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
It is customary to say that the first Basque novel is Peru Abarca completed in 1802 by Juan Antonio Mogel. Written in the Biscayan dialect, the work is unconventional in form, leaving plenty of room for dialogue between two friends, Juan, whose only masterpiece is the name, because he shows a touching carelessness, but a biting realism, and Peru, which borders on omniscience, sometimes pedantry, but will learn to pray. The objective, to convince the reader of the beauty of the rural world and thus 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 had the pleasure of inspiring his niece, Bizenta Mogel, and his nephew, Juan Jose Mogel, to take up a literary vocation. It was he who taught them to read and write, a fact that was all the more notable since, at the time, the education of young girls was not a matter of course. Bizenta honoured this legacy by publishing a Basque adaptation of Aesop's Fables in 1804, the same year her uncle died, when she was only 22 years old, becoming the first woman to publish in Basque. We should also mention Juan Ignacio de Iztueta (1767-1845) who, when he was not busy writing his own songs and poems, collected popular dances and songs, thus preserving an infinitely precious intangible heritage. The rise of these multiplied wills to establish a particular culture can only resonate with the new challenges to the foral regime, and around 1876, what could rhyme with the Catalan Renaixença, the Euskal Pizkundea, was born. The time was propitious for initiatives, the first Basque language chair 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 emerged, such as the bilingual newspaper Eskualduna, which appeared from 1887 onwards. Finally, the traditional Floral Games - initiated by Antoine d'Abbadie d'Arrast in 1851 - were exported to the south. These poetic contests are the occasion to attend the jousts between bertsolaris who practice bertso, an improvised and rhymed song which finds its roots in the 18th century and in which Jean-Baptiste Elizanburu, the author of the novel Piarres Adame (1888), and Indalecio Bizcarrondo, a romantic poet who died tragically, excel. Another Romantic will also be remembered, José María Iparraguirre, born in Urretxu in 1820, whose life as a singer and poet mythified bohemia and who is the father of Gernikako arbola, improvised, he says to himself, in a Madrid café and became a Basque anthem.
The golden age lasted, production increased, journals proliferated, and the attachment to identity values was affirmed. Julio Urquijo (1871-1950) created the RIEV (International Review of Basque Studies) in 1907, Resurrección Maria Azkue (1864-1951) became the first president of the Academy of the Basque Language in 1919, and the poetic genre flourished thanks to a legendary trio, Orixe, Lizardi and Lauaxeta. But already the Civil War was already roaring, which brutally put an end to the flights of fancy, only one novel appeared during the conflict, Uztaro by Tomas Agirre dit Barrensoro, a blueberry like a last breath of a literature that already knows that it has just entered a new era, realism, and that in the future it will get rid of its protective skins, folklore and religion. For the time being, censorship reigns, even brutal repression, some take the path of exile, timidly trying to publish from abroad, but it is not until the 1950s that a new lease of life really comes into being.
If Eusebio Erkiaga was recognised as early as Arranegi (1958), but retained a certain classical style, this was not the case with Txillardegi (1929-2012), to whom we owe the first so-called modern - and existentialist - novel in 1957! - Leturianen Egunkari Ezkutua. Txillardegi did not learn Basque until he was a teenager, but he did work hard to bring about the Arantzazu Congress, which in 1968 set out to define the rules of a unified language. Txillardegi was also one of the founders of ETA. Jon Mirande (1925-1972) is also provocative and sometimes corrosive in his tone, as in the articles he published in the ephemeral 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 many travels, he left behind poems and a novel, Haur besoetakora, with a preface by the all-rounder Gabriel Aresti (1933-1975). From theatre to short stories, from realism to symbolism, if the latter is interested in all styles, his outstanding work remains the series Harria (Stone). Finally, Ramón Saizarbitoria completes the modernization of a literature that in just a few decades has radically joined the European currents, and with Egunero hasten delako (1969) he gives us the first experimental novel, which could be similar to the New French Novel, in the Basque language.
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.
