Today is the birthday of L.L. Zamenhof, the revered creator of the Esperanto language.
To celebrate, Exploring Esperanto's YouTube channel creator and curator Alex Miller recently released a feature–length video presentation of Ĵenja Amis' play, 1910 (Mil naǔcent dek) — as recorded before a live audience during the course of the Universala Kongreso in Montréal back in August.
I am excited for this moment, as Alena Adler — the Twitch live-streamer who is also my best friend inside the Esperanto community — both directed the play and played a small rôle therein. And, yes, I am hecking proud of Alena. So hecking proud.
Briefly, 1910 (Mil naŭcent dek) is built around the eyewitness account of one William W. Mann — a British Esperantist — who was present when Zamenhof himself attended the 1910 Internacia Esperanto Kongreso in Washington, D.C. (Amazingly, you can view and read that in the October 1910 issue of La Brita Esperantisto, accessible on the Internet Archive. Once you have the above link open, go straight to page 184 to read Mr. Mann's account. You can also download this issue as a PDF to read offline.)
In adapting Mr. Mann's report for 1910 (Mil naŭcent dek), Ĵenja Amis 'resurrected' William Mann (played by Garry Evans) to present his account as a prelego or talk to the present-day Montréal audience. That one-person prelego — occasionally paused for questions and answers — is almost all of the play, save for an epilogue in which he shares with his caregiver the dream that he just had about sometime in the future... 2022?
(I hope this brief summary will help those still learning Esperanto to enjoy the play despite the lack of English subtitles; hopefully this will get rectified soon).
But enough of my words. It's time we let my friend introduce what you're about to watch, followed by the play itself.
Be sure afterwards to visit the Montréal UK website to view a full image gallery of the production.
Bonus: The playwright herself on one song she unearthed in her research for the play.
Videos (from the top) 2022 Alena Adler for Esperanto-USA; 2022 Ĵenja Amis / Alex Miller / Exploring Esperanto; 2022 Ĵenja Amis for Esperanto-USA.
Jes, ja, ri. The unofficial but often used Esperanto 'they / them.'
Few artists make such a convincing case for the pronoun like Gijom' Armide, who recorded this song for his full-length digital album, Nenifar' (available on Bandcamp and Vinilkosmo MP3).
He has another amazing project brewing on YouTube, so keep your eyes peeled on this playlist, presently with only one song, and watch it grow in the coming weeks.
In my previous post, I had mentioned that my return to the realm of Esperanto was due to a special live-streamer on Twitch who often streams in la internacia lingvo.
What I didn't mention is that...
1) we have since bonded as friends because of Esperanto, and
2) I have since become one of their chief chat moderators (or 'mods') on Twitch.
Earlier this year, my streamer-friend nudged me into having a go at submitting a short to Esperanto-USA's Usona Bona Film-Festivalo, or American Good Film Festival (specifically the third edition of the contest) — on the hope that I would gain confidence in my capability to use Esperanto.
At first, I didn't think I had sufficiently good material... but as it turned out, I did.
But have a view of the results and then come back to read further.
What I have, in fact, is a photo and video archive of my years spent in the company of the late, celebrated storyteller / author Diane Wolkstein (11 November 1942 — 31 January 2013). Lots of live performance videos that I recorded myself, plus a megaton of still photos (including an excessive amount taken in and around Diana's old Greenwich Village neighborhood in New York City), none more recent than the year 2018... after which I had stopped visiting New York altogether.
Sadly, the Diane Wolkstein literary estate, archives included, are now the property of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., so I couldn't use or translate examples of her writing or telling, even in brief fragments. (Diane was herself amused by my initial enthusiasm for Esperanto, but never herself tried it. Nor were any of her 23 books — most of them picture books for young readers — translated into Esperanto, more's the pity.)
I ended up instead assembling images, slowed down video with the soundtracks removed, and free-to-use background music (BGM) files made available by YouTube to fashion a four-minute video.
It didn't win, but thus far it has gotten 234 views (and 34 more views on the Canal Esperanto Cuba channel, if you'd prefer to watch there). So I really can't complain.
Besides, I won heartfelt praise from my streamer friend. That matters more than a cash prize. Far more.
For those not yet fluent in Esperanto, I apologize for the lack of subtitles. That said, I began by saying how much the simple gear I had at the time (a Flip Video camcorder and a Nikon Coolpix P510 bridge camera) made it possible to capture Diane Wolkstein in full cry. Even today, these digital souvenirs can make me cry.
Which made her death on the last day of January 2013 — the news of which was drowned out by the media coverage of the passing of Edward Koch, who was at one time the Mayor of New York — even more painful to process. It wasn't just the passing of a friend. Rather, over time, it was the passing of an era. Personal narratives (think The Moth™) had replaced traditional storytelling, and that was well before so much else — COVID–19 included — would eventually come crashing down on all of us.
I'm not found of personal narratives — more like projected narcissism, really. Except that Kara Diana... ('Dearest Diana...') is pretty much one. That story that I was too timid to tell and yet needed to be told.
If that wasn't enough, I should also confess how influenced I was by Alain Resnais and Jean Cayrol (with a little help from iconoclast Chris Marker of La jetée reknown, by the way). I am speaking, of course, of the half-hour collaboration Night and Fog (Nuit et brouillard ) (1956), itself a reminder of the horror show that was the Nazi Holocaust during the Second World War. Although Resnais is obviously the better known of the collaborators (and I certainly won't write off his body of work, a huge part of the French New Wave, or Nouvelle vague), it was Cayrol's declamation of the narration that snagged me the most. It was disciplined in a distinct way, and I used it as a rôle model for my own meager short.
My streamer friend, it turned out, had deeply felt the Cayrol influence clearly, without my having to over-explain. I'm still moved by that reaction, months after deciding to give the Usona Bona Film-Festivalo a go.
I'd love to have another go. I just need to get solid material first. Bonvolu atenti min — do wait for me.
Like many other students of Esperanto before and after me, I started with the well-worn postal course (if you live in the United States, you can sign up for it via Esperanto-USA's website). Back in the fall of 2005, when I decided I was daft enough to try la Internacia Lingvo, I had a (somewhat foolish) personal goal to ace the course by year's end.
Foolish, yes, but I did complete the course by year's end. And I did eventually receive an atestilo (certificate) for my efforts.
And then for some time, I foolishly let things slide.
Too many other things crowded for attention inside my head — my supermarket job, the mindless scrolling thru social media in general, and my failed effort to create a video channel devoted to traditional storytelling and the performing arts.
And then there were the occasional naysayers. They included a dear storyteller friend, now long gone and long forgotten by the world (or so it seems). And a member of my Unitarian Universalist congregation who, at a New Year's Eve party, was of the absolute conviction that Esperanto itself was dead — or at least it was to him.
While so many people have helped me come around to my original sense that Esperanto is indeed something worth learning and using, the one soul who brought me back to the realm of the gesamideanoj is not just an Esperantist but also a live-streamer —in Esperanto and English — on Twitch. (There is more to this story, but it will require me to introduce you properly to them later.)
Suffice it to say that seeing how Esperanto has found a home on Twitch, however humble, was enough to convince me to try one more time.
Back in 2005, the textbooks that were available were of little use to me in terms of developing and enlarging my impoverished personal vocabulary, much less get a firmer grip on grammar. Enter the completely upgraded Teach Yourself Complete Esperanto by Tim Owen and Judith Meyer (Hachette–Hodder & Stoughhton, 2018, available from Librejo Esperanta). While not without some proofreading and typographical errors — not to mention the idiosyncrasies of UK English that some Yanks may not immediately grasp — it does offer more current vocabulary than its predecessors, along with a gradual easing in of the major grammatical points.
Not that I would want to yeet my laminated tabelvortoj chart anytime soon... nor do I intend to.
(This post is a work in progress / process and will probably be expanded and revised eventually.)
So I am starting with a garden in a Unitarian Universalist congregation.
A garden gone to seed.
The kind of garden I do not wish to become.
Partially as still life video making practice, I brought my Nikon Coolpix P510 to 'Julia's Garden' — a memorial garden on the grounds of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship at Stony Brook (Long Island, New York) and quietly recorded what I saw following the conclusion of the morning's service.
The garden had been dedicated to a young child and her mother whose sudden deaths (while each was still young) shocked and saddened the Fellowship's congregation.
Years later, the Garden had fallen to neglect and decay, which is very visible and very on display here. Fortunately, Julia's Garden would later undergo a full transformation and now serves as an outdoor extension of the Fellowship's Religious Education wing.
This short video-film was made in advance of the work to be done.
