After a week of rather frenzied paper writing, I finally begin to see the other side and have time for some other reading. I picked up Bernardo Atxaga's Obabakoak on my adviser's recommendation. The book was initially published in Basque and translated by the author into Spanish. The latter form gives space for a series of comments on the withdrawn state of the Basque language over centuries -- only to "awake" in the 20th century. Its subsequent translation rely on the Spanish text. Atxaga explains the status of his language and culture through the image of a hedgehog, burrowed deeply into the ground, avoiding influence and (linguistic) contact for centuries. Yet this withdrawn state does not gesture towards some type of hollowed-out vacant center. Instead, this reading of Basque suggests more activity at its central core than the reader could immediately surmise.
Born, they say, in the megalithic age,
it survived, this stubborn language, by withdrawing,
by hiding away like a hedgehog in a place,
which, thanks to the traces it left behind there,
the world named the Basque Country or Euskal Herria. ("Prologue" Obabakoak)
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