Atxaga's Book Translated Into English

This note was published at the Boise State University's page:

Professor Translates Popular Basque Tome to English

Erin Ryan

Visiting assistant professor Nere Lete in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures recently translated internationally acclaimed author Bernardo Atxaga’s “Two Basque Stories” into English. The book, separated into two moving novellas, examines traditional and contemporary Basque culture, the lessons of family, the elegance of ordinary things and the challenge of living in two worlds. The paperback translation was published recently by the Center for Basque Studies at the University of Nevada, Reno.

Lete received her B.A. in Basque philology from Spain’s University of Deusto and her MFA in translation from the University of Iowa. While Basque is her “mother tongue,” she also is a native Spanish speaker, is fluent in English and studied French for many years. As an educator, she has held positions in the Basque Country at the Renteria Municipal Basque Language School and in the U.S. at the University of Nevada, Reno, University of Iowa and Boise State, where she has taught on and off since 1993 and now directs the Basque minor program.

Lete’s connection to Bernardo Atxaga began many years ago in his kitchen in the Basque Country.

“That day I went to ask his permission to translate this work as part of my master’s thesis. I thought it would take 10 minutes to get the yes or the no, but he was very welcoming, and I stayed for a couple hours chatting with him,” Lete said. “I was star-struck. He is the first Basque writer awarded the Spanish National Prize in Narrative for his novel, ‘Obabakoak,’ which has been translated into 25 languages — quite an achievement for any writer.”

The setting for “Two Basque Stories” is Boise, where Atxaga’s main character Old Martin lives. An 80-year-old Basque sheepherder, Old Martin receives two letters from the old country that stir his memory, making him reflect on what seem like separate lives.

“Old Martin is a Basque man, but his story encompasses the universal emigrant mentality that all of us who live away from our home countries relate to internally,” Lete said, adding that her thesis work on location in Boise allowed her to hear the stories of many “Old Martins” at the local Basque Museum and Cultural Center.

While most literature translated from Basque first is translated to Spanish, Lete skipped the middleman, interpreting Atxaga’s words directly.

“It is like getting a cup of tea made out of the first brewing, full of flavor,” she said, admitting that capturing the essence of another person’s writing is a serious challenge that requires maintaining the integrity of the original work and managing multiple languages and literary traditions. “If we accept as true the Latin aphorism, traductore traditore, meaning that the translator is a traitor to the original work, then any effort to convey a work in another language is doomed from the very beginning, and I don’t accept that. Translation opens a window to an author’s world that otherwise would be closed tight to anyone who didn’t speak the language of the original.”

Currently, Lete is collaborating with Boise’s Basque Museum and Cultural Center on the creation of an exhibit for the Ellis Island Immigration Museum titled, “Hidden in Plain Sight: The Basques.” The exhibit will show the journey Basques took to come to the United States and particularly the American West.

To learn more about the English translation of “Two Basque Stories,” visit this link.

By the way, the exhibit at Ellis Island sounds quite interesting, almost more interesting than the fact that one of Atxaga's books being translated into English.

.... ... .

The Basques of San Francisco

This book review about the history of the Basque Community in California and more specifically in San Francisco has been published by EiTB:

'Gardeners of Identity' pays homage to Basques in San Francisco

O.M.

A book that brings together the accounts of Basque immigrants living in California's San Francisco Bay, written by doctor of Basque Studies and current researcher at the University of Deusto, Pedro J. Oiarzabal, with material compiled by members of the city's Basque-American community, will be one of the newest publications to feature at this year's Book and CD Fair in Durango (Biscay), starting on Friday 4th December.

Entitled Gardeners of Identity: Basques in the San Francisco Bay Area and written in English, the book pays homage to those members of the Basque-American community who made it possible, more than a century after the first waves of mass immigration from the Basque Country began arriving to the United States, for Basque culture and identity to continue to be a reality in the San Francisco Bay area of today.

"I tried to reflect who these people are; normal, everyday people who don't need an academic background, or to be specialists or linguists in order to appreciate what culture is and their own cultural legacy," explained Pedro J. Oiarzabal in an exclusive interview with eitb.com in Bilbao.

"People born in farmhouses with a minimum level of school education who had to work hard in order to survive in a foreign country where the language is neither Spanish, French nor, of course, Basque and where they may have achieved a certain level of success in life while at the same time struggling hard to maintain their culture and language," Pedro says of the people who feature in his book.

The book is also of great historical value visually, bringing together as many as 123 photographic documents, much more than any other book of the same length. "In this book I've tried to give particular significance to photographic evidence in itself. It is important to be able to see the evolution of this community in terms of its style of dress, clothing, and other symbols which represent the world we live in," explains Pedro.

A seed

The creation process behind the book involved actual members of the Basque-American community, who were responsible for carrying out 93 interviews and organizing the compilation of visual material.

According to the author, his objective was not only to gather together witness accounts, but also to ensure that the community itself was central to the book; that the book's creation was the seed to make the Basque-Americans realize their own abilities to carry out such a project.

"You don't need a history degree per se to make history. A good methodology plus training in specific techniques for (compiling) oral history would make it easier for all those Basques living elsewhere to document and conserve their own immediate history. The importance of compiling firsthand accounts of emigrants from the 1930s or 1940s is invaluable, as well as a race against time, which we must try to win," explained Oiarzabal. "The communities themselves are in the best position to carry out such tasks.

"We hope this marks just a beginning; that the Basque community now continues to take care of its own history," he added.

Mirror

For Pedro, the Basque migratory experience during the diaspora can help modern-day Basques to understand why immigrants of other nationalities settle in our lands and work so hard at jobs that these days nobody wants to do.

In the same way, discovering how Basques were received in the various countries to which they emigrated helps us in turn to understand immigrant cultures, try and integrate them with our own and enrich ourselves through their experiences.

According to Pedro, Basques have always known how to convey very well - though without ever imposing - the importance of their own culture to those countries in which they have settled. "What we can do, in return, is try to learn from those that come to our land and try to combine their culture with ours. I think that we could all learn a lot from that," he concludes.

.... ... .

Running With the Hemingways

Sanfermines, the main festivity in the Basque country which takes place the second week of July in the capital city of Iruñea (known also as Pamplona) and the iconic US writer Ernest Hemingway will be forever some sort of symbiotic entities.

Regarding this connection between the Sanfermines and Hemingway we strongly recommend that you read the book "San Fermingway" by Mundaka's writer Edorta Jimenez, in the mean time we leave you with this article published at the Irish Times:

Hemingways give the bulls a good run for their money

John Fleming

PAMPLONA LETTER: Some bearded gents compete to get in character. Oh and the sun also rises

HERE THEY come running and snorting, muscular and well-fed, thundering through the cobbled streets of Pamplona. Most are sure-footed but others slump heavily against the cordoning walls of the Basque town. While some have bull necks, these guys also have beards and many have American accents.

Coiffured and growling in voices laced with cigar smoke, they came just in advance of the week-long San Fermin festival with its bull run taking place at 8am each day. They have a specific purpose apart from running with the bulls or observing them from safety. One and all, they are here in Pamplona for the first international Ernest Hemingway lookalike competition.

The manly gun-loving bull-idolatrist writer was part of a coterie of Americans whose reverse voyage of discovery to the old world led them to a rediscovery of Spain in the first half of the 20th century.

Holed up in the Navarra capital’s old city, Illinois-born Hemingway wrote the textbook on bull running and fighting. Revering it as a spectacle of blood and lust and soft machismo, he was a literary anthropologist firing a blunderbuss of adjectives into noble savages (bull and man), much in the way Robert Flaherty framed Irish islanders in Man of Aran in 1934.

But Hemingway was a participant observer, living among the peasants. He was drawn to visit Pamplona on nine occasions starting in 1923, staying for the most part in the Hotel Perla.

In the main square, Plaza del Castillo, under a long arcade, like many a writer the world over, he sat and drank and stared at the sinking sun. His novel The Sun Also Rises appeared in 1926, putting the town of Pamplona and its reverence of the bull on the international map.

In 1957, four years before he died, Hollywood made a film of the novel, shooting it on location in Pamplona with Errol Flynn and Ava Gardner and projecting the city firmly into the world’s consciousness. His favourite bar in the plaza now bears his name and is the focus of this impersonator competition held a half-century on from his last visit.

Hemingway liked to nurse a drink. It can seem difficult to find a bar in any touristy quarter anywhere that does not proclaim him as one of its more famous frequenters. The man’s fondness for spreading his custom is often mocked – be it by a bar on Plaza Santa Ana in Madrid that guarantees its clients they are in the one bar where Hemingway certainly did not drink. Or here in Pamplona, where a “Hemingway Pizza” joint waves a red flag to ardent literary pilgrims and cooks in soft mockery with its buffalo mozzarella.

Gangs of young Spaniards, Australians, Englanders and others flock in on buses in a parade of bravado, combining surfing holidays in San Sebastian and crossborder Biarittz with the running of the bulls. As they get set for an eight-day street orgy of wine-bathing and over-consumption of sangria, some portly gents arrive as leisurely guests of the government of Navarra’s office of culture and tourism.

While the energetic young ones don Daz-whiteness T-shirt and trouser outfits and tie red cravats around their necks and feel part of a history bigger and even crazier than their over-enthusiastic selves, the old chaps are thoughtfully decapitating decent cigars and getting ready to roll on down to the unlikely talent show.

All the finalists grind down through the streets to the central plaza. They are now fully in character, all beards and bellies, and must perform for a while as the celebrated writer.

They charge past tattooed young hedonists on Interrail passes just finished their first-year exams. They cut through stunning Spanish youths who know this fiesta of bulls mauls the internet back into its box.

They nod to similar-aged locals whose ardour for San Fermin never flags but whose intensity of celebration now finds form in the preparation and consumption of excellent cod stew.

The product of the best bovine breeding, some of the international Hemingway doubles are veterans of qualifying heats elsewhere.

But the only heat here is the 36 degrees bombarding these greying men.

.... ... .

Comic About Basque Whalers

This note was published at EiTB:

Basque whalers: heroes as classic as American cowboys

Igor Lansorena

Guillermo Zubiaga, a Basque comic book writer, publishes a comic about the adventures of Joanes, a Basque Whaler.

For Guillermo Zubiaga, a Basque graphic artist living in New York, the Basque whalers represent a heroic age, a "western" period particular to the Basques' own whimsicalness, comparable to the figure of the cowboy to the Americans, the vikings to the Scandinavians or the samurai to the Japanese.

For this reason, it is Guillermo's intention to keep their memory alive "as one of a number of very important symbols" for the Basques when he publishes The Flying Whaleboat, the first episode of a series of 3 comic books featuring the adventures of Joanes, a Basque whaler. "It is my opinion that the figure of the Basque whaler as well as the story behind his more than 3000 mile transatlantic exploits, is worthy of heroic praise," Guillermo says in an exclusive interview for eitb.com.

"One can't help but to wonder what kind of epic poems would had the classic Greco-Romans written would they had the knowledge of such deeds among their own folk," the Basque artist adds.

Guillermo had dreamt ever since college about creating something with a Basque theme specially for the American market. He first considered a compendium of Basque Mythology or conceiving a new take on the battle of Orrega but eventually decided resolutely on the theme of Basque whaling which he discovered through an article in the National Geographic by Selma Huxley.

The Basque comic writer had always been mystified by the whole aspect of the ancient whalers as their memory echoed along the entire Basque coast, reflected in the innumerable coats of arms of many Basque villages. The National Geographic issue confirmed to Zubiaga's mind that the content itself was a jewel when it came down to establishing whaling as a centerpiece of the story-line for a graphic novel. What is more, for Guillermo there was also the disputed early presence of Basques in the Americas which remains shrouded in mystery.

Guillermo finally decided on the name Joanes after the 1584 last will of Joanes de Echaniz, one the oldest written documents in North American history, and because the name is frequently repeated in historical records, Joanes D'Etxeberry's chants "Balearrantzaleen otoitzak," to folklore, Aita Barandiaran's story of the whaler Joanes Balaztena.

Han-Solo from Star Wars and the "Man with no name" played by Eastwood in Sergio Leone's "spaghetti westerns", two anti-heroes, were willful inspirations for the portrayal of Joanes.

The narration of Joanes the Basque Whaler was conceived as a single story of approximately 100 pages, but Guillermo decided to better adapt it to an American public, in a series of 3 episodes of 32 pages each. He has already finished the first one, The Flying Whaleboat of Joanes, and has already started penciling number two, entitled The Island of the Whales.

Influences

If Guillermo were completely free and had all the means, he would love to create an idea for Marvel of a story with Wolverine, his favorite hero in the American comic book universe. "During 1936-1937 as a combatant in the Spanish Civil War, as a foreign agent; the Canadian international brigades come immediately to mind, in Euskadi, fighting along the Euzko Gudarostea on the iron belt, or liberating Paris with the Gernika Battalion," Guillermo says.

If Zubiaga had to cite some of his influences in terms of his writing and drawing style within the American comic book industry as well as among their European and often south American counterparts, he confesses there are so many he is afraid to leave any out.

"Neal Adams, Mike Mignola, Klaus Janson, Frank Miller, Bernie Wrighston, Pasqual Ferry, Carlos Pacheco, Joe Kubert, Adam Kubert, Jimmy Palmiotti, Adam Pollina, Alan Moore, Dave Cockrum, Scott Lobdell, Will Eisner, Goscinny, Uderzo, Stan Lee, Victor Mora, Francisco Darnís, Jordi Bernet, Horacio Altuna, Milo Manara, Richard Corben, John Byrne, Walter Simonson, and the list truly goes on an on, since there is really a humbling assemble of talent", Guillermo says.

Regarding the authors and works who have had a more direct influence on Joanes the Basque Whaler, Guillermo mentions Second Century A.D. Lucian de Somastata, François Rabelais' Pantagruel, Rudolf Erich Raspe and Gottfried August Bürger's The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen, and Walt Disney's Pinocchio.

Center of Basque Studies

The comic book will hit the shelves next July 24th at the annual convention of the North American Basque Organizations. It has not been an easy road, though. Since the Basque comic book writer had some contacts in the industry through his professional involvement, he thought he would be able to find an outlet for his work but he was somewhat mistaken.

Most of the comic book editors were not very interested in such an atypical theme. This did not stop Guillermo, who decided to give himself a year's deadline before considering self-publishing. He then met Joseba Etxarri, director of euskalkultura.com, who put him in touch with the University of Nevada and the Center of Basque Studies to participate with the annual NABO in advocating his book as a platform for a new outlook on Basque-American awareness.

.... ... .

The Bad Guys

Seems like a book written expressly to be made into a script for a Hollywood movie. Riding the wave created by "The Da Vinci Code", the victim seems to be the Catholic Pope. The bad guys, you guessed it, two Basques... and an Irish.

Hit by the aftermath of the brutal crusade against the Muslims thinly disguised as a "war on terrorism", authors are resorting to "politically correct" bad guys. In the end, who is going to defend the Basques and the Irish after the brutal propaganda campaign set against those two nationalities by the main stream media?

How well does the propaganda campaign has worked that the author uses citizens of two of the nations more widely identified as "firmly Catholic" on this thriller were the target seems to be the highest representative of the Catholic church.

Here you have preview of the book published by The Philadelphia Enquirer:

A complex thriller converging on Rome

The Death of a Pope

Piers Paul Read |Ignatius Press. 215 pp. $21.95

Reviewed by Frank Wilson

Piers Paul Read's new novel opens with three men - one Irish, two Basque - on trial in London, charged with "conspiring to cause an explosion with the intent to take human life."

Two of the defendants have connections to terrorist organizations. Fergal O'Brien was a member of the Provisional IRA and continues to associate with the Real IRA. Asier Etchevarren was a member of ETA, the Basque separatist group.

The third defendant has quite a different background. A laicized Jesuit priest, Jose Uriarte is a senior aid worker for Misericordia International, a Catholic refugee service. For the last four years, he has been working in the Darfur region of Sudan.

Uriarte is, in fact, the central figure in the trial. He does not deny approaching Etchevarren, a childhood friend, about getting some Sarin gas. He denies intending to use it "to take human life." He says he wanted to use it on the livestock of the Arab militias in Darfur. This, he says, would prevent them from continuing their brutal raids.

He proves a formidable witness. When the prosecutor tells him his story "beggars belief," Uriarte calmly explains that "the Arab militias value their horses and camels more than their women and children. They are hard men, as hard as the rock in the desert from which they come. Their horses and camels and cattle mean mobility and the means of survival."

All three are acquitted.

Kate Ramsey, one of the journalists covering the trial, is much taken with Uriarte and asks him for an interview. Uriarte, however, shifts attention from himself to his work and invites her to accompany him to Uganda and see what Misericordia International is all about.

Kate is a lapsed Catholic whose favorite uncle, Luke Scott, is a priest with a distinctly traditional bent. When Kate tells Father Luke that Uriarte is "really kind of charismatic," the priest remembers the meaning of the Greek word charisma - "a gift from the gods."

"As so often is the case with gifts from God," he reminds himself, it may be "purloined and misused by the devil."

In Africa, Kate sees poverty and suffering she had never imagined. She falls ill herself and Uriarte makes sure she is well cared for. They do not exactly become lovers. More precisely, they make love and she falls for him.

He takes her with him to Cairo and introduces her to some Copts, one of whom is a chemist. Uriarte tells her he is going to help the Copts - much persecuted in Islamic Egypt and, he tells her, desperately in need of money - by smuggling out of the country a valuable scroll. She insists on carrying the scroll herself, since she is less likely than he to be subject to undue scrutiny. He reluctantly agrees.

The narrative threads all converge in Rome after the death of Pope John Paul II. Father Luke is there because he has been alarmed by a visit from David Kotovski, a British security agent who had come to know Kate when he posed as a fellow journalist during Uriarte's trial. Kate is in Rome because she is covering the conclave to elect a new pope. Uriarte is there and has paid a visit to a cardinal who long ago had made a pass at Father Luke when both were seminarians. That cardinal's assistant, Monsignor Perez, pays a visit to Father Luke and asks him to hear his confession.

Read's book is short but concentrated. The foregoing actually only hints at how subtly complex the plot is. But what really makes the book work is its ambiguity.

Kate is right: Uriarte is charismatic. He is both persuasive and forceful. He genuinely cares for the refugees he works with. And they love him. Just as Thomas Aquinas presents the best arguments he can think of for the positions he is disputing, so the arguments Read has Uriarte put forth on behalf of his social gospel sound eminently reasonable and are emotionally resonant - exactly what good temptations ought to be. The evil must appear to be good. And the advocates for good must appear timorous and old-fashioned.

Indeed, the day is not saved by any heroics on the part of the good people. The heroics are reserved for the likes of Uriarte. The only thing the good people have going for them is simplicity and decency.

Miraculously, that proves enough.

We still remember the one book called "Rainbow Six" by state sponsored terrorism supporter Tom Clancy in which the masterminds behind the threat were a group of "eco-terrorists" that had hired, besides a former KGB agent you guessed it... a group of idiotic and murderous Basques.

.... ... .

Dave Boling

I've posted a couple of articles regarding Dave Boling's book "Guernica", well, this is a chance to learn about the author of the book thanks to an article published by Seattle Pi:

'Guernica' puts sports columnist Dave Boling in the international spotlight

Last updated October 20, 2008 8:53 p.m. PT

By JOHN MARSHALL
P-I BOOK CRITIC

Forget the quiet writer's garret. Dave Boling's powerful debut novel was written in hotel rooms, on airplanes and in crowded concourse waiting areas, often when its author was covering sports events.

"I think I wrote half the novel at Gate C21 during layovers at O'Hare Airport in Chicago," Boling said.

The novel's unlikely gestation is hardly the only thing that distinguishes it.

The usual debut novel has the author's personal experience thinly disguised through altered dates, places and names. Boling's debut could have reflected his dozen years as a sports columnist at Tacoma's News-Tribune, or playing center on the University of Louisville football team.

His goal was grander. He focused on an infamous event in 20th-century history -- the bombing of a Basque village during the Spanish Civil War, a slaughter of civilians remembered mainly for inspiring one of Pablo Picasso's most celebrated paintings.

Boling's "Guernica" (Bloomsbury, 361 pages, $26) is an engrossing, dramatic family saga filled with engaging characters and resonant details of rural Spanish life. The fierce pride and independence of the Basque people is captured in its pages, as are their cultural traditions.

To the author's amazement, "Guernica" is on its way to becoming an international sensation. Already a best-seller in Spain, where Boling did a recent book tour, the book is being published in 11 countries, with a British edition coming in February.

Boling's visibility as a novelist in the U.S. is sure to get a boost in November when "Guernica" becomes one of 12 titles in the "Discover Great New Writers" program at every Barnes & Noble store across the country.

Boling's advance is reported to be in the "high six figures," but don't expect the down-to-earth debut novelist from Federal Way to leave newspaper work soon.

"I wouldn't say I could leave my day job -- with agents and taxes, I may only see dimes on (advance) dollars," he related. "I want to keep writing fiction and sports. This is the new challenge for me, and I like it."

Several factors persuaded Boling to consider writing a novel back in 2005. The newspaper business was starting to founder and he worried he "needed to start hedging my bets."

After all, Boling went into journalism on a whim when he was an unemployed logger in Idaho. The newspaper in Coeur d'Alene was advertising for a sportswriter.

"I'll bet I could do that," he thought.

He talked his way into the job, in part because he could be a real asset in the paper's upcoming touch football game against the local police.

Boling's venture into fiction was inspired by two writers from the Spokesman-Review in Spokane who made the transition to novels: Jess Walter of Spokane, whose "The Zero" was a finalist for the National Book Award, and Jim Lynch of Olympia, whose "The Highest Tide" earned many raves.

Boling knew what story his novel would tell. He had met a woman of Basque descent at the University of Idaho and they soon married. Their decades together with two children provided an immersion in Basque culture and history, including the 1937 bombing of Guernica.

It had been on Boling's mind ever since 9/11. Guernica had been one of the most prominent examples of the slaughter of innocent civilians in the 20th century, yet Boling saw no mention of this parallel in the coverage of the 2001 attack. He hoped a novel could bring renewed attention to Guernica.

Boling also had definite ideas about the characters he wanted: "We seem to be getting too far away from characters like Atticus Finch in 'To Kill A Mockingbird,' characters of high ideals and morals," he said. "I wanted to create characters I could look up to."

Once Boling started to write, he found that the characters fueled the novel's progress. He had no real plot outline. He built toward the daylong attack by German air force planes, which dropped 100,000 pounds of bombs on Guernica (just 15 pages in the novel), then included some years of its aftermath. Historical research provided crucial details, as did family experiences and past trips to Spain.

Finding the time

Carving out time to write, the bane of many writers, was never a problem for Boling. Road trips covering Seattle sports teams provided ample opportunities. When other sportswriters got together for a post-game libation, Boling returned to his room to write. He found he could work on the novel anywhere.

"Sportswriters operate under extreme conditions, with bands playing and Laker Girls dancing," he explained. "You have no choice but to focus on your computer and make your story happen as best you can. You develop a capacity to focus and I transferred that to fiction writing."

"When I got on a plane, I would get my laptop out and start to work. I would immediately get so involved in the novel's story that I could literally hear the people talking and I could smell their food and visualize the hills where they lived. It was almost like self-hypnosis. The next thing I knew, there'd be an anouncement to 'return seatbacks to the upright position.' "

Boling lived up to his reputation as a prodigious, fast writer, producing a manuscript of 600 pages in 18 months while also writing three or four sports columns every week.

Among the first to read the novel were Walter and Lynch, who offered advice on technical matters such as voice and scene. Both were much impressed.

Lynch recalled, "What surprised me was that Dave had not gone through the usual training wheels of becoming a fiction writer -- short stories and learning the craft and then getting 70 pages into a novel and losing faith. Dave had such great passion for the story he wanted to tell. He is fearless by nature."

Lynch recommended that Boling send the manuscript to his New York literary agent, Kimberly Witherspoon of InkWell Management. She immediately sensed it was "an extraordinary book" with commercial potential, both in America and abroad, but she had to deliver depressing news to the author: The manuscript was way too long.

Boling remembers what happened next: "Kim said she wanted to market 'Guernica' at the Frankfurt International Book Fair but that was only a few days away. Here's where my sportswriter training came in. I cut 180 pages of the manuscript over that weekend and covered a football game, too. Out went entire characters, history and culture and politics; I kept it close to the story of one family -- this is a story of relationships, a family love story; the history is secondary."

Witherspoon's mission to Frankfurt met with instant success. First to purchase Boling's novel was prestigious Picador in Great Britain. Editor Charlotte Greig only needed to read 50 pages to know she wanted to publish Boling's book. She then called her publisher in Frankfurt, urging him to make an offer.

"I haven't read a word of it," he said.

Greig replied, "Trust me on this: It is exceptional!"

In a little over a month, Boling went from undiscovered writer with a manuscript to a writer with a book bought by presses around the globe. Boling did not know then that this is warp speed in a business that often advances glacially.

Truly a dream

Boling's new life as a hardback writer has unfolded in what he calls "pinch-me moments."

His Spanish book tour had many. Boling went with trepidation, expecting skepticism for a novel by a U.S. sportswriter about the bombing of Guernica.

Several Spaniards told him, "We were ready to tear this book apart, but it rang true." That was a huge relief for Boling, who had had the book checked for accuracy by Spanish and Basque experts in the States.

Another memorable moment came on the day of publication. He was at a local Barnes & Noble when a woman approached. He recommended the book to her, which prompted her to ask, "Did you read it?"

"No, I wrote it."

She agreed to buy a copy, but added: "I want something profound inscribed. Write what you learned from this experience."

Boling was stumped. Then he thought: "Supposedly, you just can't do this -- start writing fiction at age 53 and have a novel that sells like this. I worked my ass off, had a lot of luck and help from people but it did happen."

So Boling wrote in her book: "Nothing is impossible."

But the most powerful moments came at two book readings. In Boise, he read with his son, Jake, from the University of Idaho, in the crowd. In Spain, he did a reading attended by his daughter, Laurel, who is teaching English in Madrid.

"I looked up from my reading and made eye contact with my kids," Boling recalls, "and there was this instant connection, a warm, comforting feeling.

"It was like when my kids were in bed and I was reading them a nighttime story. I could sense that both of them were proud of me -- and if you can make your kids proud of you, there is no greater reward. All of the money, all the reviews, all the attention are secondary to that."

.... ... .

Gotzon Garate

This article comes to us via EITb:

Obituary

Basque writer Gotzon Garate dies at 74

10/08/2008

He wrote about 30 books in Basque. He mainly became famous for his crime novels and for his works about the oral Basque language. He will be buried on Thursday in Loiola.

The Basque writer Gotzon Garate, one of the greatest exponents of the Basque language and literature, died last night in Bilbao, at the age of 74, after a long illness. Garate will be buried on Thursday in the Sanctuary of Loiola.

Gotzon Garate was born in the Basque town of Elgoibar in 1934 and he became a distinguished writer and philologist with a great curriculum: Doctor of Philosophy in Madrid, Theology Graduate in Austria, Romance Philology Graduate in Bilbao, expert of Marxist Sociology in Switzerland and Professor of Basque Literature in the University of Deusto (Bilbao) are some of his degrees.

He has made analyses about Marx, Mao or Lenin, and he even had time to write tales, crime novels or articles. Among all his awards, the one received in 2005, the ‘Argizaiola’ award, is remarkable.

After suffering a cancer during the last months, Gotzon Garate died last night in Bilbao. His burial will take place on Thursday, October 9, in the Sanctuary of Loiola and the funeral will be the same day in the University of Deusto.

.... ... .

Basque Writer in The Netherlands

This article was published at Radio Netherlands Worldwide:

Kristina Goikoetxea Langarika

'Twelve hours is a long time'

By David Swatling

07-10-2008

Basque writer Kristina Goikoetxea Langarika thinks the Dutch language is like the children's toy Lego: compact and colourful. The same can be said of her Radio Books story Twelve Hours is a Long Time.

"Basque is the language in which I read poetry before I go to sleep," says Kristina Goikoetxea Langarika. "Basque verses inspire me to dream. Then I get up in the morning, spill a waterfall of Spanish into my diary and feel ready to start typing Dutch words into my computer."

Goikoetxea arrived in the Netherlands in 1995 after completing a degree in Translation Studies from the University of Granada. She won a scholarship to study Dutch literature at Leiden University.

Between languages

"Living between two languages made me more open to a third," explains the author who grew up in Spanish Basque Country. "From the very beginning I learned that language is a bridge and not a wall." After her studies, she wrote for various cultural magazines in both Basque and Spanish. A desire to tell her own stories in Dutch led Goikoetxea to study at the Writers School in Utrecht.

Last year Goikoetxea's first novel written in Dutch was published. Evamar tells the story of three generations of Basque women in the fictional rural village of Uranda. "For me Uranda could be anywhere because everywhere there are generals, men in grey, mountain caves, a north and a south, and people that move from one place to another in search of something better."

Lego language

Writing in Dutch reminded her of playing Lego as a child. "We often missed many bricks," she says. "Nevertheless we always managed to make our castles with the blocks we had. It never looked like the one on the cover, but it was a castle made our own way."

Goikoetxea remains philosophical about her Dutch literary future. "Sometimes I wonder whether I will gain more and more Lego pieces over time," she muses. "What would happen if I had all the pieces; if I didn't have to be creative about using the small range I have; if I was so familiar with them that I used them as ‘one should use them'?"

She notes that the official Lego webpage says every brick has an endless number of construction possibilities, and six standard bricks can be combined in at least 100,981,500 ways. "So, I still have enough bricks for quite a few castles."

For her contribution to Radio Books, another small village is imagined - or two, to be precise. After many years of missionary work in Africa, a man returns to his birthplace for a bittersweet homecoming.

.... ... .

Two Basque Books

Via the Idaho Statesman we get this article about two books that have the Basque Country, its culture and its the identity of its people as a background:

Bask in a couple of new Basque books

Through fiction and nonfiction, authors Dave Boling and Colleen Fillmore portray the history, beauty and strength of Basque culture.

BY ERIN RYAN - eryan@idahostatesman.com
Edition Date: 09/18/08

Every five years, Downtown Boise sees red - and white and black with a wink of green. Colors twist in the lithe bodies of Oinkari dancers celebrating their heritage and patron saints. It is Jaialdi, a time to feast with friends and family and reflect on traditions carried from distant soil on the shoulders of past generations.

The next Jaialdi is set for 2010, but in the meantime, two new books ought to stir up local Basques and admirers of their singular culture. One dreams the lives of families in the Basque Country before and after the Nazi devastation of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. The other examines dietary history and modern culinary habits of Boise Basques, weaving health aspects with customs that go beyond the plate.

'GUERNICA: A NOVEL' BY DAVE BOLING

Dave Boling once saw a Basque woman dancing on the lip of a wine glass. The image nearly became the title of his first novel, a sweeping historical romance and surprising resume bullet for a 56-year-old veteran sports writer.

Boling spends most of his time following football and basketball for the Tacoma News Tribune, but in airports and hotel rooms between assignments, he managed to write a book. Then, he managed to get it published in a year, an eye-blink by industry standards. A lot of writers who write for a living lose their hunger for it off the clock, but Boling said it felt like recess.

"All those times I woke up at 4 a.m., I didn't have to set my alarm clock. I woke up because I wanted to get writing. In a way, it was a bit of an escape," he said. "When I was really focused and the writing was going really well, I was in that town; could see it and hear it and smell it."

That town is Guernica, known as the Basque cultural capital. On April 26, 1937, Germany's Luftwaffe blasted it with 100,000 pounds of explosives. Bombs dropped for more than three hours, and machine guns cut down many of those who tried to flee. When the fire finally burned down, a third of the population was dead and 70 percent of the city destroyed.

The atrocity was a Nazi military exercise and a strategic move by Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, who hoped to break the spirit of the Basque resistance.

Many histories have been written about the city, but Boling wanted to write a story about the passion and fortitude of its people. He married into the culture and always has been struck by its vibrance.

"At first, the whole thing seemed to me to be about dancing, drinking, eating and having fun. That was at the core of being Basque," Boling said. "It was later that I learned there were these very close family ties and real reverence for their history, culture and heritage."

"Guernica" ($26, Bloomsbury USA) traces the twining lives of Miguel Navarro and Miren Ansotegui, their experiences painting vivid pictures of real events and imagined people. Boling visited the city and the surrounding Basque Country more than once while he was writing the book and worked to give his words and characters authenticity.

He researched for years, using nonfiction as a framework for his developing fiction. He consulted his Basque in-laws, professors of Basque studies and a Spanish publishing company to make sure the story rang true.

"If there has been criticism, it's that my characters are too appealing, too valiant, too strong. There is a feeling that characters have to be deeply flawed to be real. I don't agree with that," he said, joking that he has been blasted much more severely in his day job by Seattle Mariners fans.

"More than reviewers from newspapers or the literary types, I hope the Basque community really attaches to this. In a very special way, this is a tribute to them, their love for family and closeness in personal relationships and high character.."

COLLEEN ASUMENDI FILLMORE: BASQUE DIET

When Colleen Asumendi Fillmore was a child, she thought everyone was Basque. Her Irish mother had mastered the cuisine cherished by her Basque father, and the tongue, tripe and chorizo she ate seemed as normal as macaroni and cheese.

"I grew up Basque. I didn't realize it was a special ethnic group," she said.

While she did not develop her mother's skills in the kitchen, Fillmore inherited her passion for good food and healthy living. She earned an undergraduate degree in restaurant management at Idaho State University and a master's degree in human nutrition from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln before becoming a registered licensed dietitian.

"I love to learn about the body, and with food, you study anatomy, physiology, organic chemistry. You come to know how anything will metabolize," she said.

Fillmore is director of child nutrition programs for the Idaho Department of Education and earned her doctorate in adult learning and leadership from the University of Idaho in 2005. Her dissertation had exactly the same title as her book, which was born in the fashion of an industry myth. A worldwide publisher of academic research, VDM offered to turn her thesis into a book.

"Basques of Boise: Adult Dietary Culture and Tradition" ($64, VDM) tells a story that is neither frilly or linear. It is a dissection of Basque food and the people who consider it part of their identity.

"The food we eat defines who we are and entwines with our sense of self," reads Fillmore's introduction. "This exploration was not intended to change a cuisine that has been in existence for hundreds of years, but instead, bring awareness to the field of ethnic dietary intake and how this unique group fits within the latest nutrition research."

Fillmore's subjects are not identified by their real names, but she said if you know the local Basque community at all, some of them will be unmistakable. She observed them participating in cultural functions at the Basque Center, counting heads, plates and portions and entering ingredient data into USDA-approved software. She analyzed about a dozen meals.

She compared its staples to those of classic Mediterranean fare, noting that fish, olive oil and fresh vegetables are prevalent. The saturated fat levels are good, as are percentages of iron, protein and vitamins A and C. Calories and sodium are a little high and calcium and fiber are a little low, but Fillmore said party menus are not ideal indicators of day-to-day balance. And, even for a student of nutrition, USDA guidelines don't hold a candle to the significance of culture when it comes to food.

"There are a lot of things I had done ever since my childhood that I didn't realize were part of the tradition forever and ever. They mean more to me now," Fillmore said. "I really believe you can tell the story of who people are by what they eat."

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"Guernica" : A Novel

The bombing of Gernika by the German Luftwaffe supporting the military revolt led by Francisco Franco continues to inspire artists around the world.

On this article published by The Oregonian you will learn about a novel written by Dave Boling that revolves around a Basque family from Gernika.

Here you have it:

'Guernica' novel traces Spanish Civil War through Basque family saga

Dave Boling brings his reporter's eye to a compelling exploration of a tragedy as experienced by one family

Sunday, September 07, 2008
MATT LOVE
Special to The Oregonian

On April 26, 1937, the German Luftwaffe bombed Guernica, the cultural center of the Basque people located in north-central Spain near the Bay of Biscay.

The raid, which served no strategic purpose, destroyed most of the city, left hundreds dead and wounded, and represented the zenith of barbarity in the Spanish Civil War, eventually won by the fascists.

Not long after the bombing, Pablo Picasso immortalized the calamity in a monumental painting, and that's all many of us really know of Guernica -- carnage and the huge canvas.

But who were the Basques killed or dispossessed in the raid? What were their traditions and stories? What was Guernica before its destruction?

In his debut novel, "Guernica," Dave Boling, a columnist for the Tacoma News-Tribune, explores these questions with a reporter's eye and a novelist's heart and imagination. The result is a wonderful and thought-provoking mini-epic packed full of fascinating, little-known European history, rich characters and empathy for the civilians who paid the awful price when a savage civil war visited them.

In "Guernica," Boling unfolds the Basque saga of the Ansotegui family from 1893 to 1940 in restrained yet evocative prose. Justo is the oldest of three brothers and assumes control of the family farm at age 15 after his mother dies and his father drifts away, insane with grief.

In the years before the plague of fascism spreads across Europe, Justo takes a wife, Mariangeles, and they have a beautiful daughter, Miren. Miren grows up, becomes a renowned dancer, and marries Miguel, an accomplished woodworker. Together, they all become one of the most beloved and respected families in Guernica. Boling, who married into a Basque family, deftly reveals the unique and colorful cultural traditions that defined the Basque people from that era.

Then comes worldwide depression, Francisco Franco, the civil war, the raid, and its devastating effect upon the Ansotegui family and the Basque people. By far the novel's best section is a tense 30-page depiction of the bombing, which many military historians consider the first instance of directly targeting a civilian population in an urban area. It would set the stage for World War II and much, much worse to come.

After the fires are extinguished and the bodies buried, what's left of the Ansotegui family must regroup and reclaim some semblance of a life amid war. Some choose to fight the fascists while others merely try not to starve.

If any criticism could be leveled against "Guernica," it's that a reader has no idea who the Spaniards are -- fascist or otherwise. With the exception of Picasso, a minor character who wasn't even living in Spain during the civil war, they are absent from the novel except for a few stock soldier/villains.

Despite this puzzling absence, Boling has written a fine first novel about one of the most mysterious and exotic peoples of Europe -- the Basques. They still inhabit the north-central part of Spain and make headlines in their (sometimes violent) attempts to gain independence. Their determination lives on, even after Guernica.

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Atxaga's Update

He may be a little bit misguided about the right of Euskal Herria to be independent and where the violence comes from when it comes to the political conflict that involves the Basque Country, Spain and France, but he is the most internationally renown Basque author, so here you have an update published by the Nevada News:

Basque author-in-residence wins prestigious literary prizes

Monday, June 09, 2008

By Zanny Marsh

Harvard University recruited Bernardo Atxaga as an author-in-residence, but the Basque author turned the famous university down. Instead, he accepted the position of Center for Basque Studies William Douglass Distinguished Scholar for 2007–2008.

During his term, he wrote on two books, lectured to University students and faculty and received perhaps the most prestigious award of his career. Adage’s most recent novel, The Accordionist’s Son, captured Italy’s most important literary prizes: Grinzane Cavour Grand Prize and Mondello Prize, widely considered predecessors of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

“It is an extraordinary honor to host an author of such distinction and acclaim at the University,” said Eric Herzik, interim director of the Center for Basque Studies, headquartered at the University. “His work transcends Basque culture and has brought him much attention from the international community. He lectures around Spain and all over Europe and our students have had the extraordinary opportunity to listen to him lecture about his books.”

Atxaga has traveled to the United States only twice before beginning his term at the University. He lived in Atlanta and in Boston, where he performed researched and wrote. He yearned for a ‘Western’ experience.

“In literature, there are many references to ‘passing through,’ which describes a connection to nature and to the landscape,” Atxaga said. “The history of Nevada is rich with this evocative connection to the landscape and the pioneer spirit. I wanted to capture that in my work.”

His appointment in the Center for Basque Studies afforded Atxaga the opportunity to interact with students and Basque scholars from around the world.

Outside of the classroom, Atxaga dedicated hours each day performing research and writing two books during his residency.

His first book titled Nevada Days is an amalgam of stories and memories that Atxaga heard from residents as he traveled the state. He spent considerable time in rural communities, especially at the popular “watering holes” such as barber shops, grocery stores and diners.

“The East appears to be a more homogenous society,” Atxaga said. “The building, the construction of Nevada, has more diversity, culture, more depth and growth. Nevada looks like the world of the future.”

Atxaga also wrote the book Seven Houses in France while he was in Reno.

Atxaga is among a small group of Basque writers whose careers were established when they began publishing in their native language.

“Writing in the Basque language reinforces egalitarianism but it elevates the individual voice,” said Mari Jose Olaziregi, assistant professor and specialist in Basque literature. “It separates the experience, makes it unique.”

International recognition for Atxaga came after publication of his 1988 novel Obabakoak, which was awarded the Spanish National Fiction Prize. It has been translated into more than 26 languages.

Several of his novels — Obabakoak, The Accordionist’s Son, The Lone Man, The Lone Woman and Two Brothers — have been translated into English.

Atxaga has also written short stories, children’s literature, poetry and essays. Atxaga’s work has sold more than 200,000 copies, making him the most translated and celebrated Basque author.

The Center for Basque Studies conducts and publishes Basque-related research and offers an academic minor in Basque studies and a tutorial doctoral program. The center is offering two courses for the Fall 2008 semester: BASQ 451/461, a course on Contemporary Basque Literature, and BASQ 452/652 in Spring 2009, a course on Atxaga’s literary works.

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Award For Kirmen Uribe

This note comes to us thanks to EITb:

Basque writer Kirmen Uribe receives Pen Club award in New York

05/20/2008

United States’ most important association of writers awarded Basque writer Kirmen Uribe in its day for the English version of his book “Meanwhile Take My Hand”. He was given the award last night in New York.

Pen Club, United States’ most important association of writers gave Basque writer Kirmen Uribe the prize he had been awarded with for the English translation of his poetry book Bitartean heldu eskutik (Meanwhile take my hand) on Monday.

The translation of the book was made by Elizabeth Macklin and was among the finalists in the category of poetry, an acknowledgement which culminates a year full of successes.

“It started with the presentation we made here in spring, then we traveled all over nine states of the United States, we went to several universities as Stanford, New York University… Then the critics made appreciations and finally I got this award”, Uribe explained.

Some Uribe’s poems can also be found at New European Poets, a collection of young European poets, that has been recently published in the United States. Kirmen Uribe also emphasized literary critics’ role for his success in the United States.

“The fact that a review is written in Los Angeles Times, Washington Post or Harvard Review, opens the door to new possibilities”, said the writer.

Kirmen Uribe will continue bounded to this country during the next months because he has been invited to write by a Californian university and in autumn he will write a novel set in New York.

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Rankin Is Mad

Nicholas Rankin has a nice grip of what is going on in Euskal Herria, he has supported initiatives to solve the political conflict and his writings about the Basques are always well documented.

But he is upset and he wrote about the reason why he is upset, unfortunately he allowed the worst on him to come through.

Here you have the article:

A Basque encounter with pirates

By Nick Rankin
BBC, Spain

When a Spanish fishing boat, with its cargo and crew, was seized off the Horn of Africa recently, it prompted Madrid to call for the extradition of the hijackers and for international action against piracy.

For centuries, bold Basque sailors have ventured out on the seas that crash on their homeland in the Bay of Biscay.

Basques, chasing whale and cod, were probably the first Europeans to reach North America.

The Portuguese, Ferdinand Magellan, is credited with being the first man to sail around the world, but actually he died in the Philippines and it was a Basque, Juan Elkano from Getaria, who brought his ship home.

So when a Basque-owned tuna fishing boat called Playa de Bakio was seized off Somalia, with five Basque among its crew, the story was a big one in the Basque country. The press were keen to find out all about the kidnapped fishermen and their anxious relatives. Pictures were vital.

"This is gold dust," said my friend Vincent, the Reuters photographer, tapping a good image of the fishing boat in the newspapers, next to personal ones of the crew.

"I wonder where they got those."

Ransom

In the bad old days, foot-in-the-door journalists used to steal framed family photographs off the mantel, but nowadays a second with a digital camera is all a good snapper needs.

The day before Vincent had been photographing the daughter of one of the kidnapped sailors and he still had her phone number. I called her mobile to offer a crumb of reassurance.

I told her I had made a BBC radio programme about Somali pirates and had learned they did not usually harm foreign captives. All they wanted was the ransom money.

She told me the company was prepared to pay and I said that in that case her dad would soon be back safe. And indeed, after a million or so euros changed hands, the crew were freed.

A Basque newspaper interviewed Andrew Mwangura, the sensitive man who runs a charity that helps distressed African seafarers.

"Hello, Andrew!" I said out loud reading the paper because I had spent time with him in Mombasa.

Andrew Mwangura explained that Somali piracy was a rational economic activity in a lawless country. There was no government to regulate the fishing grounds in the Indian ocean off Somalia.

The hijacked Playa de Bakio may have been licensed to fish for tuna, but scores of other European and Asian fishing boats trawl illicitly in Somali waters, running big risks for high returns.

Mwangura estimated that this pirate fishing off Somalia is worth over £50 million a year. And so the Somali pirates in their turn levy a kind of privatised tax or toll on any foreign vessels they can seize, claiming territorial rights.

Civil War horror

A few days later, in the cemetery at Gernika, I ran into my own personal pirate.

Gernika is a place whose history has been fought over. In 1937, during the Spanish civil war, the town of Gernika was burned down. There were two different stories about what happened.

The Spanish victors of the civil war claimed that the communist citizens of Gernika blew up and burned their own town. The Basques said their town was fire-bombed by foreign aeroplanes as was indeed the case.

I wrote a book about George Steer, the Times journalist, whose truthful report of the Nazi bombing inspired Pablo Picasso to paint his famous, black and white picture, Guernica.

The Basques have now put up a bust of this reporter, George Steer, in the town - and every year on the anniversary I accompany his son, who lays flowers at the tomb of the dead.

After this year's ceremony, I was told that someone who had written in Basque about George Steer wanted to meet me.

Intellectual pirates

He was my age, with the rough scruffy look that is the badge of authenticity among left-wing, Basque nationalists.

"Your book made me cry," he said, "so I copied it."

He handed me a slim volume for young people. The cover was instantly familiar, because it was the same as my own.

I still did not quite grasp that someone had picked my pocket and was now presenting me with my own wallet as a gift.

Only later did I find all the pictures were lifted, without credit or permission, and realise that the publishers were the same intellectual pirates from Navarra who had also ripped off G L Steer's original Spanish civil war book and copyrighted it themselves.

It is territoriality again, anything about Basques they feel belongs to them.

Although they flout international laws of ownership, the Somali pirate and the Basque publisher both claim their action is somehow in the national interest. As Dr Johnson said: "Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel."

Madrid called for the hijackers of their trawler to be extradited to Spain and for international action against piracy.

I won't hold my breath waiting for law and order to reach Somalia. But the Basque country is in Europe where intellectual property rights are more protected.

I am minded to go fishing for trouble, with a heavyweight copyright lawyer.

Was that quote by Dr. Johnson really necessary?

Hopefully things will be resolved to his satisfaction. And hopefully he will then apologize for calling all Basques that long for their undeniable right to self determination by the term scoundrel.

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Leizarraga's Text Back Home

An important piece of Basque cultural heritage is now back home. Here you have the note via EITb:

Entertainment

For 20,500 pounds

Leizarraga’s New Testament has already an owner

01/14/2008

Last November 28, the prestigious Shoteby’s Auction House of London put Leizarraga’s New Testament for auction but nobody bought it. Finally, Euskaltzaindia has bought it.

Leizarraga’s New Testament, published in 1571, has already an owner; Euskaltzaindia, the Royal Academy of Basque Language, bought it for 20,500 pounds. This work is the first Bible published exclusively in Basque language.

The prestigious Shoteby’s Auction House of London put the New Testament written by Basque Protestant priest Joannes Leizarraga for auction. Its first price was 20,000 pounds. However, nobody offered more and therefore the copy was not sold. As a consequence, Euskaltzaindia contacted the auction house and, after some negotiations, they finally managed to buy the famous work.

The New Testament written by Leizarraga is the second book written in Basque language.

Leizarraga was born in Beskoitze (Northern Basque Country) and he died in Bastida in 1601.

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Nowhere To Hide

Here you have a review of Atxaga's must recent book published by the Guardian Unlimited:

No hiding place

The Basque struggle provides a compelling background to Bernardo Atxaga's The Accordionist's Son, says Nick Caistor

Saturday January 12, 2008
The Guardian

The Accordionist's Son
by Bernardo Atxaga, translated by Margaret Jull Costa
384pp, Harvill Secker, pounds 18.99

The Basques have a word for it. That word is usually unpronounceable and unconnected to any other European language, reflecting the uniqueness of the history of that troubled, distinctive northern corner of Spain. In The Accordionist's Son , one of these words is zulo, here translated as "hiding-place". Over the 60-year period that the novel covers, from the 1930s to the 1990s, this zulo is used for many different purposes, all of them essential to the lived history of the village of Obaba in the heart of the Basque country.

During the civil war in the 30s, "the American" who owns a hotel coveted by the Francoists is hidden there before he succeeds in escaping over the border to France and eventually makes it back to the United States. In the 60s, the novel's protagonist David Imaz spends hours in its dark well as he makes his silent protest at being forced to play his accordion at the inauguration of a monument being erected for only one side of those who fought in the civil war. And in the 70s, when a new Spain and a new Basque country are struggling to emerge as the Franco regime crumbles, the zulo is given a more sinister function: it is used as a prison where the groups fighting for Basque independence keep the people they have kidnapped and are holding to ransom. Beyond this, Bernardo Atxaga suggests, the zulo is a symbol of the state of mind of the Basques themselves: the dark, hidden place where their complex identity is forged and from which they often only reluctantly emerge.

The novel begins and ends far from Obaba. Like many Basques, the Imaz family have been forced to emigrate. For reasons that become clear only later, David has gone to join his Uncle Juan in California. The opening centres on David's death and the arrival of Joseba, his closest friend from the Basque country, to attend his funeral. David's American widow Mary Ann presents Joseba with her husband's long memoir about his life before emigration and his explanation of how he arrived in California, and it is this memoir that constitutes the bulk of The Accordionist's Son. Born in the 50s, David finds himself surrounded by adults who bear the scars of a war he did not participate in and whose meaning he only gradually comes to understand. As he does so, he realises not only that his father Angel (the accordionist) was on Franco's side, but that he could have been directly responsible for the deaths of seven people in their home village of Obaba. Growing to manhood, David rejects his father's view of the world, with its illusion of progress and attraction to the sophistication of life beyond the village. He himself is far more drawn to the countryside, to horses, the forests surrounding the green valleys, his "peasant" friends, Joseba and local girls, the link with the land and the sensual pleasures of being immersed in still unspoilt nature.

Despite this, David accepts the need to go away to university to study. There in the early 70s he meets fellow students who are much more politically aware than he is. They do not simply feel nostalgia for the village life of the Basque country - they see it as somewhere that has always suffered at the hands of the Spanish, with Franco as simply the most recent manifestation of this oppression. They are determined to take advantage of his disappearance to win independence at last. Almost without realising it, David and Joseba find themselves drawn into this movement, until at the climax of the book they are faced with the choice between espousing violence to win freedom and accepting that yet again others will decide their future for them - in many ways the same choice as that faced by their parents' generation.

In all his work, Atxaga delves into the impact of the political on individual lives. What is most moving in The Accordionist's Son is the push and counter-push of these pressures on a believable individual (and Margaret Jull Costa's elegant and unfussy translation gives us a clear view of him in English) as he contends with the weight of history and a sense of belonging, and assesses his possibilities for action.

The conclusion to the novel is in many ways a sombre one. David rejects using violent means to preserve his garden of Eden, and in so doing is expelled far from it, to a 21st century in which Basque shepherds tend their sheep in the parks of San Francisco. Escape from the zulo can only come at a huge cost.

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Ken Follet in Gazteiz

This note appeared at Think Spain:

Culture/Art/Literature

Ken Follett statue unveiled in Vitoria

By: thinkSPAIN

Welsh author, Ken Follett, unveiled a statue of himself, the first ever made, in the Basque town of Vitoria earlier today during a two-day visit to promote the Spanish version of his new novel 'World Without End', which is the sequel to the highly successful 'The Pillars of the Earth'.

The bronze statue, which shows Follett standing up, in a reflective pose with his hand on his chin, is the work of local artist, Casto Solano, and has been erected in the Plaza de las Burullerías, near the cathedral.

The president of the Vitoria Cathedral Foundation, Lorena López de Lacalle, revealed during this morning's ceremony that Follett's family had been very amused when he told them about the statue, and had teased him about being depicted on horseback.

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Atxaga Translated

This note appeared at the Telegraph:

Uncle Juan's horse and the rich Fascist's daughter

Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 22/12/2007

David Flusfeder reviews The Accordionist's Son by Bernado Atxaga, tr by Margaret Jull Costa

Bernardo Atxaga's leisurely novel is a rare thing in our literary culture. Look around a bookshop's tables of fiction and you will see very few translated books; maybe a couple of contemporary novels from France, a few reissued classics from Russia and Germany and South America. The rest will be British and American.

Bernardo Atxaga is a Basque novelist, writing in a language that has fewer than a million speakers, and yet whose work has commanded an international audience.

The Accordionist's Son begins with the untimely death of its hero and supposed author, David Imaz, on his ranch in California, a long way from his home in the Basque village of Obaba. In the introduction we are told that David's book will be "very interesting, very dense…events and facts have all been crammed in like anchovies in a glass jar". In fact - and this is both the book's weakness and its strength - it reads like a slowly unfolding memoir.

We are moved back in time, first into the romance of how David and his (American) wife met and fell in love, and then to his 1960s boyhood in Obaba, where he did the sorts of things that boys do everywhere: flirting, fighting, squabbling with his father and falling in love.

But this is Franco's Spain, where the men with power in the village, including David's father, Angel, are those who fought or conspired for the winning side in the Civil War. Before we can approach these unpleasant truths, though, we pass several seasons in the life of the village, where things pass slowly.

The most remarkable events are David's expulsion from school, after being caught with a pornographic magazine that belongs to his friend Martin (who will later become a cocaine-tooting nightclub entrepreneur and boxing promoter); his hiding of his Uncle Juan's horse so that the rich Fascist's daughter will be unable to buy it; and his love affairs.

The most poignant of these is his afternoon of love in room 27 of the Hotel Alaska with Martin's sister, the lame Theresa. She has always loved him, while he has always loved the virginal Virginia, who is engaged to a sailor who will later be lost at sea.

In defiance of Chekhov's maxim that a pistol introduced in Act 1 must always be fired in Act 3, Theresa's pocket revolver is introduced with no greater shock ensuing than the death of a sparrow.

But there have been human deaths: the village was ripped apart in the Civil War, with Uncle Juan on the Republican side and Angel the accordionist implicated in the murders of Republican sympathisers. (Moral value here is generally equated with which side a character supported, or would have, in the Civil War.)

And the boy David, the reluctant accordionist and 1960s adolescent, becomes obsessed with disinterring the truths of the village's past.

The surface of village life is finally lifted, and we are thrust into murder and conspiracy in the story of Don Pedro "The American" (a Leftist villager so-called because he once lived in Canada), who had been chosen for death but managed to get away.

By the end of the novel, subtly, with the reader almost being unaware of the process taking place, we are in tune with the lost rhythms of Basque rural life and able to begin to comprehend a world that supported both communal village traditions and the atrocity of Guernica.

~ ~ ~

Basque Poets in Edinburgh

Scotland and Euskal Herria have a lot of things in common, they are both occupied by colonialist powers unable to evolve. This is why I was glad to read at EITb about how these two nations are coming together through art. Check this out:

Writers will present 'Six Basque Poets' at Edinburgh Book Festival

The book is a poetic anthology compiled by Mari Jose Olaziregi that gathers poems by Bernardo Atxaga, Rikardo Arregi, Felipe Juaristi, Miren Agur Meabe, Kirmen Uribe and Joseba Sarrionandia in Basque and English.

The Basque writers Bernardo Atxaga, Rikardo Arregi and Miren Agur Meabe will present the book Six Basque Poets, published by the English publishing company Arc, on Sunday, August 12, at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.

According to EuskalKultura.com, the book Six Basque Poets is a poetic anthology compiled by Mari Jose Olaziregi and translated into English by Miren Gabantxo that gathers poems by Bernardo Atxaga, Rikardo Arregi, Felipe Juaristi, Miren Agur Meabe, Kirmen Uribe and Joseba Sarrionandia in Basque and English.

The work is the second volume in a series that tries to bring closer contemporary poetry by European authors as well as from other continents to English speakers. That is why Atxaga, Arregi and Meabe will start a presentation tour that will take some of the writers later to Manchester and Reno.

According to sources of the English publishing company, the six poets included in the book have played a crucial role in the development of poetry written in Basque within the last 30 years. The book was published with aid from the Culture Department of the Basque Government and the Cervantes Institute from Manchester as well as Culture 2000.

Presentation tour

The first presentation event of the book will be this Sunday in Edinburgh. In turn, Kirmen Uribe and Felipe Juaristi will present the book at the Cervantes Institute of Manchester in October. In November Uribe and Ataxga will visit Reno, where they will lecture at the Center for Basque Studies (CBS) of the University of Nevada.

Reno will host the first International Meeting of Basque Literature in April 2008, under the guidance of Atxaga at the CBS. The CBS will publish the book History of Basque Literature for the occasion. Among the main authors of the work are Jean Haritschelhar, Beñat Oihartzabal, Aurelia Arkotxa, Igone Etxebarria, Joxerra Garzia, Lourdes Otaegi, Xabier Altzibar, Jesus Maria Lasagabaster, Patri Urkizu, Xabier Etxaniz, Manu Lopez and Mari Jose Olaziregi, translated into English by Amaia Gabantxo.

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WW II Air Assaults

A new book uses the bombing of Gernika as an example of air assault against civilian population. This article published at the Telegram talks about it:

Two authors examine World War II air assaults

BOOK REVIEW

By Jeffrey Burke Bloomberg

“Guernica and Total War” by Ian Patterson (Harvard University Press, $22.95) “The Fire: The Bombing of Germany 1940-1945” by Joerg Friedrich, translated by Allison Brown (Columbia University Press, $34.95)

On April 26, 1937, market day in Guernica, German and Italian bombers took off from a Spanish airfield to try out new techniques. They razed the ancient Basque town.

In “Guernica and Total War,” Ian Patterson, a Cambridge University English professor, looks at the history of and cultural response to the spread of airborne military assaults on civilians. Focusing on a brutish tactic — still considered useful in the form of “shock and awe” — Patterson has written a rich and engaging study.

The idea of bombing nonmilitary targets quickly followed the advent of flight itself. The British bombed “tribesmen on the Indian frontier from 1915 onward,” Patterson writes.

In the 1920s South African, French and Spanish planes targeted civilians. Mussolini’s son Vittorio enjoyed dropping bombs on Ethiopian horsemen after Italy invaded the country in 1935. Patterson quotes his description of them “blooming like a rose when my fragmentation bombs fell in their midst. It was great fun.”

For the devastation of Guernica, Patterson cites a diary entry by Wolfram von Richthofen, commander of the German Condor Legion, which led the raid, and a cousin of the famous Red Baron. Richthofen writes of the success of a new strategy using first heavy blast bombs to destroy buildings and water supplies, then incendiary bombs to ignite wooden buildings and finally machine guns to finish off people and farm animals. The entry begins, “Guernica, town of 5,000 inhabitants, literally razed to the ground.”

Guernica became a target partly because the Basques resisted Franco’s Nationalists. It became an enduring icon largely because of Picasso’s painting.

As Patterson notes, though, “it was only one of a huge number of cultural artifacts — paintings, films, novels, poems, plays — to explore the idea of indiscriminate death from the air.” Auden, Bunuel, de Kooning, Riefenstahl, Verne, Sontag and myriad more-obscure figures — Patterson casts a wide net as he explores how artists dealt with the atavistic fear of what Proust called, during earlier zeppelin raids on Paris, “an apocalypse in the sky.”

The author’s academic side only occasionally muddies clear prose, in phrases like “a trope of visualization” or “the shorthand metonymy of wings.” It’s a minor complaint about a slim book of considerable rewards.

Annihilation became the norm in World War II. In “The Fire: The Bombing of Germany 1940-1945,” the German historian Joerg Friedrich looks at the brutal effects on the ground when total war came to German cities. (The book was attacked in some quarters when it was published in Germany, in 2002, for depicting Germans as victims rather than as perps.)

Friedrich’s tone varies from clinical to literary to almost lyrical as he first examines the strategy and methods behind saturation bombing, then surveys one city after another targeted for destruction. He notes the history behind each town’s architectural heritage before it is wiped out, comparing the result of centuries of building to that of minutes of bombing.

His statistics range from body counts to acres of destroyed window panes to cubic yards of rubble per resident; the stream of horrifying facts and figures can become hypnotic. Friedrich doesn’t explicitly judge either side for attacks that mainly killed women, children and elderly men, but he often pushes the reader to question the reasoning that sanctioned such slaughter.

Jeffrey Burke is an editor for Bloomberg News.

Those bombings "of tribesmen" were ordered by no one else than Winston Churchill, a sinister little character that a lot of people consider a great statesman.

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First Europeans

Oh this is going to make a lot of fellas in the Basque-phobe camp so upset. Here you have it, as published by EITb:

'First Europeans were Basques and Basque the first language'

That’s the theory of a philologist and historian Jorge Maria Rivero Meneses in his book El verdadero origen de los vascos: la primera humanidad that will be presented Wednesday in Koldo Mitxelena library.

The philologist and historian Jorge María Ribero Meneses, after being investigating for years, reached the conclusion that Basque people were the first inhabitants of the European continent. According to Ribero Meneses, in addition, nowadays Basque is the evolution of the world’s oldest language. At the very beginning it was generalised throughout the north of Spain.

That is what he says in his book El verdadero origen de los vascos: la primera humanidad (The real origin of the Basque people: The first human beings), which will be presented Wednesday in Donostia’s Koldo Mitxelena library.

Is to mention, that the first Basques Ribero Meneses makes reference to, are not the ones we know nowadays, “Cantabria and Basque country have always been the same, as it is shown in many maps and ancient documents, but the historian and theologian Enrique Flórez, in the XVIII century, insisted on leaving the Basques outside, defending with nonsense things that only the people from Santander were from Cantabria”. According to the philologist and historian, that is the origin of the Basque “independents”, due to this, according to Flórez “created a serious problem to the identity of the Basque people”.

The philology, toponimy, arqueology and genetic studies support this author’s theories that have been presenting since 1984 of Cantabria’s area as the are where the first intelligent human being developed. The DNA studies published in 2003 support this theory, which assures that three fourths of the Europeans come from a specific population of Northern Spain. In 2006, another genetic study showed that British Island’s inhabitants came from the Cantabric coast.

There you go, in case Basques needed more reasons to support their demand for self determination.

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