Some time ago, I mentioned the French author Claude Piron in a post. Continuing in this week’s trend of examining notable Esperanto authors, I think it’s time we paid him his due! Piron was born to be a universal author, as he worked as a translator for the United Nations. He spoke five different languages, excluding Esperanto! I think it says something about the Esperanto language that someone of his immense linguistic experience would choose to base his literary career upon it.

Though he wrote poetry, novels, articles, and pretty much every other literary form in Esperanto, Piron is most remembered for two works in particular: “Gerda Malaperis” (Gerda Disappeared), which we visited in an earlier post, and the nonfiction text “La Bona Lingvo” (The Good Language). In the latter work, Piron puts forth one of the most convincing arguments for adopting Esperanto. He presents lots of linguistic reasons for doing so, but interestingly enough, he mentions somewhere in the work that, once he had learned a solid vocabulary base in Esperanto, he was able to think much more clearly in Esperanto than any other language!

If you would like to hear some of Piron’s case for Esperanto, there is a Youtube video that you can watch here. Gerda Malaperis can be found in its entirety at this site, where it is the basis for a 25-part Esperanto course.