Feathers / Plumoj & Esperanto (2)

Mi jam blogis pri la hebrea romano Feathers (Plumoj), kiu ricevis anglalingvan tradukon:

Beʾer, Haim. Feathers [Notsot]; translated from the Hebrew by Hillel Halkin. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press; Hanover: University Press of New England, 2004. xiii, 235 pp.

La originala estis eldonita en 1979 kaj fariĝis klasikaĵo de israela literaturo. Troviĝas ene strangaj revantoj kun utopiismaj revoj. Do jen enkonduko de Esperanto en la rakonto (p. 132-133):

Havkin Expounds on Esperanto & Vegetarianism
(Excerpt from Feathers)

by Haim Be’er

Over his shoulder I spied a short, elderly man making his way almost noiselessly through the empty lot between Greenberg’s yard and Jaffa Road. The closer he came, the clearer grew the features of his ascetic, white-goateed face with its deep-socketed, visionary eyes.

"Saluton, sinjoro Greenberg!" he greeted the bookbinder when he reached the front gate.

Greenberg spun around and quickly returned the greeting. "Saluton, sinjoro Havkin, kiel vi fartas?"

He fondly laid a mud-caked hand on his visitor’s shoulder and informed me that it was our pleasure today to play host to a great pioneer of Jewish vegetarianism, the distinguished Mr. Havkin, who for years had been putting utopian theory into practice on the farm he had built with his own two hands in the hills outside Jerusalem.

"Kiu estas, tiu bela knabo?" Mr. Havkin asked, pinching my check.

“I don't know Spanish,” I replied.

“It’s not Spanish, it’s Esperanto,” said the old man, asking whether I had learned in school about Dr. Ludwig Zamenhoff and the international tongue he had invented. After inquiring again of Greenberg, this time in Hebrew, who the handsome young boy was, he assured me that it would be well worth my while to acquire a language that was certain to be the world’s most widely spoken before long. And it would be best for me to do so immediately, while I was still young and quick to absorb.

For once the club discussion, which, needless to say, concerned Esperanto, was conducted in an atmosphere of calm.

Greenberg ceded his place at the head of the table to Mr. Havkin, in, while he himself sat on Havkin’s right, ready to do the old man’s bidding. Lev-Tamim, unnaturally preoccupied, whittled flowers on his walking stick, while Leder busily jotted down notes.

Havkin began by remarking that, since the day of its groundbreaking, the unfinished Tower of Babel had loomed at humanity’s back and cast its menacing shadow. “Once and for all,” he said, “we must overcome this ancient catastrophe by taking the line of ‘One humanity, one language’—not in order to rebel against the gods, but on the contrary, to fructify the earth.”

In great detail the venerable old man listed the advantages of the language of the future. Though it was easy to learn, its writing being phonetic and its grammar so simple that it could be mastered in a matter of hours, it was rich enough to express all human thoughts, and, last but not least, it was the only neutral tongue in the world, whose rival power blocs were engaged in a cold war that might flare up at any moment.

Havkin ended his address by quoting forty members of the French Academy, who concluded in a report published as far back as 1924 that Esperanto was a model of logical clarity. Once the vegetarian movement adopted it as its official language, he hoped, the day would be near when the rest of the human race would follow in its footsteps.