Obabakoak through withdrawn languages

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  The latter form gives space for a series of comments on the withdrawn state of the Basque language over centuries -- only to "awake" in the 20th century.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  Yet this withdrawn state does not gesture towards some type of hollowed-out vacant center.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)

The Retomada pushing re-reading of the Cinema Novo

There is a lot of criticism on the key changes from the Cinema Novo to the Retomada, focusing on the change of style, as opposed to what might remain the same.  I am amazed, for example, at how (historically) later rereading alters our understanding of the original text (there is amazing work on the various centuries of reading Cervantes, for example).  This is not to say it is changed or re-written (contra Borges, et al.), but rather becomes altered through new contact(s).  These new contacts should not only be used to point out naive affirmations and compositions by embittered critics, but also bring back to life a series of sparks now laying dormant, away from our dismissive gazes. 

This footnote from my paper on landscape in the Cinema Novo and Retomada ignited the post:

While it is impossible to give defining statements of the Retomada, many films take up tropes from the Cinema Novo and change up the style or tone.  As we shall see in this paper, the sertão ceases to be a utopia (as in no-place, sin topos) and becomes regional, global and eventually nonlocal.

--The Prose of the World--

A moment ago, as in a kaleidoscope, a new landscape was suddenly offered to the animal’s action, given certain factual conditions from which he profited.

Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World

Are these "factual conditions" mental, material or something else entirely?

Vallejo on May Day

Reading César Vallejo certainly helps me feel a distant spark of revolutionary zeal.  Yet, as I mentioned in my previous post, I am not sure it is all affirmative.  "Los mineros salieron de la mina" in Poemas humanos is certainly captures another event of human creation.  This creation is again twofold.  In his Cátedra edition, Julio Vélez remarks on these impressive lines:

creadores de la profundidad,
saben, a cielo intermitente de escalera,
bajar mirando para arriba,
saben subir mirando para abajo. (20-24)

Snapping up the historical significance of these lines, Vélez mentions Eisenstein's influence on Vallejo's poetry.  Sure.  Elsewhere Vallejo writes of Eisenstein's work: "[el] gran recreador del mundo, la fuerza de las fuerzas, el acto de los actos".  Vélez draws out that the miners create their own consciousness.  Yet the poem is consistently obsessed with geological movements, descending, ascending, carving up and drawing out of the earth.  I would argue that this humanism is (again) not just about humans, but about the act of carving into the earth to sustain human industry.  As I have mentioned in previous posts, affirming Neyrat's (anti)humanism, humanism consistently requires an outside, a collection (or landscape) of nonhuman actors.  Marxist humanism as the act of acts certainly does not remain merely a human act.  Bedrock is also actively playing into the formation of human consciousness.