Monday, 12 May 2008

Esperanto Voynich comic strip via Taiwan...?

Here's a little Voynich Manuscript pop-culture link that got excised from Wikipedia last September. Poor thing: I thought I'd give it a second home here.

In the Esperanto-language comic strip "La Veksilologisto" (The Vexillologist), "Dr. Voynich" is the hero's arch-enemy. Gifted by aliens with the "Orb of Esperanto" which allows universal translation, Voynich discovers this to be intolerable (animals speak, humans tell the truth), and sets out in search of the "Orb of Babel" which has the opposite effect.

I dug up a second reference to this comic strip here (also in Esperanto), which I tried to translate back into English courtesy of Traduku (an online Esperanto <--> English translator)... which had problems with cookies both in IE and Firefox (*sigh*). But (guessing at the Esperanto, which usually works), it seems as though it is a comic strip drawn by someone called David Bell, and published in the Esperanto magazine "Formoza Folio".

And then, via this bibliographic page, I found a dead link to a missing file called "ff2.pdf" which (supposedly) contains a copy of the strip (apparently it was published in Taiwan in 2006): but the Wayback Machine didn't have a copy of it. Oh well: I guess I'll just have to carry on living without the joy of reading an Esperanto comic strip. But if anyone does manage to find a copy, please let me know! :-)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I've just come back from the British Esperanto Congress in Southport. On the bookstall there were piles of an Esperanto edition of Rat-Man. There's a blog about it at: Eshttp://verdalando.blogspot.com/2007/12/interesao.html

Sorry! I've nothing tpo offer on Voynich. Bomndezirojn!