Ese idioma raro y poderoso: Once decisiones cruciales que un escritor vasco está obligado a tomar by Iban Zaldua (review)

Sometimes refreshing winds blow from the realm of Basque culture and literature. These aize berriak (‘new winds’), when they reach us, do so thanks to the wit of the artist. Iban Zaldua presents one of those works in Ese idioma raro y poderoso: a witty, informative, and concise reading on Basque prose produced in the last decades, mostly since the late 1980s. The purpose of the book is twofold. First, it informs the average Basque and Spanish reader about the wealth of prose fiction produced in Basque since the late 1980’s. Second, Zaldua gives his informed opinion on the realities of Basque literature, such as language choice, market size, linguistic history, literary system (chapters 1, 2, and 8), political activism, social tensions (chapters 3, 4, and 5), and literary tradition (chapter 9), among others. Given that Zaldua’s choices are based on his personal readings over the years, he does not pretend to make a normative or exhaustive assessment, but instead encourages other people to explore Basque prose and authors for themselves.

As a history professor, Zaldua could have chosen an academic format and tone for his book; nevertheless, he decided to approach the reader as a reader himself. Zaldua creates an attractive journal of his personal readings in the Basque language, Euskara. Stepping down from his status as an academic and a writer is not easy, but Zaldua succeeds in narrowing the distance between his informed opinion as a specialist and the average reader—who in fact knows almost nothing about Basque literature—by writing in Spanish, explaining that he himself learned Basque in school (rather than at home), and presenting the book as the product of an amateur.

Zaldua accomplishes the impossible: in his hands, a two hundred-page book of specialized literary criticism becomes an entertaining, engaging essay—I could not put it down for two days. The recipe for this successful essay is threefold: humor, awareness, and knowledge. As Zaldua states, the publication of Bernardo Atxaga’s Obabakoak (1988) was the turning point at which literature in Basque entered the international republic of letters. In fact, his way of dealing with questions such as literary tradition, colonial and colonized languages, marginal and central identities, reminds me of the many humoristic paths opened by Atxaga in Obabakoak and elsewhere, but Zaldua does not focus on the literature of this canonical Basque writer. Ese idioma raro y poderoso centers on prose literature produced by a broad array of writers, mostly after 1988 and in Euskara, the majority of it now available in translation.

It is not only through his use of humor that Zaldua demonstrates his pedagogical knowledge of recent Basque literary trends. A common thread woven throughout the book is a discussion of certain decisions that Basque writers must make. The eleven decisions provide the sequential structure to the chapters of the book, and they are all important; but the crescendo rises to the apex of an answer to a n egative critique of the Basque literary system written by Matías Múgica, Debile principium: Libelo sobre la cultura vasca (1998). I remember this booklet and the strong impression that it made on many people at the time. Múgica’s book was regarded, within Basque culture, as an act of treason. One decade after Atxaga’s internationally successful book, Múgica portrayed Basque literature as a scam, supported by public funds from the government of Euskadi. Here, Zaldua’s response to Múgica’s essay is that there is worthwhile literature to be read in the Basque language, and that institutional support is bleak, at best. Yet Zaldua is cautious about triumphalist claims. He asserts that he is not convinced by big concepts such as “Basque literary system” (127–29), or “Basque cultural system” (143–49) that are being used by other critics and journalists...