Paris and the Worlding of Minor/Small Literatures： The Case of Basque Literature
2019-12-24 11:23:02FrederikVerbeke
Frederik Verbeke
Abstract： According to Pascale Casanova, Paris would be the capital of “minor” literatures and of “small” languages (those which have difficulty circulating and are rarely translated). Whilst some Basque authors, such as Bernardo Atxaga or Kirmen Uribe, succeeded in being translated by prestigious Parisian publishing houses, others did not, although they tried, such as Itxaro Borda. How can a minor/small literature gain access to the capital of the “World Republic of Letters” (Casanova), enjoy a wider appeal and boost its worlding? Is it related to the literary image of the Basque Country as constructed by these authors? Is their consecration easier when they confirm the image of a “minor/small literature”? What is the importance (and the consequence) of being awarded with Spain’s National Prize of Literature, of having passed through the filter of the Spanish literary system? Why are French (self-)translations of Basque-writing authors from the French Basque Country not published in Paris and become part of minor/small literature written in a major language (Bertrand/Gauvin)?
Keywords： Minor/Small Literatures; World Literature; Basque Literature; Translation
Translation can play an important role in the worlding of so-called “minor” or “small” literatures. It often enhances the visibility of literatures and enables the circulation of texts in a global world (Cabo43). According to Pascale Casanova (“Consécration”13), translation gives writers in dominated languages literary recognition and international existence, whereas David Damrosch uses translation for defining “world literature”： “works become world literature when they gain on balance in translation” (289). In this paper, I would like to examine the role of translation in the French worlding of Basque literature, by focusing on a few cases of French translations of Basque contemporary literature. What is the process behind the translation of a minor/small literature into French? How, where and why did these translations emerge? Did they help authors get their voice heard in the World Republic of Letters and more precisely in Paris, in the words of Pascale Casanova (The
World
Republic
29), the capital of those who proclaim themselves nationless, the capital of “minor” literatures and of “small” languages (those which are seldom circulated and hardly ever translated)? Or, conversely, did they help Paris reinforce its dominating position? What do translations show us about the connections between the French literary system (Paris) and the Basque Country? What do they tell us about minor/small literatures, world literature, etc.?All these questions, to which I will not always be able to give a clear and firm answer, will allow to launch a debate, and more questions, about the worlding of “small”/“minor” literatures, translation and world literature. Before I present the specific case studies that will serve as a starting point for discussion, it is important to highlight quickly, without getting lost in details, some aspects of the Basque Country, its literatures and their translations into French.
Some preliminary observations on the Basque Country
As you know, the Basque Country (Euskal Herria) is a stateless nation, divided over three political territories including the Basque Autonomous Community (BAC, Euskadi), which include the provinces of Alava, Biscay and Gipuzkoa, and the Autonomous Community of Navarre, as well as the recently founded Agglomeration Community of the Basque Country, involving the territories of Lapurdi, Lower Navarre and Zuberoa. The peninsular Basque Country (also called Hegoalde or Southern Basque Country), including the first two political territories, is dependent on the Spanish State, while the continental Basque Country (Iparralde or Northern Basque Country), in turn, is dependent on the French State. The BAC enjoys a high degree of autonomy from the Spanish central government and is responsible for its own taxation, education and health system. Conversely, the Northern Basque Country has not had autonomy since the French Revolution of 1789 put an end to Basque privileges in favor of a centralized and unified French State.
The political and institutional complexity, and division, can be found also on a linguistic and cultural level. The Basque language (euskara) since 1978 has held a co-official status with Spanish in the Basque Autonomous Community and in parts of Navarre, whereas in France it has no official recognition. According to the 2011 Sociolinguistic Survey of the Basque Country, 27% of the population aged 16 and over in the Basque Country is bilingual, 14.7% is passive bilingual, and 58.3% is non-Basque speaking, in other words, people who do not know Basque at all. In the BAC, the percentage of bilinguals aged 16 and over is 32% (600,000 people), in Navarre, 11.7% (63,000 people), and in the Northern Basque Country, 21.4% (51,000).
In such a multilingual context, people are permanently in touch with different languages and cultures, on both sides of the Pyrenees, but not always in the same way. Simplifying a lot, we could state that people receiving education in the Northern Basque Country are much more familiar with French cultural traditions and keeping up with what is happening in Paris, whereas those of Hegoalde are much more focused on the South, Madrid and the Iberian Peninsula. The consequences of this can be perceived not only among those who mainly use French or Spanish in daily life, but also among Basque-speaking people. In recent research I carried out on the trans-border dynamics between the Northern and Southern Basque Country in contemporary theatre, cultural agents working on both sides of the Pyrenees highlighted significant differences in the attitudes of theatre audience, although the same play was performed in the same language (euskara) by the same theatre company-differences ensuing from an education based on different intercultural dynamics(Verbeke, “Multilinguismo”187).
As you can imagine, the Basque Country is an extremely interesting laboratory for research on multilingualism, languages in contact, diglossia, translation, self-translation, intercultural dynamics, comparative literature, and so on. The paradox is that despite the awareness surrounding the complexity of the Basque multilingual society, literary scholars have for a long time remained trapped in an insular imaginary (Domínguez109-12) and in the romantic “national” paradigm-one language, one nation, one literature-, placing emphasis almost exclusively on literature written in euskara and enclosing the Basque cultural production into a homogeneous, monolingual and national framework, instead of regarding the Basque Country “as an interesting starting point for the creation of new paradigms and for getting new insights in the problematic ways in which the concepts of ‘culture’ and ‘literature’ are connected to ‘language,’ ‘territory’ and ‘nation’ in multilingual societies” (Verbeke, “A View”677). One of the purposes of this paper is to show how the Basque Country can provide an interesting field for research on (the worlding of) minor/small literatures and, more widely, for the creation of research models for analyzing the intercultural and multilingual complexity of our globalized world.
As the case studies I will talk about are all linked with Basque-writing authors, I would like to present a few comments about literary production in euskara. As the aforementioned sociolinguistic survey shows, practically all current Basque-speakers are bilingual, and so are the Basque-writing authors. There is no wonder therefore, that choice of language is one of the “crucial decisions” a Basque writer must face when embarking on a literary career, as the Basque writer Iban Zaldua states： “a Basque writer has to choose either Basque or Spanish (either Basque or French)”, a choice that will never worry a writer “writing from the center, and being monolingual” (90). Bilingualism also provides the possibility of moving over into the other language and do, for example, self-translation, which is a widespread practice among Basque writers.
Although the Northern Basque Country has for many centuries been “the main provider of Basque literature” (written in the Basque language), according to Ur Apalategi, “since 1975, it has given way to the peninsular Basque Country”, when the Basque literary system was boosted by the development of collective tools for literary normalization (such as the standardized language oreuskara
batua
, language officialization, the cultural industry, television, awards, universities, and grants) and merged with the administrative and political area of the Basque Autonomous Community (“The Recent Systemic”473).If we look to the number of Basque speakers (approximately eight hundred thousand), the number of authors (around three hundred) and the number of works published and sold, there is no wonder that Basque literature is very often described as a “small” literature, a concept that appears to be much more appropriate than the concept of ‘minor literature’, as defined by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1986)： “the concept of “minor literature”, that literature produced at the boundaries of a major language, does not appear to fit very well with a literature that is produced in a small language.” (Kortazar11-12) Conversely, it would fit very well with the literatures of the Basque Country written in French and in Spanish, whereas the concept of “ultraminor”, as defined by Bergur Ronne Moberg and David Damrosch (2017), could be used to qualify the literatures written in the dialect of Bilbao or in the Basque dialects of the Northern Basque Country.
As with many other literatures, translation played and continues to play an important role in the formation of Basque literature. “The translation of universal texts into the Basque language allowed [...] the autonomy process of Basque literature to accelerate after 1980 via the incorporation of a body of modern poetics and the renewal of Euskara.” (“Introduction”14) Concerning the translation from Basque into other languages, on the contrary, the amount is much smaller. It is only since 2000 that the Basque Government has allocated financial support to export Basque literature in translation and, in 2009, it created the Etxepare Basque Institute whose goal is to spread the Basque language and culture throughout the world. The vast majority of works are translated into Spanish, often used as a springboard for further translations into other languages, and a lot of them are self-translations.
With regard to translations of Basque contemporary literature into French, only a very small amount of works have been translated. Some of them have been published in the Basque Country and only a few have been published in Paris. Despite this small amount, some interesting case studies can be observed. Instead of dressing an exhaustive list, let us have a look at four authors whose works have been translated into French. Four case studies illustrating the complexity of the dynamics between the Basque literature and Paris, the so-called capital of small literatures of the World Republic of Letters. Four case studies illustrating different worlding strategies or processes. Four case studies that will allow us to discuss the role of translation in the global circulation of “small”/“minor” literatures.
The four case studies concern four Basque contemporary writers, two of them from the South, Bernardo Atxaga and Kirmen Uribe, and the two others, Aurelia Arkotxa and Itxaro Borda, from the Northern Basque Country. In order to gather information for the writing of this research project, I interviewed each of them between March 2016 and March 2017. Due to the limitations of this paper it will not be possible to analyse all the topics covered in these interviews, as each of them took about 2-3 hours. I will simply highlight some aspects, especially those linked to the process behind their translations into French and to the way in which their works entered into the Francophone literary system.
Bernardo Atxaga
I would like to begin with Bernardo Atxaga and Kirmen Uribe, two authors of the Southern Basque Country whose works have been published in Paris. Bernardo Atxaga (1951) can claim to be the most successful contemporary writer in the Basque language. He became the most canonical writer of Basque literature in the 1980s. With hisObabakoak
(1988), the “first modern best-seller of Basque literature” (Before
Babel
249), he became the first Basque writer to receive Spain’s National Award in Narrative Literature and “l(fā)iterature became a Basque cultural reality, both as field and institution (publishers, reviewers, critics, academic courses, translators, agents, etc.), so that finally also had a well-defined canon” (Before
Babel
248). Moreover, Basque literature became “a literature that could now be exported and translated into other languages; it had become visible, not just in Spain but throughout the whole world” (Kortazar35). The first translations of Atxaga were successfully published. In 1999The
Observer
listed Atxaga among the 21 top writers of the 21st century.Obabakoak
has so far been translated into more than 20 languages. One of the first translations, after the Spanish self-translation and the Catalan version, was the French version of André Gabastou published in Paris by Christian Bourgois in 1991. How did this translation take place? Although there is no doubt that the Spanish version, on which the French translation was based, and the National Award in Narrative Literature played an important role, both Bernardo Atxaga and André Gabastou prefer to highlight other aspects, when I asked them about it.Atxaga strongly insted on the importance of the translator. According to him, the translator plays an important role in France, “more than elsewhere”. The French translator is “powerful”. Indeed, it was André Gabastou who decided to translate the book, contacted the author and proposed the project to the editor. André Gabastou has “always been interested in the Basque Country”. His father was from the Basque Country and they had a family house in Zuberoa, in the Northern Basque Country. In his adolescence, he stayed with a Basque family near Bilbao to learn Spanish. “One day a friend told me about a Basque writer who had just published an extraordinary book and I went to the Bordeaux Book Fair to listen to him,” said André Gabastou. Later on, he visited Bernardo Atxaga at home and received the Spanish version ofObabakoak
. Back in Paris, one morning André Gabastou talked about the book with the publisher Christian Bourgois “who bought the translation rights in the afternoon”. “The process was launched, and never stopped; he became one of Bourgois’ favorite writers,” he added. The beginning of the history of Atxaga’s translation into French is “l(fā)imited to the author, the translator and the editor”, according to Gabastou, the result of a personal encounter, in the words of Atxaga. All the translations of Atxaga into French will be carried out by André Gabastou.During the interview, Bernardo Atxaga insisted on the “fundamental role” of intercultural agents when transferring a text from a small language into a language that can reach a greater amount of readers. According to him, you cannot go directly from A to B skipping the different steps in between, criticizing those who first write in euskara to get a visibility they would otherwise not have and then translate themselves into Spanish or French. When he wroteObabakoak
, he never thought he would translate it. He just translated two short stories for a literary review of Pamplona and, by chance, the Catalan writer and literary critic Mercedes Monmany, who lives in Madrid and was also a jury member of Spain’s National Award in Narrative Literature, read the text and insisted that he translate the whole book. At first, he could not believe it, but finally, as she insisted, he translated the book with the collaboration of his wife, Asun Garikano. The role of Mercedes Monmany was fundamental, as was the role of Antonia Susan Byatt. As President of the jury for the European Literary Prize in 1990, A.S. Byatt praisedand defendedObabakoak
, shortlisted for the prize, during the winner announcement speech in Glasgow, as her favorite against the winner, Jean Echenoz. The next day, two English editors, who had attended the speech, called the Basque author to offer him a translation proposal... “Mercedes and Antonia, they are the kind of people that contribute to the distribution of your work” and that makes it possible to get from A to B successfully, emphasized Bernardo Atxaga. Indeed, Mercedes Monmany, Antonia Susan Byatt, André Gabastou ... were intercultural agents who facilitated, thanks to their prestige and authority, the spread of Atxaga’s work far beyond the Basque Country, who helped a minor/small literature to cross borders. The French translations, just as the English ones, will be a gateway to translations in other languages.Without entering into the details, a few remarks about Atxaga’s reception in the French literary system. When I asked him for the role the image of the Basque Country played in the translation and reception of his work in the French literary system (most novels and stories of Atxaga deal with the Basque Country), Atxaga highlighted that the Basque factor is important for neighboring countries such as France, but much less for more distant countries. He is convinced that a reader who has read his books “can not continue thinking of stereotypes”, although he recognizes that “stereotypes are very strong”. In the case of France, he felt the weight of stereotyping more heavily： “getting rid of the Basque stereotype is much more difficult in France,” he stressed, evoking the romantic stereotype of Basque equal to a peasant or stereotypes formed by notions of primitivism and orality. “When a Basque writer speaks about a tree, it becomes a forest, if Peter Handke evokes a tree, it’s a park,” he said. “A Basque author writing avant-garde or experimental texts would look out of place for them,” as he recalls. For example, it would be “impossible” to publish his Oulipian artifactsLista
de
locos
y
otros
alfabetos
(List of fools and other alphabets, 1998) in France as a Basque writer. The burden of stereotypes clearly appeared when the French version ofSeven
Houses
in
France
, a brooding novel of colonial intrigue in the Congo, was published. The Parisian editor asked Bernardo Atxaga to add a prologue in which he would explain why there were no Basques in this book. As if a Basque writer is supposed to write only about Basque topics...Seven
Houses
in
France
did not harvest success as expected on the French market. Conversely, in the United States, the prestigious magazinePublishers
Weekly
selected Atxaga’s novel as one of the best 20 fiction books of 2012...Most of Atxaga’s books have been translated into French and published in Paris. With the exception ofSeven
Houses
in
France
, they have been well-received by critics. The double page review devoted toS
éjour
au
Nevada
(2016;Nevada
Days
) inLe
Monde
’s literary supplement is the most recent example of this. Nevertheless, “Atxaga did not play the role of a locomotive, he didn’t carry other Basque writers in his wake,” according to André Gabastou.Kirmen Uribe
After Atxaga, only Kirmen Uribesucceeded in publishing in Paris, more precisely the French translation of his first novel,Bilbao
-New
York
-Bilbao
, in 2012 in the “foreign” literature collection “Du monde entier” of Gallimard, France’s most prestigious publishing house. Six years before this outstanding achievement, Le Castor Astral published his first book of poetryEntre
-temps
,donne
-moi
la
main
(Meanwhile
Take
My
Hand
, 2006) in Bordeaux. The same publishing house is currently preparing the translation of Uribe’s last novel,Elkarrekin
esnatzeko
ordua
(Time
to
Wake
Up
Together
, 2016). So, in Kirmen Uribe’s case a difference should be made between the translation published in Paris, in the center of the French literary system, and those published in Bordeaux, in the “periphery”, near the Basque Country.
Bilbao
-New
York
-Bilbao
,“a novel that broke the mold. Indeed, with the publication of this work one could point to the dawn of a new important era for the Basque novel [...]” (Kortazar62). In the words of the author,he wanted to write “a novel of 21st century” inspired by new forms of literary communication, by the aesthetic of the age of technological writing. Or, as Kortazar puts it,In Kirmen Uribe’s work, within his major intuitions about creating a work that sets off from a premise of autofiction and ends up entering a new aesthetic that resembles after-pop literature, one can observe an oscillation between literature considered postmodern and the consciousness, still undefined, of a literature-defined by the author as new, although refuted by some critics-that is defined as the point of departure for the coming age [...]. (Kortazar148)
Uribe won Spain’s National Award in Narrative Literature in 2009 for this book. As in the case of Atxaga, the Spanish award was an important springboard towards the world market. One of the first editors to buy the translation rights was the publishing house Gallimard, following the advice of Gustavo Guerrero (Caracas, Venezuela, 1957), professor of Modern Hispanic Literature at the Jules Verne University of Amiens and the Spanish language literary consultant for Gallimard. According to Kirmen Uribe, Gustavo Guerrero especially appreciated the “formal innovation” and the postmodern vision of the Basque Country, a very contemporary point of view, linked to the past, but far from a “nostalgic point of view focusing on stereotypes, such as green mountains, pelota etc.” In France, “they like that I speak about the Basque Country, but doing it in a different way,” offering “a vision of the Basque Country connected to the world”, he highlighted.
The translator of the book, Gersende Camenen, on the contrary, does not consider that the image of the Basque Country influenced the decision to translate the novel. “It was rather the formal uniqueness and the poetical quality of the language that determined the choice,” she said, not without also highlighting the factor of the award.In any case, Gallimard’s edition (2012) endowed Kirmen Uribe with a strong symbolic capital and with power of consecration in the French literary field and far beyond. Indeed, the French translation gave rise to other translations. As soon as the book was published, Kirmen Uribe participated in book presentations and book-signing events in Paris, Toulouse, Lyon and Bordeaux, and in literary festivals. According to him, the book harvested success especially in coastal areas, in the Northern Basque Country and in Paris.
Although Paris opened its door for Uribe’s first novel, his second and third novel would bring him back to the “periphery” of the French literary field. Kirmen Uribe has not yet succeeded in finding a publishing house for a French translation of his second novel,Mussche
(2012), translated into Spanish (2013) under the titleLo
que
mueve
el
mundo
(What
makes
the
world
go
round
). If we look at the content of the book, we can see that the presence of Basque themes in the novel is rather limited. At the beginning of the story, he recalls the arrival of Basque children who came to Belgium as refugees in 1937, after the bombing of Guernica, but the rest of the book focuses principally on Robert Mussche, a Flemish writer who housed one of these refugees, and on his life, celebrating the memory of one forgotten everyday hero. It is a novel that explores universal themes, where the Basque topic is just a point of departure, an excuse. The lack of interest from French publishing houses, probably linked to the book’s content, is somewhat a reminder of the poor reception reserved forSeven
Houses
in
France
and invites us to remember what Atxaga said about France, the burden of stereotypes and the mainstream image of the Basque writer who can/should only write about Basque themes. Moreover, just asSeven
Houses
in
France
was very well received in the United States,Mussche
will be praised on the other side of the world, far away from the Basque Country, in Japan and China. A mere coincidence? Perhaps, but what is remarkable is the success of the Japanese and Chinese translations, “two of the most difficult markets to enter for any writer” (Perret26). In April 2016, the Japanese translator Nami Kaneko was even awarded the Japanese Award for Best Translation for her translation into Japanese of Kirmen Uribe’s novel. What is even more remarkable is that she translated directly from Basque (Manterola41).
If you want to boost your chances of getting published, “you need to write what they want to hear” and “silence what they don’t like to hear”, points out Kirmen Uribe. The problem for a Basque author is that “the pressure has been doubled： on one side, the nationalist movement linked to ETA, on the other side Madrid”. “It’s difficult to become at the same time a recognized writer in the Basque Country and in Madrid or Paris,” according to Kirmen Uribe. “Postcolonial theories could be applied here very clearly”, affirms Kirmen, blaming Madrid for behaving as an “empire”, but adding also that “in the Basque Country too, there has been a lot of pressure. That’s why the third novel could not have been published before”. Aware of this situation, aware of the fact that small literatures are seemingly “supposed to respond to different laws if they want to be international”, Kirmen Uribe tries to “cheat” ： “I talk about the Basque Country, but the characters always move throughout the world; [...] I talk about Basques (observing that law), but being a migrant[...]”.
He wants to talk about the Basque Country in a contemporary way, surfing between assimilation and difference, between global and local. Labelling Basque literature as a “small” literature, he calls for smallness, a smallness he identifies with humbleness, mobility, fluidity and openness to the world. In a recent lecture at Washington University in Saint Louis, he developed that idea：
[...] I also think that minority literatures are interesting in these two aspects： they speak about long silenced realities and they do it differently, raising new forms of narration, new ways of writing, postmodern or even post postmodern.
Being small is not bad. It can make you more humble, look for things you do not have in your culture or in other cultures. It makes you daring, to write what nobody has written, without being afraid of the tradition itself, which, in some cases, can infuse too much respect. You can be freer. (Uribe8)
In such a small coastal town as Ondarroa, with ten thousand inhabitants, postmodernity, mostly considered as a metropolitan phenomenon, is possible and, taking account of this possibility, “small literatures do have that opportunity to create quality work that contributes to universal literature. But if we close ourselves off inside ourselves that is impossible” (Kortazar185). In order to reach that objective, it is important, according to him, that the force of differentiation, the willingness to differentiate from what is being done elsewhere, does not outweigh that of assimilation, the willingness to assimilate what is being done elsewhere. “When that instinct to differentiate supersedes that of assimilating, works are poorer in literary terms and it affects literary debate,” Kirmen Uribe pointed out in another interview (Kortazar185).
So far the two Basque authors, Atxaga and Uribe, who succeeded in publishing in Paris. Let us now consider two other cases, more specifically concerning two Basque authors of the Northern Basque Country, two authors from “a literature subsystem inside the humble Basque literary system, which is itself in the periphery of international literature” (“The Recent Systemic”477), two authors who are living in a territory that depends on Paris, two authors who know French and who will self-translate their works originally written in Basque： Itxaro Borda and Aurelia Arkotxa.
Itxaro Borda
100
%Basque
. It was the first time that the highest award for literature, financed by the Basque Government, was awarded to an author from the Northern Basque Country. For Ur Apalategi, the awarding of this prize to the peripheral writer Itxaro Borda only served to reaffirm the center of the Basque literary system.[F]or a core to keep being the core, it needs to be the center of something, and, thus, it is absolutely necessary to keep a periphery (in all the senses of the word-financing it, maintaining it). [...] Just as the French literary system needs other French-speaking peripheries, so too the Basque literary system needs Biscay’s, Navarre’s, and Iparralde’s subsystems in order to be the core of something. If there is something that hinders the core, it is not peripheral writers, but rather those peripheral writers who ignore the core. The Basque literary system, therefore, needs Borda’s refusing, queer, and revolutionary peripheral proclamation, since opposition reminds the core of its centrality. In her radical periphery, ItxaroBorda is the most bothered by the core among Iparralde’s writers, that is, she has the Basque system always in mind when she writes and that is exactly what the Basque system has rewarded. (“The Recent Systemic”481-82)
100
%Basque
, a novel that she qualified, when I interviewed her on September 29th 2016, as an “explosion”, as a “translation of anger” and as “anti-basque”, offering an image of the Basque Country that has nothing to do with the images of Bernardo Atxaga or Kirmen Uribe.
Hell
is
other
people
said the French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. By doing translation, any person makes peace with that enemy who resemble him. (Borda)
Ultimes
D
échets
(2015), has been published as a bilingual book and is the result of a bilingual writing process (she wrote the two versions simultaneou-sly). Not everyone was as pleased about this bilingualism. The French language and culture are still frowned upon. Many Basque authors still refuse to translate their works or to be translated (Verbeke, “Multilinguismo”). That is also one of the reasons why Basque literature is rarely translated into French. The other reasons, according to Itxaro Borda, are： the lack of financial aid and “the lack of cultural interest to discover writers [writing in a small language] who are considered worse than ‘regional’ writers”.
Aurelia Arkotxa
This lack of interest for Paris and the ensuing affinity for the Francophone peripheries also occur in the case of Aurelia Arkotxa (1953), the fourth Basque author I would like to briefly present. Born in Baigorri and living in Hendaye, Aurelia Arkotxa is also from the Northern Basque Country and like Itxaro Borda, she is one of the few writers of Iparralde who have achieved “a worthy position in the general Basque literary system” ( “The Recent Systemic”483). She is also a university professor and member of Euskaltzaindia, the Academy of the Basque language. With Itxaro Borda, Lucien Etxezaharreta and Piarres Xarriton, she launched the literary journalMaiatzin
in 1981, which has helped to promote most writers from Iparralde. The journal also became a publishing company.After she published some poetry in Maiatz, the Pamplona based publishing house Pamiela proposed that she publish her first poem book,Atari
ahantziak
(1993). In 2001, Alberdania, a publishing house based in Irun, published her second book,Septentrio
. She published a third book,Fragmentuak
(2010), bringing together a series of poetical chronicles she had published previously in the Basque journalBerria
. So far, she has self-translated her second book, but she would also like to self-translate her other books. The self-translation ofSeptentrio
was published in 2006 in a small publishing house in Brussels, Atelier du Héron.
Contrary to what Itxaro Borda did, Aurelia Arkotxa did not knock on the door of Parisian publishing houses. During the symposium “Writers in Between Languages： Minority Literatures in the Global Scene”, held in 2008 at the Center for Basque Studies of the University of Nevada (Reno), she very clearly explained the reason of her decision：
I decided to try take a chance inFrancophonie
in order to escape Hexagonal prejudices with regard to its “regional” languages; and basically, in order to avoid suffering the prejudices of the Jacobin literary system [...]. I wanted to avoid at all costs the demeaning and condesc-ending double label that the French literary institution [...] would have forced me to assume： namely, that of a French author writing and publishing in one of the “regional languages” of France; that of a regionalist author; and that of a regional author with French citizenship writing and publishing in French, but in the context of the “Atlantic Pyrenees” or in “Aquitaine” or any other Hexagonal region-which is to say, “en
province
”, as opposed to in the Parisian publishing houses that have come to symbolize the French literary institution. (Arkotxa29-30)As a result, she travelled across France to arrive in Brussels at the l’Atelier du heron publishing house. It appeared within theP
ér
égrins
collection, a collection dedicated to geo-poetic itineraries. The theme of voyage and nomadism is at the core of her book. The French version is a remodeled version of the original 2001 Basque text. The opportunity of publishing in Brussels granted her “access to the space traditionally labeledFrancophonie
” (Arkotxa34).
Final observations & conclusions
After this quick presentation of four cases illustrating each of them different worlding strategies, a lot of questions emerge. Why do some succeed and others fail at publishing in Paris? What are the most important factors in the consecration of a small/minor literature on the global scene? Which keys open the door to Paris? The cases of Bernardo Atxaga, Kirmen Uribe, Itxaro Borda and Aurelia Arkotxa allowed us to catch a glimpse into some of the answers. Translation and self-translation, literary awards, economic factors (financial support of public institutions), literary quality, intercultural agents, the centrality of the target-language, the reputation of the publisher,... all play an important role in the process of consecration; nevertheless, it remains a complex issue.
Although Bernardo Atxaga and Kirmen Uribe represent the Basque Country, which is partly dependent of France, their consecration in Paris was preceded by their consecration in Madrid, by the granting of Spain’s National Award in Narrative Literature. A mere coincidence? Perhaps, but it is an undeniable fact that this award involves a national canonization (Domínguez103), certifies their “foreignness” with respect to France and highlights their belonging to the Spanish literary system or, as some scholars would say, their appropriation by the Spanish literary system. Indeed, by receiving the national award, Basque literature, or at least the Basque literature of the Southern Basque Country, is included in the Spanish literary canon, probably for the same reason as the one we observed with regard to Itxaro Borda and her Euskadi literature award： the core system needs peripheries to be the center of something. In the case of Spain, its decision to include its peripheral literatures written in Basque, Catalan and Galician could be seen as the result of a postimperialist nostalgia：
[...] one could argue that, among many other historical factors, one of the reasons for the Spanish state to admit internal differences, such as the Basque, has to do with a postimperialist compensation for the loss of a putative “postcolonial, Hispanophone literature,” which is then followed by the internal loss of a unified, national literature. This second loss, unlike the first one, can still be controlled and compensated by the Spanish state through the postnational regulation of its other internal literatures and cultures, that is, Basque, Catalan, etc. (“Indifference”223)
The dependency established by the national award seems to be mutual. Madrid, as the centre of the Spanish literary system, needs its peripheries to reaffirm its centrality, just as the Basque authors seem to need Madrid in their process of consecration in a world literary system where the nation-state paradigm is still alive. Since Atxaga’s awarding, the importance of winning the National Award is crucial in [Basque] writers’ careers, to the extent that it would even be considered a starting point as a means of getting a name outside the Basque Country and facilitate translations into other languages (Kortazar35). Nevertheless, when observing the increase of direct translations between the Basque language and other languages (remember Uribe’s translations into English, French or Japanese), one might think that the dependency is declining. Of course, this increase should be linked to the financial support that the Basque Government has allocated since 2000 to export Basque literature in translation.
Notes
① I interviewed Bernardo Atxaga on the 16th of September 2016. André Gabastou answered my questions by email in February 2017. The following quotes come from these unpublished interviews.
② “A.S. Byatt [...] said thatObabakoak
, in line with contemporary European tendencies, cleverly combines primal stories and motivations with modern metanarrative techniques” (Olaziregi,Waking
the
Hedgehog
58-59).③ Born in 1970, Kirmen Uribe belongs to a different generation than Bernardo Atxaga. He represents a generation of writers who grew up in the period following Franco’s dictatorship. “Unlike previous generations, who were persecuted for any public use of Basque under the repressive cultural policies of dictator Francisco Franco (1939-1975), Uribe’s generation attended school in Basque; they grew up using Basque on the streets and at home on a regular basis; and they were raised reading world literature alongside Basque authors writing in Basque, such as Bernardo Atxaga and Ramon Saizarbitoria” (Perret25).
④ “Uribe’s poems took shape around the following characteristics： simple language, a narrative treatment of poetry, and the importance of an autobiographical past. The tone of his poetry had something to do with the joy of life, although the most memorable poems in the text were those about people close to dying. Rooted in postmodernity, his poetry affirmed that it was impossible for language to completely grasp reality, and the work was structured around several key themes that displayed his schema of the world： the body as a new language; memory as a form of anchoring oneself in one’s identity; love and sex; a glance at others and a self multiplied in an ever-changing reality; the boundaries of language; the understanding and dialogue between literature and other arts; a life that shines at the hardest moments of his father’s death, and so on. Uribe wrote a type of poetry that seemed easy, but one that thrilled readers.” (Kortazar57)
⑤ Kirmen Uribe only self-translated his first texts, his poetry. His novels are translated by professionals, as he considers that “giving the task to translators is a way to promote the maturity of Basque literature and the professionalization of the translation field” (Miren66).
⑥ The English version, published in 2007, would also be the result of a direct translation from Basque. U.S.-born writer Elizabeth Macklin’s translation would be “the first time a book translated directly from Basque was published by a commercial press in the United States of America”, can be read on Kirmen Uribe’s website kirmenuribe.eus.
⑦ “The novelBilbao
-New
York
-Bilbao
is set on a hypothetical flight that its narrator, one Kirmen Uribe, takes from Bilbao’s Loiu Airport to New York’s J.F.K. On the flight the writer contemplates his supposed novel-in-progress, which is about three generations of a family, his own, whose life is bound up with the sea.Bilbao
-New
York
-Bilbao
is a novel with no conventional plot to speak of. Its structure is that of a net, and the knots of the net are the stories of the three generations as they intersect with crosswise stories and reflections on the twentieth century as it was experienced in the Basque Country.” (Source： kirmenuribe.eus)⑧ I interviewed Kirmen Uribe on April 7th, 2017. Following quotes come from this unpublished interview.
⑨ Unpublished interview with Gersende Camenen, on the 1st of May 2017.
⑩ Unpublished interview with Kirmen Uribe, April 7th, 2017.
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