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From: donh@netcom.com (Don HARLOW)
Subject: Re: Great Esperanto literature (was: Re: Esperanto? The EU?)
Message-ID: <donhD46q0y.GKt@netcom.com>
Organization: Esperanto League for North America, Inc.
References: <3i0p01$8i8@masala.cc.uh.edu>
Distribution: inet
Date: Sat, 18 Feb 1995 07:26:57 GMT
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Sender: donh@netcom4.netcom.com

frenkel@ox.tcs.uh.edu (David Frenkel) skribis en lastatempa afisxo <3i0p01$8i8@masala.cc.uh.edu>:
>
>    At some point in this or a related thread a claim was made that
>    Esperanto does have poetry, literature, etc.
>
>    A question I have is this. Who are the Shakespears, Tolstoys,
>    Cervanteses, and so on, of that language? And furthemore, are
>    there any, and can there be any?
>
This is a sort of cleft stick to be caught in. If I said, "Shakespeare, 
Tolstoy and Cervantes," would you then say that translated literature 
doesn't count? And if I said, "Auld, Kalocsay, Baghy and Miyamoto," 
would you then say that you'd never heard of them? (Which, since they 
wrote/write in Esperanto, would not be too surprising...)

(Actually, we're a bit short on Tolstoy, even though he _did_ -- peace, 
Mr. Gerdemann! -- learn Esperanto in two hours, whatever that means. 
Maybe Pushkin, Chekhov, Lermontov, Dostoevskij and Shevchenko can 
help fill in the gap.)

_Can_ there be any? In the strict sense, probably not -- _nobody_ 
is going to produce another Shakespeare, Tolstoy or Cervantes. In the 
more general sense -- of a writer doing his or her own thing in the 
great tradition of Shakespeare, Tolstoy or Cervantes but in his or her 
own way, I can only ask: why not?


-- 
Don HARLOW			donh@netcom.com
Esperanto League for N.A.       elna@netcom.com (800) 828-5944
ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/el/elna/elna.html         Esperanto
ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/do/donh/donh.html 
