From the tradition..
Against all odds, this short presentation of the literature of the Basque Country, La Rioja and Navarre will begin with a meeting with a Castilian-speaking poet. Gonzalo de Berceo was certainly born around 1196 in the city that gave him his name, and the few elements about his life do not in any way diminish the importance that his writings will have for Spanish letters. Twelve works with a religious vocation have come down to us, but they are nonetheless borrowed from a scrupulous poetic form subtly mixed with popular speech. To make faith a pretext for writing will be the challenge of the centuries to come, although the first book printed in Basque, the famous Linguæ Vasconum Primitiæ by the Navarrese Bernart Etxepare, published in Bordeaux in 1545, causes a bit of a scandal since it brings together religious and licentious poems, and is above all an inaugural ode to Euskara, the Basque language, which until now was, in fact, practised more or less orally. This 16th century will prove to be twice as valuable, firstly because of the translation into Basque of the New Testament by Joannes Leizarraga, who responded to the request made at the Synod of Pau in 1564 and played with the difficulty of combining different dialects, and secondly because he witnessed the birth in 1556 in Urdazubi of Pedro Agerre Azpilkueta, better known as Axular. His only known work, perhaps incomplete, is Gero (1643), which can be translated as "after". Axular was a preacher who extolled asceticism, but it is the form, didactic, modern and literary that will make this work a classic that is of prime importance in the development of the Basque language and, of its author, the most famous representative of the School of Sare. The following century, in turn, is embodied in the features of a man who will open up new perspectives: Manuel de Larramendi (1690-1766). Paradoxically, he made very little use of Euskera, although he was an ardent defender of it, not least because of his work as a philologist and lexicologist - he wrote the first Basque grammar and compiled a trilingual dictionary with Castilian and Latin equivalents - but also because of his desire to preserve and promote this culture. In this, he was a precursor of a certain patriotism, but he also acted in reaction to a political trend that was foreshadowed by the decrees of Nueva Planta, which advocated centralism, the abrogation of the "fors" and, consequently, the injunction of a single language. If Larramendi breathed new thought and even pride and influence into the authors who were readily associated with a school bearing his name, a new turn was already taking place at the very beginning of the nineteenth century: the appearance of the novel.
... to fiction
The first Basque novel is said to be Peru Abarca, completed in 1802 by Juan Antonio Mogel. Written in Biscayan dialect, the work is unconventional in form, giving pride of place to dialogues between two friends, Juan, whose mastery is in name only, as he displays a touching carelessness, but a biting realism, and Peru, who verges on omniscience, sometimes pedantry, but will learn to pray. The aim of convincing the reader of the beauty of the rural world, and therefore of the importance of Basque culture, seems to have been achieved. Although Mogel was not fortunate enough to see his writings published until 1881, he did have the pleasure of inspiring a literary vocation in his niece, Bizenta Mogel, and nephew, Juan Jose Mogel. It was he who taught them to read and write, all the more remarkable given that, at the time, the education of young girls was not taken for granted. Bizenta honored this legacy by publishing a Basque adaptation of Aesop's Fables in 1804, the very year of her uncle's death, when she was only 22, thus becoming the first woman to publish in Basque. Or Juan Ignacio de Iztueta (1767-1845), who, when not busy writing his own songs and poems, collected folk dances and songs, thus preserving an infinitely precious intangible heritage. The upsurge in these efforts to fix a particular culture could not but resonate with the new challenges to the foral regime, and so, around 1876, was born what could rhyme with the Catalan Renaixença, the Euskal Pizkundea. It was a propitious time for initiatives: the first chair of Basque language was created in 1888, the foundations were already being laid for the future Academy, which was still very active in Bilbao, and new types of publications were emerging, such as the bilingual newspaper Eskualduna, which appeared from 1887 onwards. Finally, the traditional Jeux Floraux - initiated by Antoine d'Abbadie d'Arrast in 1851 - were exported to the south. These poetic competitions provided an opportunity to witness the jousting between bertsolaris who practiced bertso, an improvised rhyming song with its roots in the 18th century, in which Jean-Baptiste Elizanburu, author of the novel Piarres Adame (1888), and Indalecio Bizcarrondo, a Romantic poet who died tragically, excelled. Another Romantic, José María Iparraguirre, born in Urretxu in 1820, whose life as a chansonnier and poet mythologized the bohemian lifestyle, and who was the father of Gernikako arbola, improvised, so he said, in a Madrid café and turned into a Basque anthem.
Julio Urquijo (1871-1950) founded the RIEV (Revue internationale des études basques) in 1907, Resurrección Maria Azkue (1864-1951) became the first president of the Basque Language Academy in 1919, and the poetic genre flourished thanks to the legendary trio of Orixe, Lizardi and Lauaxeta. Only one novel appeared during the conflict, Uztaro by Tomas Agirre aka Barrensoro, a bluegrass like a last sigh from a literature that already knew it had entered a new era, realism, and that in the future it would shed its protective skins of folklore and religion. For the time being, censorship reigned, even brutal repression, and some artists went into exile, timidly trying to publish from abroad, but it wasn't until the 50s that a new lease of life was truly born.
While Eusebio Erkiaga gained recognition as early as Arranegi (1958), but retained a certain classical style, this was not the case for Txillardegi (1929-2012), who in 1957 wrote the first so-called modern - and existentialist! - Leturianen Egunkari Ezkutua. Although he didn't learn Basque until he was a teenager, Txillardegi was instrumental in the 1968 Arantzazu congress, which set out to define the rules for a unified language, and was also one of the founders of the ETA. Jon Mirande (1925-1972) also attracted attention with his willingly provocative, sometimes corrosive tone, as in the articles he published in the short-lived magazine Igela, which he co-founded in 1962 and which made him one of the representatives of the Basque avant-garde. Influenced by his translations, from Edgar Allan Poe to Nietzsche, and by his extensive travels, he left a legacy of poems and a novel, Haur besoetakora, prefaced by the versatile Gabriel Aresti (1933-1975). From theater to short stories, from realism to symbolism, although he was interested in all styles, his outstanding work remains the Harria (Stone) series. Finally, Ramón Saizarbitoria completed the modernization of a literature that in just a few decades had radically caught up with European trends, and with Egunero hasten delako (1969), he wrote the first Basque-language experimental novel, which could be likened to the French Nouveau roman.
And today..
Ramón Saizarbitoria continued to occupy the literary scene and quickly went beyond the role of writer by co-founding the publishing house LUR in 1967 and a few years later creating a literary magazine, Oh! Euzkadi. Nevertheless, although dense and undoubtedly innovative, his work did not pass the stage of translation into French, unfortunately, and the same can be said of that of his friend, Koldo Izagirre, born in 1953 in Pasaia, who is just as prolific. If the figures speak for themselves - more than a thousand publications each year and several dozen publishing houses - it must be said that, to date, transmission has generally been in one direction only. Two exceptions, however, give reason to hope that the situation will change: the great success of Bernardo Atxaga's Obabakoak, available in 23 languages and in French from Christian Bourgois Éditeur, which published in early 2020 the translation of another of his novels, L'Homme seul, and the reception reserved for the books of Juan Manuel de Prada, born in 1970, the favourite author of the beautiful Seuil publishing house, where we will savour the pleasure of treating ourselves to Mourir sous ton ciel, a flamboyant historical novel.
