Bewildering Stories welcomes...

Manfred Ratzlaff

Manfred has not sent us a bio sketch, but I’m going to break with formal protocol and welcome this courtly gentleman and scholar to Bewildering Stories anyway.

Manfred lives in Ölde, Germany, where he manages an Esperanto poetry website: poezio.net. He approached me for permission to reproduce my translation of La Fontaine’s fable La Cigale et la fourmi.

Of course I was flattered and invited him to send us his own translation of the poem. Manfred kindly obliged by sending his Esperanto translation, which we have in this issue. We would love to have his German translation as well; German is sadly unrepresented in our Translations index.

Esperanto is easy to understand once you know the rules. And they’re easy to determine just by observation. One I’ve learned: the nominative singular ending -o is optional, at least in poetry. That explains all those final apostrophes. But la formiko (the ant) occurs in full, where it’s needed, and the accusative plural occurs in full in la pasantojn (the passers-by).

Manfred likes to use the Esperanto form of his name, Manfredo Ratislavo. Although it’s fairly strict rule of translation that proper names are not translated unless they have standard English forms, we will, of course, honor his usage in his byline.

Manfred Ratzlaff’s bio sketch can be found here.

Welcome to Bewildering Stories, Manfred Ratzlaff. We hope to hear from you again soon and often!