Esperanto literature

Esperanto is the only artificial language that has its own sufficiently developed culture, and that has created an interesting literature, made up of both translated and original works.

The first book where the fundamentals of the language were offered, published on July 26, 1887, already included a translation, and a small original poem. Later, the same initiator of the language, L. L. Zamenhof, continued to publish works, both translated and original, as a conscious way of testing and developing the potential of the language. Esperanto speakers today continue to regard Zamenhof's works as models of the best classical Esperanto.

Other authors of the first stage were Antoni Grabowski and Kazimierz Bein (Kabe). Henri Vallienne is considered the author of the first novels.

The period between the wars saw a moment of great brilliance, with special prominence of what was called the Hungarian School, whose main exponents were Julio Baghy and Kálmán Kalocsay. Other members were Ferenc Szilágyi, Sándor Szathmári, Jean Forge or Teodoro Schwartz, best known today for being the father of financier George Soros.

The Soviet school also showed great brilliance, linked in part to the workers' association Sennacieca Asocio Tutmonda, until its disappearance at the end of the 1930s due to the persecutions of Stalin.

After World War II, literary activity resumed. The center was established in the Canary Islands town of La Laguna, where Professor Juan Régulo Pérez had founded the publishing house Stafeto. Among the original published authors, those grouped in the Scottish School deserve special mention, led by William Auld, several times a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

In the 1980s and 1990s, a new generation stood out, among which the so-called Iberian School stands out, a group that included the writers Miguel Fernández, Miguel Gutiérrez Adúriz, Jorge Camacho Cordón, Gonçalo Neves or Abel Montagut.

It is estimated that the number of books published in Esperanto is over twenty-five thousand. The main book sales service, that of the Universal Esperanto Association, has more than four thousand titles in its catalogue. There are magazines dedicated exclusively to literature, such as Fonto and Literatura Foiro, while general magazines, such as Monato and La Ondo de Esperanto also publishes fictional texts, original and translated.

In June 2008, Geoffrey Sutton published Concise Encyclopedia of the Original Literature of Esperanto, with more than three hundred articles on the main writers and their work, ordered chronologically.

Digital Corpus

In 2002, the Esperanto Research Foundation (Esperantic Studies Foundation [1]) launched a project to create a digital corpus of Esperanto literature to facilitate linguistic research on the language. In 2009, it had sixty-seven works (translated and original), more than one thousand four hundred articles in the general-themed monthly publication Monato, and thirty-nine issues of the magazine La Ondo de Esperanto , also monthly. In 2012 it added almost five million words and the goal is to reach ten million words.