...the difficult but rewarding Koldo Izagirre, or even the father of modern Basque poetry, Gabriel Aresti (whose works have just been published by University of Nevada Press.) There were others, too, names flew in and out of my mind: Itxaro Borda, Arantxa Urretabizkaia, Amaia Lasa, each poet a rich fragment of Basqueness. How to choose, how to represent.
And as is often the case when given strict delimitations, my mind focused. In the end, I thought, what do people know about Basque literature? Not much. So how could I provide a good sketch of Basque literature in four poets then? The idea of four made me think of the cardinal points: I come from fishing people, so I can’t help the tendency to think in terms of north, south, east, and west, the corresponding winds, what comes with each, what landmarks (seamarks) I see, where I stand with respect to each. (I don’t know many other people whose first gesture in entering a place they’re considering to rent is to flip open a compass). It’s in my blood to define territories, to craft maritime charts, to fish, to swim, to sail boats, and now, thanks to the new world, to European ideals about the free movement of peoples and the decline of the fishing worlds, I’ve translated the skills of my ancestors into this, this crafting...
(read the whole article by Amaia Gabantxo here)
About Amaia Gabantxo
Amaia Gabantxo is a writer, flamenco singer, and literary translator specializing in Basque literature. She currently teaches creative writing at the University of Chicago, and performs regularly in venues all over the city. She is the most prolific translator of Basque literature into English to date, as well as a pioneer in the field, and has received multiple awards for her work, most recently, the OMI Writers Translation Lab award, a Mellon Fellowship for Arts and Scholarship, and a yearlong artist-in-residence award at the Cervantes Institute in Chicago. She has published and performed on both sides of the Atlantic: in Ireland and Great Britain, the countries in which she carried out her university education, and in the US, where she currently lives.
Forthcoming literary translations in 2017 include Twist by Harkaitz Cano for Archipelago Books in NY, A Glass Eye by Miren Agur Meabe for Parthian Books in the UK, and two seminal collections by the father of modern Basque poetry, Gabriel Aresti, Rock & Core and Downhill, for the University of Nevada Press.
She is currently writing a "novel in flamenco form," a work structured around a chain of flamenco songs, a hybrid that is both literary and performative.
Her website: http://amaiagabantxo.weebly.com
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