Benedicto Silva:

“There is already very rich literature published
in Esperanto”

Translator of many books into the language created by Zamenhof, the well-known teacher talks about his experience in the area

	Benedicto Silva (photo) was born in the Brazilian state of São Paulo. He lives in the city of São José do Rio Preto, where he retired as a teacher. He is an enthusiast of Esperanto and translated books into the international language. In this interview he talks about his work in that area.
When and how was Esperanto created?

Esperanto was created by the Polish doctor, Ludwig Lejzer Zamenhof in 1887, as a way of approaching human beings from many nationalities, cultures and languages through a neutral and easy means of communication. 

What are the main characteristics and function of the international language? 

Its main features are: easy pronunciation for all peoples; shortened grammar, with only 16 fundamental rules and no exceptions; vocabulary made up mostly from words coming from the main languages spoken across the developed world, such as Latin, Greek, English, French, Italian, Spanish, German etc. There is already very rich literature published in Esperanto.  

What aspect of the international language strikes you the most? Why? 

What really strikes me from Esperanto is its practical and logical grammar structure, whose rules don’t have exhaustive exceptions so common in national languages. That is why the grammar of Esperanto can be learned in a few hours only, depending on the dedication of the student. The best place to start is the First Manual of Esperanto, which in Brazil has been published by the Brazilian Spiritist Federation (FEB) for over half a century.  

How many books did you translate into Esperanto? 

There were many books, including Filigranas de Luz, from Tagore with the psycography of the medium, Divaldo P. Franco, and O Consolador, written by Emmanuel through the medium, Francisco Cândido Xavier. About 35 years ago, at the request of the late Francisco Thiesen, then president of FEB, and my friend Allan Kardec A. Costa, I translated into Esperanto the excellent biography of Allan Kardec, by Thiesen and Zeus Wantuil. As Thiesen passed away, that book is still to be published in Esperanto. I hope it will be published one day. 

Share with us a remarkable event linking Esperanto and your personal life.  

With the respect and admiration I have for the medium, Francisco Cândido Xavier, I can say that the most important event of my life was when he invited me in 1974 to work on the bilingual edition of the book O Esperanto como Revelação/Esperanto kiel Revelacio (Esperanto as a Revelation). Chico Xavier had written the book years earlier, dictated by the Spirit, Francisco Valdomiro Lorenz. It was Chico Xavier himself who came up with the suggested structure for the book, which is already in its fifth edition.  

How about the Spirit who didn’t want to have a certain part of a book translated? 

It was the book Filigranas de Luz, written by the medium Divaldo Pereira Franco and dictated by the Spirit Rabindranah Tagore. It was a poetic text, very difficult to translate. It took me months to translate. Once I finished, I began to translate the preface, but got stuck and simply could not do it. One day, however, everything was clarified. Divaldo came to our city to give a talk and he explained to me why I could not translate the preface, stuck on the sixth or seventh line. He looked at me and said: “Benedicto, Tagore does not want that preface to be on the book because he is mentioned there as a great thinker, winner of the Nobel Prize”.  I gave up translating it then.