One of the consequences of those labors is, to give one example, the invisibility of certain words. When a reader reads a novel with a lot of dialogue, he probably doesn’t even see the constant repetition in the text of “he said,” “he replied,” and “he retorted.” The words are there but the same thing happens with them as happens with the trees on his favorite walk: He has read the words so many times, he doesn’t even notice them.
Writing in euskera, I have no problems with “he said” (esan) or with “he replied” (erantzun) but I begin to have problems with “he retorted” (arrapostu) because this word is not familiar to the reader, because it’s a tree he recognizes but that, nonetheless, he has never seen on this particular walk. So the Basque writer knows that his reader will stop at that word, that it will be a stumbling block.
I would say that the first duty of literary language is to be unobtrusive. And that’s our weak point: Because we lack antecedents, there are not enough books to create the habit of reading in Basque. And in the sixties we had an even harder time.
However, like every adolescent artist, the young Basque writer had enough energy to cover the first squares of the journey almost without noticing what he was doing, without realizing what he had gotten himself into. Moreover, he felt he had a lot of things to say. Pío Baroja had not said it all.
Under that first impulse, the adolescent who set out on his journey with his bundle over his shoulder got at least as far as square number nine, as far as the second goose: He published the odd story (I did in the anthology Euskal Literatura, 1972), the odd short novel (Ziutateaz, 1976), and even the odd book of poems (Etiopia, 1978).
But that brief experience only served to make him realize the limitations of his baggage. He immediately felt like the boy on square ten who is shown sailing in a little paper boat. The moment of uncertainty had arrived.
Nevertheless, quite a lot of us survived the paper boat test and managed to get past square ten, trying, in the first instance, to reach square twenty-four, the one showing a hare reading a book, and then square forty-three, where a venerable old man is doing the same as the hare: reading a book and taking the air.
These squares are now within our reach. To put it another way, we now have a literary market, which, among other things, enables writers like myself to live off the royalties from such works as Bi anai (1984) and Obabakoak (1988).
The leap — from square ten to square forty-three — has been possible thanks to the help of various geese along the way. Gabriel Aresti, whom I mentioned before, was one of them, Luis Mitxelena another. They both worked so that we, the younger writers, would have a common literary language, the so-called euskera batua, so that we could exchange our bundle for a decent suitcase.
The journey continues and I think most of us believe that things will turn out well.
There are still fears, though. I look at the board and I see square fifty-two, the prison; I see square fifty-eight, the skull; I see, right on square sixty-two, the one before Great Mother Goose’s pond, a sinister man dressed in green and wearing a top hat… and I feel uneasy.
But we will keep trying, we will keep writing. The reason the board is there is for us to continue playing.
— BERNARDO ATXAGA
BERNARDO ATXAGA was born in Gipuzkoa in Spain in 1951 and lives in the Basque Country, writing in Basque and Spanish. He is a prizewinning novelist and poet, whose books The Accordionist’s Son, The Lone Man, and The Lone Woman have won critical acclaim in Spain and abroad.
MARGARET JULL COSTA has translated many Portuguese, Spanish, and Latin American writers, among them Javier Marías, Fernando Pessoa, and José Saramago.