Short Story
(in Olaziregi, M. J. (Compiler), an Anthology of Basque Short Stories, Center for Basque Studies - University of Nevada, Reno, 2004, pp. 11-27). Translated from Basque by Kristin Addis.
"FOREWORD"
As they say, an anthology is usually the result of error since, even with the best of intentions, the selection of stories always poses the risk of committing an obvious omission. Things get even thornier with an invitation to contribute a foreword to an anthology, since if there's anything we love as readers, it's to sit right down and dig into the stories. Without a doubt, the stories are the important thing in the book, and we would like to begin by stressing that, as R. Ford(1) writes in a foreword of his own, reading the stories makes more sense than anything that could be said in a foreword. With this in mind, we will try to be clear and concise, to choose our words aptly, as in good stories.
Although we know that every literature gives rise to the dialogue between the particular and the universal, few Basque authors have managed to cross borders; for too long a time, few Basque authors have managed to make their voices heard in the canon of the monochromatic and monological panorama of Western literature. One of these few is Bernardo Atxaga, whose book Obabakoak (1988, published in English under the same title) can now be read in 25 languages; here he proposes a new cartography with which to brave geographical and literary frontiers: "These days nothing can be said to be peculiar to one place or person. The world is everywhere and Euskal Herria is no longer just Euskal Herria but (...) the place where the world takes the name of Euskal Herria."(2)
To understand this map splashed with the physical geography of Basque, English readers can turn to Mark Kurlansky's The Basque History of the World(3) in which the outsider will find many fascinating details about us: we speak Basque, the oldest European language, a language with only 700,000 speakers in all; our country measures only 8,218 square miles, a plot of land a little smaller than New Hampshire; this territory is divided between Spain and France but as Kurlansky states, "Basqueland looks too green to be Spain and too rugged to be France" (p. 18). Additionally, a number of instances in which the adjective "euskal" is featured are specifically mentioned: the fame of our cuisine (the preparation and conservation of codfish, for example); our well-known sport, jai alai (Basque handball); our most famous religious figure, Saint Ignatius of Loyola; our excellent contemporary Basque sculptors J. Oteiza and E. Chillida; the Guggenheim Museum of Bilbao... and the provocative issue of terrorism, considered to be the biggest problem for the 2.4 million people living in the Basque Country. As Kurlansky's book reminds us, terrorism is the topic of fully 85% of articles published in the United States on Basque issues. We cannot deny that this harsh reality fundamentally colors our lives and thus it naturally appears in some of the stories in this anthology (Iban Zaldua's powerful story Bibliography, for example). Among other things, this is one of the purposes of literature: to exorcise demons, whether those of an individual or of a people. Literature of whatever genre is more truthful than either media reports or the official story given in history texts. This goal, that is, the discovery of truth, was considered by Edgar Allan Poe to be a characteristic of the short story and, if we accept this view, the reader will find in this anthology more than a few Basque truths. These truths question our fears, raise our ghosts, tell our dreams or, as André Gide would have it, recount our miseries.
And the writers in this anthology present these questions in Basque, in our ancient language of pre-Indo-European origin. Basque (euskara) gives its name and its nature to our country, Euskal Herria, the land of euskara speakers, and for that reason we have tried, despite its historical prohibition, despite its problems, to hold tight to our language through the centuries. In the final analysis, as G. Steiner reminds us, when a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world. One way of holding onto our language and crossing our borders is to win new readers through translation. But borders, though a spur to literary creativity in the opinion of Claudio Magris, are a heavy burden for Basques. Thus few of our writers have managed to put us on the map in foreign countries and, though nowadays Basque reaches 87 million homes in Europe and 3 million families in the United States thanks to radio and television, no such thing has happened with Basque books. One of the writers in this anthology, Harkaitz Cano, paraphrasing W. C. Auden's Letters from Iceland, compares the situation of our literature to the solitude of an island, an old European island, nevertheless often visited by well-known authors thanks to translation -it is a pleasure to be able to read Joyce, Faulkner, Eliot, Chekov, Carver in Basque- but from whose shores few excursions to foreign territory have been made. In total, only 60 titles have been translated from Basque to other languages, doubtless too few for a nation of such dedicated travelers.
The socio-historical situation of Basque is the cause of the rather late evolution of our literature. From 1545, when the first Basque book was published, Bernard Etxepare's Linguae Vasconum Primitiae, to 1879, only some 100 books were published in Basque. Numbers began to rise at the beginning of the 20th century, when Basque literature began to gain strength; only then, in B. Atxaga's metaphor, did the hedgehog begin to wake from its hibernation. In a brief review of 20th-century Basque literature, we find the post-symbolic poets Lizardi and Lauaxeta in the 1930s; in the 50s and 60s, the Bilbaino Gabriel Aresti, an excellent representative of social poetry; and in the 60s new novelists who revisited and remodeled the typical novel of the late 19th century (Txillardegi, for example, was a follower of Sartre and Camus, and Ramon Saizarbitoria brought experimentalism to the Basque novel). Nevertheless, if there is any critical event in the history of Basque literature, it is the death of the dictator Franco in 1975. Only then did Basque literature begin to establish the conditions necessary for its development (the bilingual decree, which expanded the corpus of potential readers, official funding for publishers and distributors, funding to protect production in Basque...). Nowadays, of the 1500 books published every year in Basque, approximately 14% are literature, and among these, narrative is prominent at 60% of all published literature(4). But though this may be true, it's the novel that holds the central place in our modern literature; in ours, as in other literatures, the market is a controlling factor and the most profitable genre, the novel, therefore triumphs.
This anthology is thus rather daring in that we have chosen the short story, a genre that arose late in our literary development, to launch this Basque Literature Series. The reasons are evident. First, an anthology provides the opportunity to introduce several of our 300 Basque writers. Here, the reader will discover the most fundamental characteristics that define our contemporary narrative: the pluralism of our generation and our esthetic tendencies. Additionally, our objective is the English-speaking audience, among whom the short story has enjoyed long tradition and recognition; we believe that this is thus an apt genre with which to begin the series. The welcome that the short story receives in the English-speaking world has always been cause for envy among modern Basque writers, whether from the Spanish or French Basque Country, since they typically receive little attention from literary institutions. Not only because the initial theoretical formulation that established the origin of modern short story ("literary story", "tale") originated in America (see the works of E. A. Poe), but also because of the evolution of the genre itself in the 20th century. In the 1980s, both our literature and Spanish literature experienced a revival of the short story, the reasons for which can be found not only in the example provided in the works of various well-known South American authors (Quiroga, Borges and Cortázar, for example), but also in the influence of contemporary US writers (beginning with Cheever and leading up to Carver, Wolff and Ford, said to be representatives of minimalism). Basque writers now saw themselves in this new light and, even though the last two decades have been very interesting in the short story, we are still far from definitive socio-literary acclaim in what W. Faulkner considered "the most demanding form after poetry"(5).
Our intention was to produce an anthology of recent Basque stories and, although there are a couple of stories from the 1980s (there are always exceptions), all the rest were originally published in the 1990s. Furthermore, we did not seek a balance in either style or theme; the quality of the stories, in our opinion, inspired us and was the overriding principle in including them in this anthology. And on the topic of quality, we would like to add here that we sought the characteristics that R. Carver and T. Jenks required of the stories in their anthology, that is "stories which on occasion had the ambition of enlarging our view of ourselves and the world"(6). Together with the stories, we include the bio-bibliographies that we requested of our writers. The reader will readily perceive that these short introductory texts written by the authors bring out the ties that their stories have with life's mysteries, questions and rifts. In the end, this literary genre which entails concentration, tension and illumination seeks only to captivate the reader so that the stories enter into his own biography and remain there at least a short time. With this in mind, the present anthology includes not only authors who have written only (or primarily) books of short stories (Cillero, Garzia, Iturbe, Linazasoro, Lizarralde, Mujika Iraola, Zaldua), but also those who have made interesting contributions to other literary genres (Atxaga, Cano, Lertxundi, Montoia, Oñederra, Rozas, Sarrionandia...), in other words, those with an extensive bibliography together with those whose journey has so far been shorter. Finally, there is one more aspect of the chosen texts that deserves comment: their length. Although most of these stories are approximately the same length (most are under 15 pages), we include some interesting writers who have written truly short stories. In their case, we have chosen more than one story; from one literary point of view this might seem a dubious practice, but we hope the reader will understand our wish to provide some sort of balance.
The short story, this autonomous modern genre of adult literature and its craft, is a new phenomenon in Basque literature. A. Lertxundi's Hunik arrats artean (1970, "Until Nightfall") is considered to be the first fruit of modern Basque short story. In it, we see the notable effects on narrative of both South American magical realism and the theater of the absurd (García Márquez, Rulfo; Kafka, Artaud). Other Basque collections of stories published in 1970 adopted traditional models of folk tales or the experimentalism that was then prevalent in novels. In any case, the 1980s were without a doubt a decade of strengthening and expansion in modern Basque short story. In our country as well as in others, the proliferation of literary journals did much to promote narrative, but in our case, the political situation from 1975 on additionally facilitated funding, literary prizes and the campaign for literacy. In 1978, the literary group POTT Banda (pott = failure) was formed in Bilbao, opening new literary universes to contemporary Basque narrative. Members included Bernardo Atxaga, Joseba Sarrionandia and Joxemari Iturralde, who in the 1980s published works that would change the panorama of Basque narrative. The members of POTT looked to English literary tradition (crime novels, the cinema, adventure fiction, etc.), and the works of J. L. Borges provided the essential path toward this tradition, the universal inheritance found in his labyrinthine library. Joseba Sarrionandia's Narrazioak (1983, "Narrations") and Bernardo Atxaga's Obabakoak (1988) are considered to be POTT Banda's most illustrious contributions to the contemporary Basque short story.
Very slowly, from the 1980s onward, the typology of the Basque story became richer and richer and, as in the novel, today's panorama is truly eclectic. Adopting the characteristics that define this multi-faceted modernity, modern Basque short stories feature realism presented from an expressionist point of view, fantasy in the style of Cortázar or Borges (also known as neofantasy), metafiction, tales of a lyrical tone rooted in the past, stories that speak to us of the absurdity of life, minimalist accounts of daily life, hybridization... But above all, today's Basque narrative has abandoned the experimentalism of the 1970s in favor of the simple desire to tell stories and, especially among the writers of the 90s, the influence of the cinema, music and the media is ever more obvious. Finally, it is accepted that reality is like broken glass and that it is up to the reader to arrange the pieces. In the same way, the new hybrid stories, which break through the frontiers of the genre, demand a new type of dialogue with the reader, either through collections which propose new structures or ties between stories (such as in a short story cycle), or through almost chronicle- or essay-like fiction.
In 1983, the successful Narrazioak was published, Joseba Sarrionandia's first book of short stories. In poetic prose of enticing images and metaphors, the author shows his fondness for fantasy and ancient legends; the reader will find sirens and ancient mariners (betraying Sarrionandia's fascination with Coleridge and Melville), characters who do homage to the legend of King Arthur: Queen Ginebra, Sir Galahad... solitary stopping-points, and a meditation on literature, in other words, metaliterature. The reader will find one of the ancient mariners of Narrazioak in this anthology, as well as in the short-short stories from Han izanik hona naiz (1992, "Having Been There, Here I Am") and Miopeak, bizikletak eta beste langabetu batzuk (1995, "Myopic People, Bicycles and Other Redundancies"). In the latter, the hybridity that is characteristic of Sarrionandia's work is evident, the desire to break through the restrictions of the genre. Putting a new spin on stories taken from both literary and oral tradition, playing with black humor and irony, Sarrionandia in his short stories recalls the supershort texts of writers like A. Monterroso.
As mentioned above, Bernardo Atxaga's Obabakoak (1988) was a milestone in contemporary Basque literature and, as Anjel Lertxundi (one of the writers included in this anthology) confirms, things were never the same in Basque literature after it. The author presents a collection of short stories with an innovative structure, one that binds ancient Basque superstitions to postmodern examination of literature. International criticism has defined Obabakoak as an intertextual voyage that begins with The Thousand and One Nights and continues with the master storytellers of the 19th and 20th centuries (Chekov, Waugh, Maupassant, Villiers d'Idle Adam, Borges, Cortázar and Calvino were, among others, Atxaga's fellow-travelers). On this voyage, the writer speaks to us of the borders between literature and life and of the conflict between nature and civilization, using the techniques of fantastic literature for that purpose. And there is fear in the foundation of that fantasy for, as R. Callois and others have defined it, fantastic literature plays with fear. In the story chosen for this anthology, Teresa, poverina mia, Atxaga again investigates human fears and desires and, as in the novels The Lone Man (Harvill, 1996) and The Lone Woman (Harvill, 1999), to invoke M. Montaigne, we delve into the internal and bellicose world of the protagonist. The story's lyrical tone stands out and, as in Chekov's stories, the author's repeated images and metaphors take root inside us.
The poetic prose of Inazio Mujika Iraola likewise has a truly lyrical tone. In his 1987 book Azukrea belazeetan ("Sugar on the Prairie"), we see the influence of South American magical realism and particularly that of J. Rulfo. This type of realism is captivating, not only in many neoruralist Basque novels of the time, but also in other short stories worthy of mention (I. Zurutuza's 1989 story Haizeak iparlaino beltzak dakartzanean, "When the wind brings the cold northern fog", for example), and the fantasy found in Basque oral tradition put us in the limelight. This narrative makes possible a way of visiting our past, a way of recapturing an identity denied us for years. And if memory has become the primary obsession of modern Basque novelists (see Ramon Saizarbitoria's Gorde nazazu lurpean (2002, "Put Me Underground"), for example), it is no surprise to see the importance of memory in the works of Mujika Iraola. The fiction that arises from mixing legends and Borgesian expertise is the basis of his collection of stories Hautsaren Kronika (1994, "Chronicle of Dust"). In the story we chose for this anthology, Like the waters release their dead, dramatic memories from the time of WWII rise to the surface, very slowly.
The past is similarly recovered in two other short stories in this anthology. In Javi Cillero's story A kiss in the dark, from Hollywood eta biok (1998, "Hollywood and I"), for example, the point of departure is a flashback to adolescence. Hollywood eta biok reflects the influence of US cinema and narrative and in it, the reader will find stories that vary in length and structure, told in Cillero's unornamented prose with humor, irony and skill. Xabier Montoia also turns to the past in his book Gasteizko hondartzak (1997, "The Beaches of Gasteiz"). Though in his last two novels, this author also revisits the different moments and epochs of our history, Montoia's narrative goal is not to bear historical witness. The characteristics of dirty reality also appear in his collection of stories Emakume biboteduna (1992, "The Mustachioed Woman"), for example, in which he presents sharp and realistic stories based on love or the lack of love, and which are echoed in the provocative nature of M. Duchamp's painting on the cover. The stories in Baina bihotzak dio (2002, "But the Heart Says"), on the other hand, focus on homesickness for the Basque Country but, above and beyond this, Montoia offers us the chance to see the world through the eyes of his believable characters. Credibility and intensity are conspicuous in the story we chose for this anthology, Black as coal. This, the first of the twenty-two short stories of Gasteizko hondartzak, opens in the town of Gasteiz (Vitoria) at the end of the 1960s. The history of the city passes before our eyes as the backdrop to the lively cast of characters who appear and disappear from story to story.
Like Montoia's stories, the works by Arantxa Iturbe, Harkaitz Cano and Iban Zaldua which we have included in this anthology are firmly based in realism. Arantxa Iturbe, one of the not quite 11% of Basque writers who are women, published lively short stories on love and the lack of it in her books Ezer baino lehen (1992, "Before Anything Else") and Lehenago zen berandu (1995, "Earlier Was Already Late"). The principle characters are women, urban women living in today's media-infested and stressful society. Iturbe bases her spirited, spontaneous and colloquial stories on everyday life and on misunderstandings with men. Harkaitz Cano's realist narrative, on the other hand, is quite different. Black novels written in the rhythm of jazz or blues, poetry books sprinkled with Basquiat, Boris Vian, Maiakovski, Carver and famous movie directors, Cano's chronicles show that he is a dedicated student of Capote; such is his literary universe. A desolate modern city, anonymous telephone calls and abandoned streets, bits of stories that speak to us of the lack of love are all found in his minimalist stories. Cano's book Telefono kaiolatua (1997, "The Caged Telephone"), from which we have chosen the story The mattress, includes elements both black and absurd. As in the short stories of the masters Chekov and Carver, humble elements and details report on the protagonist's inner life, with compelling comparisons and metaphors in which to delight. The old and stained mattress which serves as an x-ray of the protagonists' lives, or the agreements which function as premonitions, situate us in a story in which apparently little happens.
Few are the Basque storytellers who have mastered the short-short story as well as Iban Zaldua. Borges' or Calvino's metaliterary stance, or Cortázar's shocking fantasy, among other things, serve as the point of departure for Zaldua's pointed, ironic and humorous stories. And this writer uses his critical scrutiny to fragment topics such as literature, life and Basque reality. Hence, the meaningful titles of his books: Gezurrak, gezurrak, gezurrak (2000, "Lies, lies, lies") or Traizioak (2001, "Betrayals"). Zaldua has shown that he is capable of writing in rich registers and styles, shaping his stories without a single extraneous word. Because of their intensity, Zaldua's short stories will never leave the reader cold; for Zaldua the short story is, as J. Cheever says, what we tell ourselves in the unequivocal moment of death.
The existential anguish caused by death is very much present in the work of Karlos Linazasoro. This anguish appears in his stories under the guise of the literature of the absurd (echoes of Kafka and the theater of the absurd), and is expressed in the upside-down fantasy of irrational logic (Cortázar). The mixture of reality and dream, the suffocating atmosphere, delirium, savagery... these are the elements of Linazasoro's tales. This explains why there are so many crazy people in his stories, because they depict the irrationality behind the mask. We chose the story for this anthology, The derailment, from the second of his four collections of short stories, Ez balego beste mundurik (2000, "If There Is No Other World"). To the reader it will seem a surrealist and brutal story of a person reading Cioran while traveling on a train, and we are certain that he will find the comparisons and frightening scenes disturbing.
The slippery borders between literature and life are subject to debate in metafiction. Tempering the difference between fiction and essay, presenting the status of writing as a collage, metafiction makes us recognize that everything has already been said and that all writing is rewriting. J. L. Borges' Library of Babel or I. Calvino's literary artefacts are much in evidence in several of the stories of Anjel Lertxundi and Juan Garzia. Anjel Lertxundi, who in 1970 wrote the first modern Basque collection of short stories, is one of the most prolific writers in Basque literature. If anything defines his narrative (ten novels, four collections of short stories...) it is relentless scrutiny, the exploration of different literary means of expression. Metafiction has always been present in his work, but it is particularly so in his book of stories, Urtero da aurten (1984, "Every Year is This Year") and in the novel Argizariaren egunak (1997, "Days of Wax"). In the story we chose for this anthology, Berlin is not so far away, the 15th-century artist Jean Foquet's painting Madonna and Child is the point of departure for an amazing story. This fiction based on true historical events is a reflection on the ties between art and reality, and Lertxundi asks us if works of art must swallow and make disappear the real references used in their construction. Juan Garzia has translated into Basque W. Shakespeare, Melville, Beckett and J. L. Borges among others, and Itzalen itzal (1993, "Shadow of Shadows") is his strongest collection of short stories. In it, we find eleven chapters and a scrap of conversation (Borgesian), but we cannot say that this is a loose collection of stories, because they gather themselves into a wholeness. One of these stories is Gubbio, chosen for this anthology. It tells the disturbing story of a 13th-century nun, her transgression (blasphemy) and its dramatic consequences. Citing dubious sources, making reference to apocryphal books, reaping humor and the absurd... Garzia's work teaches us that literature can be an interesting game. As the critic Iñaki Aldekoa states, shadow is everything, convention is everything in this book of Garzia's.
The next two authors of this anthology play with looks and glances. In Lourdes Oñederra's stories, both in her novel Eta emakumeari sugeak esan zion (1999, "And the Serpent Told the Woman") and in the story Mrs. Anderson's longing, it is a look that makes desire evident. Because the subject of Oñederra's short story is the desire of an aging woman, she mentions Doris Lessing's Love, again at the beginning. Glances, short and interrupted sentences, repeated names and elements that mark the rhythm, sensual descriptions... these are the components of Oñederra's work, especially the measured prose that plays with silence, the gaps and breaks that seek the reader's participation. In her short story Korronteak ("Currents"), Ixiar Rozas looks outside in order to look inside. The short stories in Sartu, korrontea dabil (2001, "Come In, There's a Draft") have unusual ties and create a structure almost like that of a novel. We have chosen the first story in this collection, A draft, a current, in which one senses Rozas' humane regard that nonetheless is as cold as a movie camera. This writer who admires John Berger has said many times that she learned to look from English writers, learned to see the invisible creatures (immigrants, the ostracized...) that are lost in big cities. The passing glances of characters who don't know each other are captured by a meaningful gesture and recounted in the present, the currents that expand or reduce the gaps between these characters.
The writer Pello Lizarraldes story Un ange passe completes this anthology. His is a minimalist prose that plays with silence, that knows how to create a truly strange atmosphere. And in the recently published novel Larrepetit (2002) we find the characters fleeing in endless comings and goings. The reader will soon note that few things "happen" in Lizarralde's stories and that he inevitably draws the attention of the narrator to gestures, smells, colors and ordinary motions of almost epiphanic meaning. Making use of descriptions of great lyrical force, raising the objectives of different methods of storytelling to new pinnacles, the atmosphere, the internal life is dominant in Lizarralde's narrative. The same talent for creating moods that he showed in his book Sargori (1994, "Sultry Weather") is present in this work as well.
We conclude with a quote from W. Benjamin which expresses our hopes for the stories in this anthology: "story stays in the memory and compels the listener to tell it to someone". Amen.
NOTES
(1) Ford, R. (ed.) Antología del cuento norteamericano, Galaxia Gutemberg & Círculo de Lectores, Barcelona, 2002.
(2) Atxaga, Bernardo, Obabakoak, Vintage, New York, 1994, p. 324.
(3) Kurlansky, Mark, The Basque History of the World, Penguin, New York, 2001.
(4) As the body of Basque literature becomes stronger, narrative has gained a greater and greater prominence. Thus, while narrative held only 18.7% of literary publication from 1876 to 1935, it rose to 23.8% between 1936 and 1975, and today, as stated, accounts for more than half of all Basque literary publication.
(5) Meriwether, J. B. and Millgate, M., Lion in the Garden: Interviews with William Faulkner 1926-1962, Nebraska University Press, Lincoln, p. 238.
(6) Stull, W. L. (ed.), No Heroics, Please. Uncollected Writings, Harvill, London, 1991, p. 147.