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A Geography of the Heart
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10614 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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7 / 1993 |
2,841 Words |
| Author
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Philip W. Silver
Philip W. Silver's most recent books are Nationalism and
Transition: Euskadi, Catalunya, Spain and Luis Cernuda: An
Invitation to His Poetry, both published in 1988. He has been
professor of Spanish literature at Columbia University since
1973. |
OBABAKOAK
Bernardo Atxaga
Pantheon Books, Division of Random House, Inc., 1992
Rarely does the brave new world of international publishing bestow on us a work as luminous as Bernardo Atxaga's Obabakoak ("things of Obaba"). We rub our eyes and wonder how it can have happened. For this novel already has been translated into fifteen languages, hailed as postmodern, and favorably compared to Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler. Yet its origins could not be more modest. It was written and first published in Euskera, a strange non-Indo-European language spoken by about 700,000 Basques. It thus is the singular product of an ancient minority culture and people, with a red, white, and green national flag but no independent state of their own. It is natural to wonder, then, what circumstances can have contributed to its unlikely birth. Indeed, the story behind the creation of Obabakoak is quite as exceptional as any the novel contains.
Atxaga was christened José Irazu Garmendia when he was born in 1951 in the village of Asteasu, in the Basque province of Guipuzcoa, in northern Spain. This means that during his first twenty-seven years he experienced the dictatorship into which General Franco had converted Republican Spain. José Irazu's pen name, Bernardo Atxaga, dates from the later Franco years, when, among Spain's ethnic minorities, even a nonbelligerent cultural militancy required the discretion of anonymity. Ever since the Civil War of 1936-39, General Franco had repressed all the non-Spanish minorities in Spain, both their cultures and their languages. No Basque or Catalan songs were sung in public, all education was in Spanish, and no books or newspapers were published in Basque. Incredibly, even Basque family names were chipped off old tombstones by the ever-repressive regime.
Franco was attempting to eradicate a language that had survived for over two millennia, since before the Celts or the Romans invaded Britain or northern Spain. His initial success was only cosmetic. Basque had survived, albeit in a variety of dialects, in part because of its speakers' extreme isolation: The Basques inhabited the Atlantic Pyrenees on both sides of the present border between France and Spain. But Franco also failed, paradoxically, because Basque was not primarily or essentially a "written" culture. Rather, the illusive, millennial roots of the Basque language were thrust deep in an oral culture of proverbs, witchcraft, folk songs, and pagan myth.
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