Bernardo Atxaga, 1988

Stream Three · The Basque Library · Entry 02

Before the stories begin, Atxaga places a short prologue. It is one of the strangest and most quietly ambitious prologues in contemporary European fiction. He describes the Game of the Goose — the board game played on a circular track of sixty-three squares, where chance and skill and the interventions of fate conspire to move you toward or away from the centre — and announces that this game is also an autobiography: the autobiography of a Basque author born in 1951. Then, without explanation, he turns to his language. I write in a strange language, he says. Its verbs, the structure of its relative clauses, have no sisters anywhere on Earth. And then, the claim that has stayed with readers ever since: in four centuries, barely a hundred books had been written in Basque.

The hedgehog is his image. Since the megalithic age, he writes, the Basque language has been hiding away like a hedgehog, fortifying itself on an oral tradition, surviving by contraction and concealment. What he is offering in Obabakoak, then, is not merely a collection of stories about a village. It is an attempt to open that hedgehog up — to bring it into contact with the full breadth of European literary culture without losing what made it distinct, to write in Basque while writing about everything, to be provincial and cosmopolitan in the same breath. This double ambition, and the difficulty of achieving it, is what makes Obabakoak the hinge it has become: the book through which Basque literature joined the world, while remaining legible as itself.

Atxaga and the problem of writing in Basque

Bernardo Atxaga is a pseudonym. He was born Joseba Irazu Garmendia in 1951 in Asteasu, a small municipality in Gipuzkoa, and adopted the pen name early in his career — a gesture of self-creation that seems in retrospect entirely characteristic. He studied economics in Bilbao and philosophy in Barcelona, worked variously as an economist, a bookseller, a publisher, a teacher of Basque, and a radio scriptwriter, and published his first texts in the early 1970s, at a moment when Basque cultural life was still under Francoist suppression and the act of writing in Euskara carried political weight it could not avoid.

The Francoist period had driven Basque into private and familial spaces, out of schools, out of official life, out of the press. The ikastolak, the Basque-language schools that were established clandestinely from the 1960s, represented a form of cultural resistance that was also, necessarily, a pedagogical project: teaching children to read and write in a language that had almost no modern literary models. The standardisation of Basque into Euskara Batua — the unified written form developed by the Royal Academy of the Basque Language from 1968 onward — gave writers a common literary register for the first time, but it also confronted them with a question that the Entry 03 piece on the Elizen Arteko Biblia addresses in another register: what should the literary language sound like? What is the Basque sentence?

Atxaga has described the particular vertigo of writing in Basque: there was no substantial tradition of prose fiction to learn from, no canonical novels to argue with, no established idiom for psychological interiority or narrative irony. The language had its oral tradition, its poetry, its religious writing, its chronicles — but the modern European novel form had arrived without the infrastructure that normally carries it. He had to build, in the act of writing, the models he needed. His early poetry collection Etiopia (1978) and his short story Ziutateaz (1976) are experiments in exactly this construction. Obabakoak is where the construction found its form.

The choice he made — to absorb and repurpose the traditions of world literature rather than to retreat into folkloric self-sufficiency — was a deliberate one, and it is thematised within the book itself. In the In Search of the Last Word section, characters argue explicitly about what a Basque literature should do, what stories are for, whether plagiarism is a sin or a strategy. The book is, among other things, a manifesto enacted as fiction.

The structure of the book

Obabakoak is composed of three parts of very different character, which is one reason it resists the label of novel while also resisting the label of short story collection. The English edition calls it a novel on its cover; most critics prefer story cycle or composite fiction; Atxaga himself has been deliberately evasive. The question is not pedantic: the structural ambiguity is part of what the book is doing.

Childhoods opens the book with five stories set in or connected to Obaba — the unnamed village in the Basque Country that Atxaga had used in his earlier work and that serves here as the gravitational centre around which the other material orbits. The stories vary widely in tone and technique, but they share a preoccupation with childhood perception and distortion: the world as it appears to a child who does not yet know how to interpret what he sees, whose categories are not yet formed, who lives in a condition of maximum susceptibility to the mythological. A boy faints in church and has a vision of a German girl whose address he is given — a vision that turns out to have been engineered by his father, trying to give him a reason to aspire beyond Obaba. A poor, friendless child who was the object of village cruelty disappears, and a white boar appears, attacking the people who had tormented him. A young schoolmistress in a remote outpost of the village lies awake at night listening for the train and the whistle of the driver she loves. Each story is formally accomplished and tonally distinct — comic, elegiac, uncanny — but together they establish Obaba as a place where the literal and the legendary are not clearly separated, where a child turning into a boar is not stranger than the fact of human cruelty.

Nine Words in Honour of the Village of Villamediana is the book’s most formally unusual section: a sixty-page episodic novella structured around nine Basque words, each word providing the heading for a chapter that explores a facet of village life in Villamediana, where the narrator has been posted as a teacher. It is quieter than the surrounding material, more documentary in spirit, but Atxaga uses the formal constraint — each chapter anchored to a single word — to explore the relationship between language and perception, between what can be named and what can be known. The section is about small-town suffocation and the loneliness of the educated outsider, but it is also about the word ostatu (inn, lodging place), the word malkoa (tear), the word izeba (aunt) — about the specific textures of knowledge that a language embeds in its vocabulary, and what is lost or preserved when you inherit that vocabulary or struggle to acquire it.

In Search of the Last Word takes up the second half of the book and is its most ambitious and most discussed section. The narrative frame is a journey: the unnamed narrator, having found an old school photograph, becomes obsessed with the question of whether a classmate called Albino Maria was deliberately deafened and driven mad by another boy who inserted a lizard into his ear — the lizard being one of the central folk-mythological images in Basque tradition, and the belief that a lizard can crawl through your ear to devour your brain being one that Atxaga evokes from deep in Barandiaran’s collected materials. The narrator and his companion travel toward Obaba and the house of the uncle from Montevideo, where a storytelling gathering is taking place; along the way, the journey is interrupted by story after story, told by the narrator, by his friend, by strangers they encounter, by the uncle and his guests.

The stories embedded in this journey are extraordinarily various: a retelling of the Arab fable of a man who flees to Isfahan to escape Death only to meet Death there — the same fable used by Somerset Maugham as the epigraph to Of Human Bondage, and by Atxaga deliberately and openly, since the section includes a chapter titled How to Plagiarise; an Amazon adventure in which a scientist’s wife searches for her husband deep in the jungle; mountain-climbing murder in the Himalayas; a medieval narrative; a love story. Characters with names from Germany, China, Senegal, Ireland appear alongside shepherds and schoolteachers from Obaba. The effect is of a library shelving its contents regardless of origin — Kafka beside a Basque folk tale, Chekhov beside a shepherd’s anecdote — which is exactly Atxaga’s point.

The question of whether the lizard entered Albino Maria’s ear — the mystery with which the narrator is obsessed — is never quite settled. The resolution, when it comes, is lateral and ironic. What the book finally offers in place of a last word is the suggestion that stories do not resolve: they accumulate, they nest inside each other, they circle without landing. The final short chapter, By Way of an Autobiography, returns to the Game of the Goose and fuses it with the history of Basque literature, the life of the writer, an image of a skull, an image of a prison. It is compressed, ambivalent, and formally very tight — the book’s most pointed statement of what it has been doing and the cost.

The village as mythological container

Atxaga has said that Obaba is an interior landscape, not a map reference. The village does not correspond to any specific Basque municipality, and its geography shifts slightly across the stories: it is in a valley, it has a church, it has a remote corner where the schoolmistress is posted, it has farmhouses and streams and forests. It is recognisably Basque in all its physical features without being pinned to any actual place, which gives it the freedom of a mythological location — like Yoknapatawpha, like Macondo — where the specific and the archetypal can coexist without contradiction.

The connection to Macondo is one that Atxaga has both invited and resisted. The comparison was inevitable in 1988: magical realism was the dominant frame through which European readers understood Latin American fiction, and Obabakoak had enough overlapping features — a remote village, the intermingling of the natural and the supernatural, an atmosphere of ancestral repetition — to seem to belong to that tradition. Atxaga resisted the connection not because it was wrong in every particular but because it obscured something important: that the mythology behind Obaba is specifically Basque, drawn from the materials that Barandiaran had spent his life documenting — Mari, the basajaun, the laminak, the lizard-beliefs, the sense of the landscape as inhabited and animate — and that this mythology belongs to a pre-Christian, chthonic, non-Indo-European tradition that García Márquez’s Catholic Caribbean world has no structural equivalent for.

The white boar of An Exposition of Canon Lizardi’s Letter is not a Márquezian figure. He is a figure recognisable from the Basque materials: the threshold being, the creature of the boundary between human and animal, natural and supernatural, living and dead. The lizard-in-the-ear is not an image Atxaga invented: it appears in Barandiaran’s fieldwork notes as a genuine folk belief, the lizard associated with the sugaar, the serpentine consort of Mari, a creature of the underground moving through the apertures of the human body. Obaba is magical because the Basque landscape is, within its own tradition, magical — not because Atxaga imported a mode from South America.

This is a distinction that matters for how you read the book. The magical elements in Obabakoak are not decorative or metaphorical in the first instance: they are the residue of a living belief system, treated with the same respectful attention that Barandiaran brought to his fieldwork, but refracted now through a literary form that can accommodate irony, distance, and self-consciousness alongside them. Atxaga does not believe in the lizard. He does believe in what the lizard means — the terror of penetration, the vulnerability of the mind, the sense that consciousness is not sealed against the world — and he uses the folk belief to carry that meaning without reducing it to allegory.

The plagiarism defence

One of the most provocative gestures in Obabakoak is the chapter titled How to Plagiarise. In it, a narrator proposes that the correct response to the impoverishment of a literary tradition is deliberate and open appropriation: take stories from other languages and other traditions, translate them into Basque, adapt them to the local idiom, claim them as your own. The argument is attributed to an old Basque writer who has worked out a theory of peripheral literature — the idea that writers working in traditions without strong modern precedents are not bound by the anxiety of influence in the same way, because there is no anxiety: the canon is not something that oppresses them, it is something they can simply use.

This is a serious argument as well as a comic one. Atxaga is working within a tradition that European literary theory has only recently caught up with: the idea, developed by theorists of minor literature following Deleuze and Guattari’s reading of Kafka, that writing from a marginal linguistic position has specific freedoms as well as specific constraints. The minor writer cannot afford the luxury of the major writer’s assumption that the tradition speaks for him; he has to make choices that the major writer does not have to make, because every choice in a minor literature is already political. But this also means he can poach freely — can take the Appointment in Samarra story, rename it, reset it in Isfahan, and include it without apology, because the act of plagiarism is itself a statement about the relationship between centre and periphery.

The intertextual debts in In Search of the Last Word are not hidden. Dante and Théophile Gautier, Kafka and A Thousand and One Nights, Chekhov and Balzac and Evelyn Waugh are all present, acknowledged in the text or in the chapter How to Plagiarise itself. What Atxaga is proposing is that Basque literature can take its place in a conversation that has been going on for centuries without it, not by imitating but by participating — by showing that the same stories can be told from here, in this language, by people whose landscape looks like this and whose grandparents believed in the lizard that eats your brain.

This is what the In Search of the Last Word section performs: a demonstration that world literature is not the property of the languages in which it was originally written, that the story travels, that Obaba is as legitimate a setting for the Appointment in Samarra as Damascus or Isfahan or London. The move is confident rather than defensive, and it is this confidence — the assurance of a writer who knows exactly what he is doing — that distinguishes Obabakoak from the category of marginal literature it might otherwise seem to occupy.

The translation question

The English reader of Obabakoak is reading a text that has passed through two acts of translation. Atxaga wrote the book in Basque, published it in 1988 with Editorial Erein in San Sebastián. A year later he translated it himself into Spanish — not straightforwardly, but making changes, restructuring some passages, altering emphases — and published the Spanish version with Ediciones B in 1989. Margaret Jull Costa’s English translation, published in 1992, is based on the Spanish self-translation, not on the Basque original.

This is a significant fact and worth sitting with. The English reader is reading Atxaga reading himself: a translation of a translation, with all the distances and choices that entails. Atxaga’s self-translation into Spanish was not a neutral act; it was a negotiation between two languages with a specific power relationship, the language of a suppressed minority being rendered into the language of the state that had suppressed it. The Spanish text is not identical to the Basque text. Scholars who have worked with both versions have noted differences in tone, in the treatment of certain culturally specific passages, in the handling of Basque words that are left untranslated in the Spanish version — words that then remain in the English, islands of Basque in an otherwise English-language sea: ostatu, malkoa, baserri. These untranslated words are not accidents. They are, as one scholar has put it, the gaps between what we think we know and what we cannot reduce to a soundbite — the points at which the text refuses to be fully absorbed into the majority language.

Margaret Jull Costa’s translation is excellent and widely praised. She has worked with Atxaga on several books, and her English is precise, assured, and tonally sensitive. What she cannot do — and does not try to do — is restore the Basque. The English reader should be aware that what they are reading is at two removes from the original, and that this double distance is not merely a regrettable pragmatic necessity but is itself part of the meaning: the book is about what happens to a language when it has to pass through a larger one in order to be heard.

The practical recommendation is to read the English translation, which is the only accessible version for most anglophone readers, while keeping this layering in mind. If you have Spanish, reading the author’s Spanish version alongside the English opens up an additional dimension: you can see Atxaga making choices about what to carry across and what to let go. If you are learning Basque, the original is a long-term goal — a text whose full register becomes available only when you can hear the Basque sentence, with its distinctive verb-final structure and its agglutinative morphology, moving under the English.

Peripheral literature and the world

The question of what it means to write from the periphery — to write in a language with no sisters anywhere on Earth, from a village that is not on most maps, toward a readership that does not yet exist — runs through Obabakoak as a sustained formal and thematic concern. It is not primarily a political concern: Atxaga is not writing a lament for Basque oppression or a nationalist manifesto. It is an aesthetic concern, and in the end a metaphysical one.

The peripheral writer’s situation is, Atxaga suggests, a clarified version of the universal writer’s situation. Every writer faces the question of how to make something local speak to something general; the peripheral writer faces it more acutely, because the local is more obviously local. Esteban Werfell, the elderly man who opens the book, surrounds himself with twelve thousand books in order to build a wall between himself and Obaba — and then writes his story from inside that wall, unable finally to leave the village even in imagination. The schoolmistress in the most remote corner of the valley lies awake listening for the train, which is her only connection to a larger world. The narrator of In Search of the Last Word travels toward Obaba even as he accumulates stories from across the globe. Everyone in the book is negotiating the same problem: how much of the world can you hold in a place this small?

The answer Obabakoak gives is: all of it, and none of it. The Game of the Goose ends at square sixty-three — at the centre, at the Mother Goose, at the point of arrival — but the game also loops back: land on certain squares and you return to the beginning, or are sent to the prison, or miss a turn. The autobiography of a Basque writer born in 1951 does not end in triumph. It ends in a skull, an image of the prison, a man in a top hat who represents something ominous and unresolved. The book does not conclude: it pauses, having made its demonstration, knowing that the demonstration will have to be made again.

This is the sense in which Obabakoak is irreducibly a product of its moment. It was written at the tail end of the Franco period’s aftermath, when Basque cultural survival felt genuinely precarious, when the existence of a serious Basque novel was itself a political fact. The lightness of touch with which Atxaga carries this weight is part of his achievement: the book does not feel like testimony or documentation, it feels like literature, in the fullest sense — a text that is interested in what stories are and how they work as much as it is interested in any particular story. But the political situation is the water it swims in, and the reader who ignores it misses something essential about why the plagiarism is funny and why the last word is never found.

How to read it

Read the prologue twice. The Game of the Goose and the hedgehog and the hundred books are not throwaways: they are the book’s coordinates. Return to the prologue after finishing By Way of an Autobiography and see whether it reads differently.

Read Childhoods slowly and resist the urge to explain the supernatural elements. The white boar is not a symbol. The vision in the church is not a hallucination. Atxaga asks you to hold these events in the same register as the mundane ones — the father’s trick, the schoolmistress’s longing — without forcing them into a rational frame. This is the mode of the book: a steady tonal level that contains both the magical and the ordinary without marking either as exceptional.

Read Nine Words with attention to the linguistic frame. The nine Basque words — malkoa, ostatu, izeba and the others — are doing something more than providing chapter headings. They are asking you to notice what a single word contains: a whole system of relationships, a history of use, a specific texture of knowledge. This is Atxaga’s argument about language in miniature.

When you arrive at In Search of the Last Word, read the embedded stories as full stories rather than interruptions of the main narrative. Mr. Smith, the Amazon story, is not a digression: it is a story about a man who follows his obsession to its conclusion and is destroyed by it, and it rhymes with the narrator’s own obsession with the lizard. The intertextual games — the Somerset Maugham story, How to Plagiarise, the Chekhov references — are easier to follow if you have some familiarity with the originals, but they work even if you do not: the important thing is to recognise that Atxaga is being deliberate, that the plagiarism is an argument, not a lapse.

Finally: the lizard. At the beginning of Young and Green, the opening story of In Search of the Last Word, the narrator recalls the childhood folk belief — never go to sleep on the grass, or a lizard will crawl in through your ear to eat your brain. The belief is comic and terrifying. By the end of the book, it has migrated from folklore to literature, from the field notes of Barandiaran to the interior of a narrative about the relationship between a writer and his language. The lizard is in your ear now. That is what reading Obabakoak feels like: something small and inexplicable moving inside your head, and the suspicion that it has been there for longer than you thought.

Availability

Obabakoak is published in English by Graywolf Press (Minneapolis), translated by Margaret Jull Costa. ISBN 978-1-55597-551-7. It is in print, available widely, and also available as an ebook. The Graywolf edition is the preferred text for anglophone readers; an earlier Pantheon edition (1992) and a Vintage paperback (1994) have the same translation.

The Basque original is published by Erein (San Sebastián) and available through Elkar and other Basque booksellers. The Spanish self-translation was published by Ediciones B and is available from Spanish booksellers; later editions are published by Alfaguara.

Atxaga’s other works in English translation, all by Margaret Jull Costa, include The Lone Man (1996), The Lone Woman (1999), The Accordionist’s Son (2007), and Seven Houses in France (2011). The Accordionist’s Son is the most substantial of these and the natural next step after Obabakoak: a longer, more directly historical novel set across the Basque Country during the Civil War and its aftermath. Atxaga’s website, atxaga.eus, maintains a bibliography and recent work.

The 2005 film adaptation of Obabakoak, directed by Montxo Armendáriz, is available in Spanish with subtitles and is worth seeing not for its fidelity to the book — it inevitably simplifies — but for the visual register it establishes for Obaba: the light, the farmhouses, the mountain weather. It makes the landscape argument concrete.

Previous in Stream Three: Mitologia Vasca — José Miguel de Barandiaran, 1960 Next in Stream Three: Elizen Arteko Biblia — the Basque interconfessional Bible, 1994