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From Oral Tradition to Literature
| Article
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10616 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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7 / 1993 |
948 Words |
| Author
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Felipe Juaristi
Felipe Juaristi is a Basque poet, critic, and anthropologist.
He is director of Literatur Gazeta, a literary journal
published in San Sebastian. This text was translated by Philip
W. Silver. |
OBABAKOAK
Bernardo Atxaga
Pantheon Books, Division of Random House, Inc., 1992
In the growing corpus of work by Bernardo Atxaga, one of the most incisive contemporary writers in the Basque region and in all of Spain, Obabakoak is central to the extent that it contains a variety of clues about his own writing, both poetry and prose, and about his ideas on literature. It also is essential for understanding the modern development of Basque literature.
Obabakoak is a collection of stories, a sum of fictions, wherein the conversion into narrative of a mythic, ancestral, and rural past, the cradle of the Basque language, is combined with a vision of an impoverished present, peculiar to a lately industrialized, inadequately urbanized nation where Basque cohabits with the Spanish language in a permanent struggle to retain its personality and identity. The fictions of Obaba and Hamburg, together with Villamediana--yet another reflection of Obaba--towns where these stories take place, are but three symbols of this fissure in reality and in the Basque country as it exists today.
Some time ago, when a reporter asked Atxaga about the origins of the word Obaba, he replied, "The word comes from a traditional cradle song of Vizcaya [the Basque coastal province west of Guipuzcoa] that goes: 'Obabatxue, Obabatxue, Obabatxue, he sallies forth, on a blue horse . . .'; therefore, the word 'ba-ba' must be one of the first sounds a newborn child repeats, and Obaba is therefore the alpha point, the beginning. This is what I talk about in the stories of Obaba, about my origins and those of our society."
But Obabakoak is not simply a reflection on the distant and imagined past of the Basques: its children who turn into animals, its dense forests, enveloped by the sounds of wind and rain, amid a savage nature where men and women feel in their bones the harshness and solitude of the environment. It is equally a reflection on the ominous present: its civilization, trains, automobiles, languages. Obaba is Hamburg and Hamburg is Obaba, because the borderlines between past and present are permeable, and neither perspective can be understood without the other. Here, as elsewhere, fiction permeates reality. Or, as Inaki Aldekoa has written about Obabakoak: "In these narratives the frontier between reality and fiction, desire and reality is erased; in these narratives the conscious and the unconscious, the lived and the dreamed, as well as the concepts of nature and
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