REYES LÁZARO
Introduction:
Poetry can feel and feed on ghost-limbs of amputated languages. Linguae Vasconum primitiae (First News on the
Language of the Basques), is the first book known to have been
published in Euskera or Basque (Bordeaux (1545). Its author, Bernat
Dechepare, wanted to encourage the publication of Basque texts by means
of the recently invented printing press. Thus he pushed the shy unknown
ancient language to step into the public square of world languages and
dance, in a much published quote: “Heuskara, ialgi adi
plazara!” (“Basque language, come out into the public
square!”). Dancing, however, particularly among prestigious
attendants, requires more than just coming out into the public square;
one must be aware of the latest fashions; it also helps to be escorted
to the floor and invited back. Unfortunately, when a minoritized
language shows up on the dance floor of dominant cultures, the others
tend to believe they already know the complete stranger. As Atxaga told
us, Euskera (or Basque) is frequently imagined as a farm girl,
picturesque and noble but also old-fashioned, parochial and unworldly,
definitely something of the past. Paradoxically, since her imagined
archaism is precisely what got her invited in the first place, she is
expected to dance traditional dances; if, instead, she breaks into
“peteneras,” she may not be invited back. 3 Of course, just
like anybody else, minority cultures can dance peteneras or break dance
if they so choose; they can even move to the rhythms of the Macarena if
either poor taste or temporary mental obfuscation prompts them to do
so. Counteracting a prevalent trend in translation and publishing politics, which overwhelmingly favors writing in dominant languages, by inviting a diversity of minoritized writers to dance,4 is a conscious goal of this issue. These specific writers share in a variety of merits: they have enriched literary registers, modernized literary expression, and/or given ammunition to political claims to cultural space for their languages by the very fact of their contributions. Minoritized writers also face common problems, which some of the texts included here address. For example, Menna Elfyn (“The Deep Sounds of W(h)ales. Writing in a Sea of Song”) points out the tongue-twister contradiction of having to spend so much time speaking in English about writing in Welsh that she does not have much actual time to write in Welsh. Common themes—such as, not surprisingly, death—also appear among these authors: Joseba Sarrionandia compares it to a pile of old shoes in a brief poem reminiscent of the powerful visual imagery of medieval Hispano-Arab poetry; Bernardo Atxaga’s poem “The Death and Life of Words” deals with the disappearance of old words which currently affects all languages without exception, but which is accelerated in the case of minoritized ones; Maite González Esnal´s short-story “Blackbirds in the Cornfield” is a metaphor of love and loss, in which a linguist’s love for cemeteries is compared to the unflinching loyalty of the deaconess in charge of a cemetery towards both her dead partner and her dying variant of French Basque, Labortano. However, relevance and commonalities aside, the circumstance of writing in a minoritized language is taken for granted instead of made into a central organizing principle of this issue, for a variety of reasons besides the one mentioned above. In the first place, saying that the specific language choice of a writer is important is a truism. Secondly, “European ‘minoritized’ writer” is not a precise category of classification, because each linguistic situation is unique: writing in a language with a long written tradition (such as Gaelic, Welsh, Galician or Catalan) technically is not the same as writing in one with fewer literary “antecedents” or tools, like Basque; the institutional-political circumstances that surround writers vary greatly, even within the same language. French Basque writers, for example, work with less institutional support than the Spanish Basques: Basque is co-official within the Basque autonomy of the Spanish state, whereas it has no official status in France, where languages other than the dialect of the langue d’oeïl which has come to be known as French (in a slow process since François I signed the edict of Villers-Cotterets) have no official status.5 In terms of cultural institutions like publishing houses, etc., currently Spanish and French Basques relate among themselves, respectively, like center and periphery (a fact which nobody could have predicted under Franco’s dictatorship, when Spanish Basque nationalists crossed the “muga” (border) to “the other side” in order to be able to gather and celebrate literary contests, buy forbidden books, commemorate national holidays and speak in Basque; differential power relations also exist among the diverse variants or dialects according to their respective distances from the standard ‘batua’ (“unified” Basque created in the sixties). Even within minoritized languages, the dialects incorporated into the standard have more possibilities of survival than the more distant ones such as Labortano, a dialect of French Basque with a long poetic tradition during the Counter Reformation of the 17th century (when Labort, Labourd or Lapurdi was a kind of Basque Tuscany). Itxaro Borda’s and Aurelia Arkotxa’s Basque is much closer to it than anybody else’s in this issue, and therefore their writing possibly expresses with more intensity a feeling of loss. As I have stated above, there is another reason why writing in a minoritized language is not highlighted in this issue: classifying writers simply as minorities encourages ways of reading which are counterproductive. Anyone who organizes activities around minoritized languages knows of the hair-rising clichés, simplifications and plain ignorance writers have to face, and of their need to educate audiences, to the point of exhaustion. Such languages and the cultures they represent are seen and frequently referred to as “problems.” Regardless of how heterodox their political ideas might be within their respective communities, writers in non-dominant languages are invited to lectures and cultural activities as political representatives, and they are asked political questions much more frequently than literary ones. If they have the audacity to consider their specific localities literary material they become suspect of provincialism (as if la Mancha for Cervantes or Paris for Balzac were any more/any less related to the local than the Basque imaginary town Obaba or the city of Bilbao for Bernardo Atxaga). They frequently have to answer impertinent questions which no other writer of a recognized nation-state is ever asked—such as why they write in their language. The role of basic educators into which they are cast keeps the level of discussion of otherwise interesting debates and encounters in which they participate quite low. This is particularly regrettable, because dialogues outside their regular environments offer these writers unique forums for discussing issues (such as literary ones) that are difficult to discuss at home, given the highly politically charged character of cultural life. In an attempt to gather writers around literary rather than exclusively linguistic or political matters (narrowly understood), the title of the call for papers for this issue (“Words and Worlds”) was broad enough to open a range of possibilities. The texts I obtained suggest, not surprisingly, profound differences among writers and reveal a variety of literary subjects and styles. In addition, these writers engage as much with the world, their immediate realities, as with words; moreover, most interestingly, they see the dichotomy word-world as a false one. The nature of reality today, a central philosophical concern of our time, is also a common preoccupation. Finally, a belief in the critical powers of writing as an alternative form of knowledge in this day and age comes out of many of these poems, essays, aphorisms and microfictions; — one which is complex, far from naïve, and very distant from the “boy meets tractor” style of realism so detested by Theodor Adorno in Soviet art.6 Bernardo Atxaga’s “Confession,” a patchwork of prose and poetry characteristically rejecting restrictive limits of literary genre, chronicles his intellectual and affective life and that of his generation, from the dark sixties and seventies of Franco’s dictatorship to the present. The work is also an analysis of the evolution of Atxaga’s poetics through life changes and the experience of death—in this case of a recently deceased painter friend and fellow artist, Vicente Ameztoy, to whom he dedicates an elegy. The passage of time produces an emotional distance which motivates a rewriting of old poems in lighter tones. “What killed me in 1975 felt already distant in 1990; thus the humor in sentences like “crying a la sniff-sniff,” says the writer.7 Montserrat Roig´s story speaks about the situation of a Catalan woman in England in the seventies (very different from today), and of minoritized languages vis-à-vis Europe, through the work of a Cuban writer. The narrator of “Before the Civil War” tells about her experience as a Catalan woman in Bristol, England. The setting is a multiethnic, multinational party in which music gets progressively louder and communication dwindles, with guests from England, America, an Indian man from Kenya, a Black man from Africa, Latin Americans, an Italian, the Catalan narrator--an obvious metaphor for the post-colonial Europe of the 70s. The story has an epigraph from Cuban Nobel Prize Alejo Carpentier’s Explosion in the Cathedral, an exposé of the Janus-faced double legacy of freedom and repression of the French revolution for France´s colonies. Carpentier also establishes a connection between French colonial attitudes towards overseas colonies and its internal peripheries, specifically Basques. “Solstici” by Maria-Mercè Marçal revives a medieval literary form, the sestina, with origins in twelfth century Provence, invented by Arnaut Daniel and cultivated by Dante and Petrarch, and in Spain by some of the poets of the Golden Age. The translator, Kathleen Mc Nerney informs us that some Catalan twentieth century poets went back to it, such as Jaime Gil de Biedma and Joan Brossa, who dedicates one to Marçal. Made up of six six-line stanzas and a closing tercet, its enchained form makes it very complex: the last word in each stanza must end the first line of the following one, so that one of six key words dominates each stanza and leads to the next. The final tercet contains all six key words in a summation of the poem. According to McNerney, Marçal used this and other traditional forms to train herself to dominate lyrical language. At times these writers recall meaningful words by other writers who are distant, culturally or geographically—such as Anne Sexton for Bernardo Atxaga, Feride Durakovic for Nuala ní Dhomhnaill, Elisabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore for Eli Tolaretxipi or John Berger for Ixiar Rozas. Literary relations among some of the writers included here are also expressed. Sarrionandia, dedicates a poem to his old friend and generational companion Bernardo Atxaga.8 These writings also bear witness to personal and literary private worlds. “Poems of the Infinite Silence” illustrates the personal and literary importance of Greece and the US for Itxaro Borda, one of the best known French Basque writers. Originally written in Basque and translated by the author into her other native language, French, it documents an increasing tendency in Borda towards translating herself, which recently culminated in her own version into French of her novel 100% Basque, winner of a national prize in the Basque Country. Childhood and adolescence are explored by Harkaitz Cano. The world of science is a significant referent for Tere Irastortza, as seen in her poem “Hawking.” Phil Jenkins, her translator, explains that for Irastortza poetry might assume a responsibility for building a bridge between science and language. Several of these writings display a profound concern for the loss of a sense of reality. Julia Otxoa’s aphorisms, poems and microfictions, for example, denounce the degradation of what passes for reality. Manuel Rivas’s “All Animals Speak” is part of Las llamadas perdidas (Lost calls), a collection of short-stories which, as the back cover indicates, “demand more reality: that which is covered up, hidden, or masked.” It is also a vindication of non-human forms of language, such as the language of animals. Historical crises provoke a questioning of anthropocentrism: Friedrich Nietzsche, master critic of modern reason, hugged horses in his final madness in Turin, and U.S. comedian Jon Stewart finished his T.V. program by hugging a dog on in silence after September 11. Certainly, the work of Rivas and Atxaga, Otxoa and other writers included here, frequently features animals as characters or even narrators. These writers are unapologetically “palabra en el tiempo,” (word inserted in time) as Spanish poet Antonio Machado defined poetry. Poetry is described as an alternative type of knowledge based on the symbolism of the number three (Eli Tolaretxipi) or as a can of sardines which can produce either nourishment or revulsion (Harkaitz Cano). Manuel Rivas (“Manifesto against Silence”) is not apprehensive about dealing with unhygienic realities, such as the black tide caused by an oil-tanker. Yet aesthetics is not a servant of politics even when writing a manifesto about one of the worst ecological crises of the 20th century, which echoes Poe’s raven and Baudelaire’s albatross. Similarly, Atxaga addresses the dismal view of contemporary America which he presents in “Written in the USA” to a quintessential pastoral poet, Virgil, who, as the poem reminds us, also wrote under the constraints of his political times. The task of writing in this day and age, as Nuala
ní Dhomhnaill tells us in a poem with that title, is shown as
fraught with difficulties. In spite of this, the writers featured here
seem to place a certain hope, as cautious as it might be, in the
restorative power of words in a state of grace. They seem to believe
that thoughtful aesthetic words are alternatives to degraded political
ones. “The Death and Life of Words” places hope in new
words, those invented by children but also by poets. The euphony of the
first stanza in Basque (which the CD allows us to appreciate), in which
the silencing of words and the silence of a snowfall are expressed
through the repeated use of sybillant consonants, reveals
Atxaga´s belief (tenuous as it might be) in the restorative
powers of poetry at the very moment in which he laments the death of
ancient words:
Poets as translators Translation “can become an addiction for writers of lesser used languages,” Pam Petro tells us, and can even provide a space to reenact power-plays between languages in a way which the original by itself cannot. Menna Elfyn’s article points out the importance of translation for Welsh. Tere Irastortza tells a brief history of Basque literature as a history of translation which probably has much in common with most other languages represented here: Between the 15th and 19th centuries religious translations of the Bible had a literary and linguistic impact. In the 20th century translation plays a central role as a tool for modernizing language, giving it flexibility and creating new registers.9 Some of these writers are translators of their own work and/or, occasionally, that of others. Included here are Bernardo Atxaga translating “Starry Night” by Anne Sexton; Nuala ní Dhomhnaill’s free translation from the work of Bosnian writer Ferida Durakovic. Ixiar Rozas translates John Berger, whose “intrahistorical” sensibility, not surprisingly, is akin to that of many Iberian minoritized writers.10 Some poets featured here translate others also
featured here. For example, Eli Tolaretxipi translates Nuala
Ní Dhomhnaill into Basque; Nuala’s poems are also
translated here into Castilian and Galician. They were read in the four
languages of Spain, as well as in English and Irish at the
Basílica de Santa María del Mar, in Barcelona, as part of
the conference “Irish Literatures at Century’s End”
of the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures
(IASIL), organized by Professor Jacqueline Hartley, of the Departamento
de Filologia Inglesa y Alemana, and celebrated at the Universitat de
Barcelona in July 1999. This type of translation among minority
languages suggests the existence of an alternative politics of
translation among minoritized languages, at least an attempt to broaden
dominant circuits. Metamorphoses Audio CD This is the first time a CD is incorporated in Metamorphoses, to offer readers the rare opportunity to hear the languages included in the issue, read by the authors themselves, as well as Sexton in Euskera, Nuala ní Dhomhnaíll in three languages of the Iberian Peninsula (Basque Galician, and Spanish), or Bosnian poet Ferida Durakovic in Irish. Unfortunately, we can no longer hear Maria-Mercè Marçal, but the reader, Eva Juarros, has given us a spirited reading of “Solstici” in which the distinctive sounds of Catalan can easily be appreciated. The background hiss that traverses Nuala ní
Dhomhnaill’s reading is a providential reminder that translation
is always a mediation, not a transparent glass.
“Komunikazioa/Inkomunikazioa,” a song by Mikel Laboa which
is, actually, the oral part of a performance, is included (even at the
cost of losing the gestures) as a reflection upon the limits of
communication, both in general and among languages. Laboa (a founding
father of contemporary Basque music) calls it a “lekeitio.”
Lekeitio is a town in the province of Biskay where he spent his youth;
it also has a peculiar inflection in Basque which Laboa (a child
psychiatrist who has worked with speech impediments) explores in his
work, as a means to investigate nonverbal forms of communication.
This specific lekeitio has been a particularly productive piece of
performance art in the Basque Country, where it has inspired multiple
readings. For example, an independent radio station used it to
authorize their use of non-standard, hybridized Basque; an art
collective (Bigara) used it as background for an installation which
explored in a general way the limits of communication, etc. It can also
be regarded as a tool to think about communication in the context of
minority vs. majority languages. The song includes a failed phone
conversation in Basque, full of interruptions and miscommunications.
Laboa also mimics the sounds of several languages, with no mocking
intention, rather to experiment with sounds and render homage to
admired artists. Laboa also allows an English speaker to hear English
the way many people around the world grew up hearing it in popular
music (certainly Laboa and most members of his and posterior
generations in the Iberian Peninsula). They listened to songs they
could not understand but which, nevertheless, influenced them deeply
(they got hooked, for instance, on Dylan’s howling, even if they
did not understand a word he said—sometimes even after
translation, for lack of cultural references). Illustrations We include two paintings of the seventies by Vicente Ameztoy (1946-2001), an important painter whom Atxaga dedicates an elegy in “Confession.” Both are untitled, as it was Ameztoy’s practice. Two visual poems by Julia Otxoa: “Meditation on the Encyclopedia” (a collage based on a drawing of a cannon depicted in Diderot’s and d’Alembert’s Encyclopedia) and “El que tiene boca se equivoca” (“Those who have a mouth make mistakes”). Both revolve around the fixation and fluidity of language. Ricardo Ugarte´s collage “Kurpil” (cartwheel in Basque) which illustrates the CD, was the cover of the first issue of a Basque literary publication with the same title in the 70s, created to provide a space for Basque culture in Spanish and Basque under Franco´s regime. The O printed on page 39, a monotype of a letter
described as “the sole survivor from a lost alphabet,” is
an obvious metaphor for this issue. Tere Irastortza pointed out to me
that “Words and Worlds” could be freely translated into
Basque as “Hitzak eta Biz (h)itzak” (Words and
Lives), because, with poetic license, it shows that life has the word
at its core. This O belongs to one of those abecedaries which contain
worlds. This little universe of an O is also included to
celebrate the ardent and wild patience which made it persist. Acknowledgements I am particularly grateful to fellow members of the 2002 Kahn seminar which I co-organized with Anna Botta, “Other Europes/Europe’s Others” of the Kahn Institute; they provided an intelligent and warm forum to discuss some of the ideas which form the basis of this issue. Particular thanks are owed to its director Marjorie Senechal and acting director Rick Fantasia, as well as to Renee Heavlow and Cyndee Button for their support in organizing the “Other Europes/Europe’s Others” seminar. The generosity of Kahn extends to their co-sponsorship of this issue of Metamorphoses. Special thanks are due to Virginia Montenegro and Virginia Ameztoy for their permission, generous help and trust, enabling us to reprint Vicente Ameztoy’s paintings. Julia Otxoa and Ricardo Ugarte generously gave permission to reproduce their work. To Martin Antonetti’s expert help we owe the O monotype. All the authors and translators who granted us the right to publish or reprint their work have made this issue possible. I am grateful to writers like Bernardo Atxaga, Itxaro Borda, Aurelia Arkotxa, Maite González Esnal who granted me interviews and gave me their work. Thanks also to the Elkar Publishing House (particularly Anjel Valdés); to Professor Jacqueline Hartley of the Universitat de Barcelona, who helped me obtain translations of Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill’s poetry by several hands into Galician, Spanish and Basque: to Gomer Press (Llandysul, who first published the poems Menna Elfyn reads on our CD and which appear in this issue. I would like to express my gratitude to my former students and current teachers Sarah Moon (who went far beyond the call of duty in assisting me with translation, editing, typing and much else) and Kelsey Camire for their marvelous help, and to my colleague Charles Cutler for his wise advice. Charles Cutler, Marguerite Harrison and Ana López offered invaluable help with translations from Portuguese and Galician. Thanks to Frank Citino for designing the CD label); Jo Cannon, Nickie Michaud, and Jeff Heath (the Media Services Manager who salvaged the recording of Nuala’s reading, and who was reminded of his grandmother’s Irish while he listened to Nuala). Pam Petro, Laura Blosser, Lauren Armstrong, Martin Antonetti, Curator of Rare Books, and his great staff provided invaluable help, as did Dan Bridgman, Smith’s visual communication specialist. I thank Dan Murphy for being my beloved accomplice in translation and other adventures. I also owe a debt of thanks to Julia Otxoa and Ricardo Ugarte, Tere Irastortza and Euzkal Idazleen Elkartea (Basque Writers Association), Eli Tolaretxipi, the library of Hondarribi, and the director of cultural center Koldo Mitxelena in San Sebastian, Eva Juarros, Bernardo Atxaga, Nuala ni Dhomnaill, Menna Elfyn who wrote in difficult personal circumstances and drove two hours to record her voice. Bernardo and Menna also shared their work with us at the Kahn Institute, as did Nuala who also co-taught with me. I have very fond memories of our conversations after class, with Susan Di Giacomo. Manuel Rivas, wild goose, translatlantic brother, thank you for your electronic gifts and humor! Thanks to Phoebe Porter for her patience with technology. Thanks to singer Mikel Laboa and his wife Marixol, whose calls from Spain proved that Komunikazioa and generosity are synonymous, and to all those who recorded for us so we could offer our readers the opportunity to hear the music of the languages in this issue. Metamorphoses deserves much credit for the breadth
of interests that the publication has demonstrated. In particular, its
editor-in-chief Thalia Pandiri deserves all the credit for having
encouraged and supported an issue largely centered around European
minoritized writing shortly after an important one on minority
languages of Sub-Saharan Africa—guest-edited by Katwiwa Mule
(spring 2002). European minorities do not receive great interest in
academia these days; an inaccurate use of the term
“European” to mean “dominant European” is
widespread, even in departments or programs with a tradition of
innovative thinking. Thalia is courageous, patient and generous
with her energies and talents, and her exterior toughness hides the
warmest of hearts. I hope I have not blown her cover.
|