Elizabeth Macklin

A gorgeous Basque Country slideshow in English.

A third solo album by Rafa Rueda, of Zaharregia fame. (See below for a track or two)

On YouTube: Kirmen Uribe's "Lagun bat"/"One Friend (Children's Song)" live from the Bowery Poetry Club - with (see below)...

Zaharregia, txikia agian Too Old, Too Small, Maybe When poet Kirmen Uribe came to New York in the early spring of 2003, the experience set off thought trains that over the next half dozen months crystallized in this CD/book from the Basque Country. Over the days they spent in the city, Uribe and the singer/songwriter Mikel Urdangarin and fellow-musicians Bingen Mendizabal and Rafa Rueda, did six concert/readings in nearly as many days that took them to the Bowery Poetry Club, an Upper West Side museum (the Roerich), Greenwich Village bars (Cornelia St., Ear Inn), Greenpoint, Brooklyn (the NY Euskal Etxea), and the South Bronx—in Basque, English, and (at CUNY-Hostos Community College on the Grand Concourse BX) Spanish. After one of the readings, Uribe wrote later, the poet Phillis Levin told him that written Basque, with all its X's, "looks like a treasure map. If you just forget all the rest of the letters and focus in on the X, it looks as if you could find out where the treasure is." Recounting this later, Uribe wrote, "I thought it was the most beautiful thing one could say about a language one didn’t know, that it’s the map to a treasure." With illustrations by the artist Mikel Valverde (who had come along for the ride, with sketchbook) and with English versions by Elizabeth Macklin. Click to order "Zaharregia, txikia agian" ("Too Old, Too Small, Maybe").

And now for something completely different....

Tracks from Zuhaitz okerretan gora noa (I'm Climbing Up Crooked Trees) and then some.

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The absolutely independent 2007 CD by Mikel Urdangarin, Anek idatzi dit zutaz (Ane Wrote Me About You):

... Click to hear the title song. Izeneko abestia entzun dezakezu.

And: Nahiadance, the music-video project of the director Arkaitz Basterra, two musicians from Elurretan & others

And: Aizkorripetik Euskarazko blog ederrenetako bat. (Out from Under Aizkorri A beautiful blog in Basque.)

With Kirmen Uribe at the PEN Necessary Translations: Language Is the Homeland reading, October 2003 Too Old, Too Small, Maybe / A Way to Look at the World is noted on the English PEN website, with poems by Uribe and Urdangarin, and an essay on freedoms of expression in the Basque Country by the translator.

Read a poem from Circumference

Two poems by Kirmen Uribe in Open City

Freedom of expression In February 2003, the Spanish courts shut down the only Basque-language daily newspaper, Egunkaria. In just four months, a new Basque paper is on Basque Country newsstands and online.

The Balde on the Internet

Beste link pare bat
Other Basque links

The International Basque Organization for Human Rights
Some of the issues, in English

Elkarri:
Working toward peace in the Basque Country

Human-rights news at Amnesty International

Lorea Oar-Arteta—a Basque artist in Bilbao

"Who Put the Code in the Dagoeneko?"

Who Put the Code in the Dagoeneko?

An ongoing study, with audiovisuals and show-and-tell, of a multithousand-year-old language and of how it looks & sounds today, in human-size version(s).

In addition to Macklin's 2001 title essay, Barrow Street ran a bilingual "found poem" called "What Does It Mean?"—"Zer esan nahi ote du?" that would have been in Basque, but the title ended up English-only. ("What to say, what to say..."—to quote Phillis Levin, for whom see also next page in Written Work.) For Barrow Street's Fall 2001 issue, click here.

Ta jarraitzen dugu / And so we go on

The new single from Rafa Rueda's Zuhaitz okerretan gora noa.
A DEBT TO PHOTOGRAPHS "The truth is, old photograph, this is the last time I will look at you let’s settle our account once and for all. Rolling thunder does not scare me any more darkness does not impede my sleep, even my memory has started to light up the pathways. The moment will arrive, alone again, nevertoday, impossible I will realise, perhaps in time to wake up. Stay here old photograph stay in this old bunk next to tributes and cracks. Farewell they are calling me I will leave slowly, step by step, I will lift the latch and leave for newly metalled roads, the fountains of my friends, the photos where black and white stand out just like intense colors.”—Lyrics by Gotzon Barandiaran. ©Rafa Rueda, Zuhaitz okerretan gora noa, ISBN 8436039068803 (Videoclip by Alphax.)

Erregea = The King
Gora Rafa Rueda Erregea!

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Gora Agian!

The trailer of "Agian (Maybe)," a 2006 documentary on at least some of all this, by Arkaitz Basterra (with a journal entry by Kirmen Uribe). And for my personal (favorable) opinion of it please see:

movies.nytimes.com/movie/376894/Maybe

"LOTURAK," the first single from Rafa Rueda's Zuhaitz okerretan gora noa— "LINKS": "We tie young bushes down with small stakes. Fearful that they will not grow straight. They try to escape but they can do nothing. They are not able to grow with their imperfections. they cannot do anything to free themselves from their stakes. We have all acted like these bushes at some point. We like seeing twisted trunks on the pages of books, but never in our garden. We are not able to grow with our imperfections. we cannot do anything to free ourselves from our stakes." ©Rafa Rueda, Zuhaitz okerretan gora noa, ISBN 8436039068803 (Videoclip by Mikel Clemente.)

And live, November 2008:

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Translation

The poet was trying to teach me
the flavor of a pending word,
a word for a dangling kind

of awaiting, contained, he said,
in the very sound of the word,
for which we had nothing easy.

Casting about, casting out and finding
only an orange, bobbing; another;
a purple for which we had no rhyme.

This kind was not “impatient”; no Southern
biding. A slow fast toward food. Wasted no time.
And so I had to find another way of conveying

a long, long moment of waiting
alert to catch a slight sign, any day
the whole length of our wait.

—Elizabeth Macklin

From the Winter 2008 issue of Epiphany. To order, click here.

Not so recent news,
but still ...

Poetry at About.com featured "Too Old, Too Small, Maybe" as among the ten best poetry CDs of 2004: "listenable, danceable, and after you’ve read [Kirmen Uribe’s] simple, devastating poems, unforgettable."

In the hopes of forestalling misunderstanding, a short list of Basque national poets (twentieth-century division):

* Bernardo Atxaga (1951--) - "The Tale of the Hedgehog" and two other poems in English translations by Amaia Gabantxo.

* Gabriel Aresti (1933-1975) - Think Walt Whitman.... Many of Aresti’s poems have been set to music (see the Rogelio Botanz album "Tiempo," for one).

* JoxanAnton Artze (1939--) - For his poem "Txoria txori" (The Bird as a Bird) as a song, see Mikel Laboa or

Joan Baez.

* Xabier Lete (1944--) - Alas, can’t find anything at all in English.

* Joseba Sarrionandia (1958--) - "Hau da ene ondasun gutia" - A selected poems, with a CD of some that have been set to music, by 16 artists (with Spanish, French, English, and German translations).

* Miren Agur Meabe (1962--) - "The Code of the Skin" - a selection of English versions by Amaia Gabantxo.

* Pako Aristi (1963--) - Eight poems in English (trans. Jain Alkorta).

* Gerardo Markuleta (1963--) - Seven poems in English. (See "Extracts") Translated by Iñaki Mendiguren and Sarah J. Turtle.

And his "Ez esan ezetz" (Don't Say No), as sung by Mikel Urdangarin.

The list could go on (since there is, obviously, no single Basque National Poet).

Selected Works

Meanwhile Take My Hand: Poems by Kirmen Uribe
A translation from the Basque, published by Graywolf Press

Poems

You've Just Been Told.
"These poems parse life's sentences.... [They are] poems of abrupt perception and rigorous lyricism." —New York Times Book Review.

A Woman Kneeling in the Big City
"[Her] city is surely the world, and the posture of kneeling surely implies reverence.." —Mary Oliver.

Several essays

"Who Put the Code in the Dagoeneko?" (2001)
A wander through Europe's oldest language, with a "found poem," called "What Does It Mean?"

"It's a Woman's Prerogative to Change Her Mind" (2000)