Esperanto song

La vojo

The Road

Lyrics

Strofo 1

as ,

.

,

.

,

, ,

, .

Refreno

, flankiĝante

celitan!

, ,

Traboras granitan.

, -

,

, ,

.

Strofo 3

, as,

.

as, as, -

.

", !" , -

" , !" :

" ! ,

".

Strofo 4

o

deŝiras,

, , repurigitaj,

.

a ,

, ,

, , hardita,

signita!

New words in this song

Comprehension drill

4 questions on what you just read. Get one wrong and the story will show you where it says otherwise.

Words by L. L. Zamenhof (1859-1917), transcribed from his Fundamenta Krestomatio (1903) on Wikisource, where the refrain (our stanza 2) is printed again after the fourth stanza; we print it once. The linked video is a spoken reading posted in 2021 by the Novice Scribe channel, over a Mozart recording its description credits to archive.org; Mozart's music is long in the public domain. Zamenhof died in 1917, so the words are long out of copyright. Source text. Translation ours.

If La Espero is the movement's hymn, La vojo is its work song: not "the world will change" but "keep going while it does not". Zamenhof printed it in the Fundamenta Krestomatio of 1903, beside Al la fratoj and Mia penso.

Its most quotable image is in the refrain: , , traboras granitan, even a small drop, striking constantly, bores through the granite mountain. And the third stanza is the movement's whole method in four lines: we sow, a hundred seeds are lost, a thousand are lost, we sow.

The grammar to watch is the -ita participle, the finished passive, which this poem uses like a drumbeat: (defined), (chosen), celitan (aimed at), repurigitaj (made clean again), , hardita (tested, hardened) and signita (marked out). Each one is a verb that has already been done to something. Participles and the passive have the system.

Celitan is worth a second look: , to aim, plus -it-, plus the -n of the object, because celitan is what we walk. The adjective agrees, ending and all.