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Message from the World Esperanto Association
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A Declaration by the World Esperanto Association on the occasion of the World Book and Copyright Day
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A Declaration by the World Esperanto Association on the occasion of the World Book and Copyright Day
The World Esperanto Association joins in celebration of the International Day of the Book (23 April) initiated by Unesco. The aims of the Day are to promote the reading and printing of books and to protect the rights of authors.
We completely support the declaration of the General Director of Unesco, Koichiro Matsuura, on last year’s Day of the Book, when he said: “Books are a fundamental means of becoming acquainted with values, wisdom, beauty and human thought. As vehicles of creativity, information and education, they allow each culture to express its own essential qualities and perceive the identity of others. As a window on the difference of cultures and as a bridge between civilisations, beyond space and time, books are a source of dialogue, a means of exchange and a source of evolution.”
The Esperanto movement for a whole century lived mainly by means of books publication, from the first small text-book which appeared in 1887, to the contemporary riches of tens of thousands of books in the international language, Esperanto, on all subjects and published in all countries of the world. Books have played, for the community of Esperanto-speakers, in their scattered homes, the unifying role which in national terms is played by more material means. With pleasure one realises that Esperanto-speakers have now naturally and easily progressed to new forms of book-publishing, which continue the same work by another technology.
But there is something special about the culture expressed by Esperanto literature. It touches upon the fact that the Esperanto community makes great efforts to fulfill the desire that every race may express its qualities and understand the identity of other races. The range of Esperanto literature actually puts all races on the same level when it comes to possibilities of expressing oneself, independently of numerical, economic or political size. That is even more important in today’s world, when some try to make use of their books as a means of cultural imperialism. It is sufficient to look at the statistics of Unesco itself about the country of origin of books that are sold, to comprehend the size of the phenomenon. At the same time, statistics about the translation of books show even more dramatically that cultural influence in the modern world is only in one direction: certain people talk to everybody else, and everybody else listens.
Against that and for equality between languages, the cultures and peoples of the Esperanto movement have worked for a century, and the movement proudly restates its orginal aims. The international, planned language, Esperanto, aims at justice in the field of linguistic, cultural, international relations. Support for books published in all countries, in all languages and for everyone’s values, is therefore a natural part of our aim, and for that reason we celebrate, with Unesco, action for more justice in the world of books.
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