches on Gramsci's view of language, but it does suggest my suspicion of organicism. It might relate to Gramsci's treating Esperanto as anathema. I just chanced upon this article:

Gunster, Shane. "Gramsci’s Linguistic Turn: Critical Theory, Vernacular Materialism and the Grammar of Revolution" [Review of Ives, Peter. 2004. Gramsci’s Politics of Language: Engaging the Bakhtin Circle and the Frankfurt School. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.], Topia 13, pp. 165-168.

Gunster begins in a most unconvincing fashion:

Conceived in linguistic terms, then, the construction of a hegemonic cultural formation involves the molecular translation of diverse, immanent communicative practices into a coherent and (relatively) unified grammatical structure. Gramsci contrasts the progressive, organic character of this process to regressive forms of cultural domination that involve the external imposition of arbitrary, fixed linguistic regimes that serve to displace or repress, rather than integrate, indigenous patterns of language. Hence, for example, his fierce opposition to the naive, technocratic utopianism of those socialists and communists who advocated Esperanto as a means of artificially overcoming the communicative barriers that slowed the fashioning of a unified class consciousness among workers and peasants in different parts of Italy.

Clearly, Gunster  understands Esperanto no better than Gramsci did, or why the voluntaristic internationalism of proletarian Esperantists would be an imposition but national cultural unification is not. The balance of the review is not illuminating about any of the ideas discussed. I cannot draw any conclusions about Ives based on Gunster's useless review.

Sam Green, Utopia, Esperanto, Adorno

Here is a review of Sam Green's Utopia in Four Movements that I haven't seen before and that presents something different as well:

Hope Against Hope: Utopia in Four Movements by Andrew Lison, Dossier, May 14, 2009.

You don't often see Adorno's name juxtaposed to Esperanto, but the theme is failed utopian dreams and their monstrous side. It's a thoughtful review. I can't help but quip, though: there is Esperanto after Auschwitz.

Adorno & Esperanto? : phonetics, photograph, cinema, phonograph as universal languages

Some interesting metaphorical history here.

For the Record: Adorno on Music in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility
Thomas Y. Levin
October, Vol. 55. (Winter, 1990), pp. 23-47.

. . . particularly on pp. 35-38, where Esperanto is discussed. See the original text for illustrations.

At first glance there is a striking similarity between Adorno's evocation of a post-lapsarian utopia and the universal language topos that accompanied early cinema. [27] The parallel logic in what one could call the Esperantist conception of the cinema is evident, for example, in D. W. Griffith's claim in a 1921 interview that "A picture is the universal symbol, and a picture that moves is a universal language. Moving pictures, someone suggests, 'might have saved the situation when the Tower of Babel was built.' " [28] Just as cinema was heralded as a transparent, unproblematically accessible (because visual) alternative to national languages, an analogous discourse of democratization and univocal, natural signs accompanied the prehistory and invention of the phonograph. During the first half of the nineteenth century, phonography—defined in the OED as "a system of phonetic shorthand invented by Isaac Pitman in 1837"—was heralded as a "natural method of writing" [29] and was arduously defended by worker's groups as a means of making writing more widely accessible. [30] In the same vein, the "phonautographe," invented by Léon Scott de Martinville in 1857, was an attempt to produce, as the machine's subtitle explained, an "Apparatus for the Self-Registering of the Vibrations of Sound." The resulting "natural stenography" would be, according to the title of Scott's book on the subject, sound writing itself. [31] Illiteracy would thus be eliminated by substituting hearing and speaking for reading and writing. Indeed, one of the most popular uses of the early phonographs—which, one should recall, could both play and record—was acoustic correspondence. The "phono-post" speaking postcards, which one recorded and sent through the mails, made writing superfluous, a fact stressed by advertisements that invited potential users to drop their dictionaries and "Speak! Don't write any more! Listen!"

Unlike the visual Esperanto of the cinema, however, the possibility of universal language held out by the gramophone is just that: only a possibility, a hope. While the traces of the gramophone are just as indexical as the cinematic signifiers, they are not, as Adorno is careful to point out, readily intelligible like photographs. Rather, they are both indexical and enigmatic. In this regard they can claim both of the contradictory qualities of the hieroglyph: "universal" and "immediate" by virtue of their "natural," necessary relation of sign to referent, and also esoteric, recondite and requiring decoding, due to their surface inaccessibility. [32] Phonograph records are, to quote an astonishing early anticipation of Adorno's techno-cryptogrammic characterization, "cabalistic photographs [by means of which] sound can outlive itself, leave a posthumous trace, but in the form of hieroglyphs which not everyone can decipher." [33] Despite their shared millenarian formulations, the universal language rhetoric accompanying early cinema is thus far indeed from the post-Babelian figure employed by Adorno in his recuperation of gramophonic reification by means of what is almost a theology of indexicality. The latter must be located, rather, in a very different tradition: the hieroglyphics of nature articulated in German romanticism and, in particular, as mediated by Walter Benjamin.

___
27. As Miriam Hansen has pointed out, this metaphor of universal language, which was "used by journalists, intellectuals, social workers, clergy, producers, and industrial apologists alike . . . drew on a variety of discourses (Enlightenment, nineteenth-century positivism, Protestant millennialism, the Esperanto movement, and the growing advertising industry) and oscillated accordingly between utopian and totalitarian impulses" (Miriam Hansen, "The Hieroglyph and the Whore: D. W. Griffith's Intolerance," The South Atlantic Quarterly 88 (Spring 1989), p. 362. For more on the universal language discourse in early cinema, see also Hansen's "Universal Language and Democratic Culture: Myths of Origin in Early American Cinema," in Myth and Enlightenment in American Literature: In Honor of Hans-joachim Lang, ed. Dieter Meindl, et al. (Erlangen: Universitätsbund Erlagen-Nürenberg, 1985), pp. 321 -51.

28. D. W. Griffith, "Innovations and Expectations," in Focus on Griffith, ed. Harry M. Geduld (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971), p. 56.

29. See Pitman's 1840 treatise, Phonography; or, Writing by Sound; Being a Natural Method of Writing, Applicable to all Languages, and a Complete System of Shorthand (London: S. Bagster & Sons, 1840).

30. This accounts for its appearance as a topic of debate at the 1867 congress of the International Worker's Association in Lausanne, a discussion that is summarized in G. Duveau, La Pensée ouvrière sur l'éducation pendant la Révolution et le Second Empire (Paris: Domat-Montchrestien, 1947), pp.115- 16.

31. Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville, Le Problème de la parole s'écrivant elle-même: La France, l'Amérique (Paris, 1878). Earlier Scott had published a study of stenography entitled Histoire de la Sténographie depuis les temps anciens jusgu'à nos jours (Paris: Ch. Tondeur, 1849).

32. As an early nineteenth-century scholar has pointed out, ancient hieroglyphs were also, in fact, phonographic: "Hieroglyphic characters are either ideographs, that is, representations of ideas, or phonographs, that is, representationsof sounds" (Hincks, On Hieroglyphics, cited in OED

33. Emile Gautier, Le Phonographe: son passé, son présent, son avenir (Paris: Ernest Flammarion, 1905), p. 28. The implication in Gautier's remark that some people might be able to "read" the gramophone record is curiously confirmed by the case of Tim Wilson, a thirty-three-year-old Englishman who made the rounds of British and American talk shows in 1985 demonstrating his particular ability to identify unlabeled records, ostensibly by reading the patterns of the grooves (DPA press release, October 1985).

OK, most of this will be impenetrable gobbledegook to most of you, though it fits in to my research interests. But note that the universal language idea became popular for the first time in the 19th century, and as a master metaphor persisted into the early 20th century. The popular universal interest in a universal language dovetails with various media, symbolic codes, notations, etc. that could function as "universal languages". Of course, people still use the word "Esperanto" neutrally, positively, or pejoratively in a metaphorical sense, but we're in a different era. I wonder if it was the 1930s that killed off this earlier sensibility, both metaphorically as well as literally.