Basque in Literary Toast

Something big is cooking in New York.

And it seems like they will be ingredients from many parts of the world.

Most important of all, Euskal Herria will be present. This is the report by The International Herald Tribune:

Speaking in tongues: A literary toast

By Dinitia Smith The New York Times

TUESDAY, APRIL 25, 2006

New York Some 6,500 languages are spoken in the world today. And according to the 2000 census, you can hear at least 92 of them on the streets of New York. You can probably hear more; the census lumps some of them together simply as "other."

But by the end of the century, linguists predict, half of the world's languages will be dead, victims of globalization. English is the major culprit, slowly extinguishing the other tongues that lie in its path. Esther Allen, a professor of modern languages at Seton Hall University in New Jersey, calls English "the most invasive linguistic species in the world." Spanish and Hindi are also spreading, subsuming the dialects of South American Indians, and of the Indian subcontinent.

In the next two weeks, however, some of these endangered idioms can be heard at two international literary festivals in New York that celebrate languages big and small, as well as the power and resilience of words.

The PEN American Center is holding its second World Voices Festival of International Literature, beginning Tuesday and running through Sunday. Allen is the curator of the gathering, and the novelist Salman Rushdie is its chairman as well as a participant in a discussion Wednesday on "Faith and Reason" - the festival theme - with 134 writers from 41 countries.

Among the 58 events is a panel, "Writers on Their Languages," with the novelist and poet Bernardo Atxaga, who writes in the endangered language of Euskera, or Basque; and Dubravka Ugresic, whose most recent novel is "The Ministry of Pain" and who writes in Croatian. Other writers scheduled to participate include Orhan Pamuk, from Turkey, E.L. Doctorow and Martin Amis.

Then there is the People's Poetry Gathering, from May 3 through May 7, sponsored by City Lore and the Bowery Poetry Club. There will be some 60 poets reading their work in English and in their native tongues. Among the highlights is a performance of poetry and music by Kewulay Kamara, whom City Lore commissioned to return to his boyhood home in Dankawali, Sierra Leone, in 2004 to recreate an epic poem destroyed during the recent civil war.

There will also be a reading by Robert Bly of some of his translations and his own poetry, and a program on endangered languages at the United Nations, co-sponsored by the United Nations SRC Society of Writers, the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues and the World Intellectual Property Organization.

American publishers have one of the lowest translation rates in the Western world, according to Andrew Grabois, a consultant for Bowker, which tracks the publishing business. Only 3 percent of books published in the United States are translations, Grabois said, compared with, for example, 27 percent in Italy. As a result, linguists contend, much of the English-speaking world knows little of other countries and cultures.

English may be eating up other languages, but paradoxically translation into English is vital for their survival, Rushdie said.

"People are not going to learn Serbian," he said. "If Serbian writers are going to survive in the world, they will have to be translated into English."

Allen said, "The whole point of this festival is inviting these people from outside English into the conversation, and making a place for them in English."

Among those invited to the Poetry Gathering is Kamara, of Sierra Leone. Kamara's native language is Kuranko, part of the Manden language group in West Africa. His family, the Kamaras, are members of the Fina caste: orators, who recite at ceremonies like weddings and funerals. Kamara came to the United States when he was 18. Now 52, he teaches in the African-American studies department at John Jay College in New York. His epic poem "Voices of Kings" tells of the origins of the Fina caste. One part relates the story of how the Prophet Muhammad rewarded an old couple for feeding him when he was hungry:

The old man returned to manhood

The old woman returned to womanhood

The child they bore

They called Fisana

Muhammad names Fisana and his Fina descendants "the voices of faith."

The epic has many parts, and recitation can continue for hours, even days, Kamara said. He has also interwoven it with his own story.

"It's not linear. You can start anywhere," he said.

Another endangered language being highlighted in both the Poetry Gathering and the PEN festival is Euskera, or Basque. Atxaga, the Basque writer, wrote in an e-mail message from Spain that he is fighting to preserve Euskera because it is "a language we know well, it helps us to live."

Yet he said he disagrees with the idea that language gives insights into a people's consciousness and culture. "Presumably, a national epic can be translated," he said.

"All you need to do is read the thinking of the Nazis," he said. To them, "the German language was unique and carried with it a singular concept of the world and life, revealing the essence of the German people," he said. "This quickly reached absurd extremes."

Ugresic noted that the same thing has occurred in the former Yugoslavia, where language has become intensely politicized.

Serbo-Croatian has broken up into Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin, all of them very similar but with speakers of each language claiming - sometimes violently - the supremacy of their own.

Beatings and book burnings have occurred when one group objected to the language of the author. "Crazy linguists are ready to project many things into languages," she said by phone from Amsterdam, where she lives. She added that languages are always in a continuous state of transformation, and that to try and get in the way is useless.

"Some languages are dying and some are appearing," she said. "That is a much deeper and more interesting dynamic."

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