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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 <i>War with the
Newts</i> (1936) by Czech author Karel Capek, creator of the concept and
our word "robot" (in the play <i>R.U.R</i>.: <i>Rossum's
Universal Robots</i>, 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.<br><br>
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
<i>R.U.R</i>.).<br><br>
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"):<br><br>
<a href="http://www.autodidactproject.org/my/vincent.html" eudora="autourl">
http://www.autodidactproject.org/my/vincent.html</a><br><br>
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:<br><br>
<i>War with the Newts<br>
</i>(Excerpt on the Language Problem)<br>
by Karel C^apek<br>
<a href="http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/newts-esperanto.html" eudora="autourl">
http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/newts-esperanto.html</a><br><br>
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_________________________________________________<br><br>
"Fascism has awakened a sleeping world to the realities <br>
of the irrational, mystical character structure <br>
of the people of the world."<br><br>
-- Wilhelm Reich<br>
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