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> Most of the literature is just translated from another language. And the original literature is problematic. Since the 1970s, Esperanto activists have heavil
by Mediterraneo10 7y ago
> Most of the literature is just translated from another language.
And the original literature is problematic. Since the 1970s, Esperanto activists have heavily emphasized that Esperanto is just a neutral interlanguage, that it aims to allow everyone to keep their native language and let language diversity flourish. But at the same time, Esperantists are so proud of people creating cultural output in Esperanto, as opposed to expressing themselves first in their native languages and only then translating that expression into Esperanto.
You are right that the literature is often not good. The problem is that as a very small community, publishing in Esperanto is either self-publishing or vanity publishing (i.e. if you have the money to pay, you can get your manuscript published, and then it gets sold by Esperanto booksellers or at congresses). There is little quality control. This isn't limited to Esperanto -- one encounters this also in natural languages whose communities of speakers are only in the thousands or low hundreds of thousands.
- andolanra 7y agoI own a handful of Esperanto books, most of them translations that range in quality (e.g. a surprisingly good translation of The Hobbit that also translates both the poetry and the runes on the map, but also an abysmally bad translation of Alice in Wonderland that abandoned any attempt to preserve the wordplay) but the native-Esperanto books I do have are often endearingly clunky in a way that marks them as obviously self-published. For example, one of them regularly misprints its own title: the cover and the spine don't even agree on the name of the book!
- sterlind 7y agoI have some Soviet propaganda stories which were painfully clunky, Brazilian "spiritualism" books which I'm not sure what to do with, and a State-approved history of China. In all of them, the Esperanto was quite good but the content is just so clunky. It was like Communist Bernstein Bears.