[Membroj] Newts & the international language

[Ralph Dumain]

In my junior year of high school 40 years ago I had an eccentric 
English teacher who ignored the standard curriculum and taught 
whatever he wanted to. So he taught a novel nobody ever heard of 
called War with the Newts (1936) by Czech author Karel Capek, creator 
of the concept and our word "robot" (in the play R.U.R.: Rossum's 
Universal Robots, 1921). It's a terrific dark satire of the end of 
the world, mocking the news, the fads, trends, politics, culture, and 
everyday life of society blindly following its trivial pursuits and 
myopic perspectives as civilization teeters on the brink of 
destruction, a theme that ought to resonate today as it did in the 
1930s. Book Two of this novel, an excerpt of which is now on my site, 
is written with running footnotes from page to page, such that the 
main narrative is constantly being broken up by footnotes that run 
for pages at a time, a technique which highlights both the fragmented 
experience of modern life and the futile attempts to come to terms with it.

The novel centers around the discovery of a hitherto unknown, 
intelligent species of salamander--the newts--that is then 
incorporated into human civilization and penetrates every aspect of 
culture, eventually perpetrating an apocalyptic civilizational crisis 
(which also occurred in R.U.R.).

Well, by the time I had read this, I had already taught myself 
Esperanto a couple of years earlier, and in the same school year I 
translated Sandor Szathmari's short story "Vincenzo" from Esperanto 
into English as a project for the same English class (got an "A"):

http://www.autodidactproject.org/my/vincent.html

Among many many other social and cultural trends, Capek satirized one 
trend that had surfaced in popular culture, the quest for a universal 
language and the habit of constantly inventing new ones. Naturally, I 
noted his references to Esperanto, Basic English, and the language 
problem. I photocopied the relevant section of Book Two many years 
ago and am now making it available on the web:

War with the Newts
(Excerpt on the Language Problem)
by Karel C^apek
http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/newts-esperanto.html




_________________________________________________

"Fascism has awakened a sleeping world to the realities
  of the irrational, mystical character structure
  of the people of the world."

        -- Wilhelm Reich
   
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