Obabakoak

By way of an autobiography

I’VE HEARD IT SAID THAT, like folk tales, the Game of the Goose represents a particular view of life, that it is a description of the tasks and the days we are allotted on this earth, a description and a metaphor.

What this view of life is can be seen by anyone familiar with the board and the rules of the game, for both the board and the rules show that, basically, life is a journey full of difficulties in which Chance and Free Will intervene in equal measure, a journey in which, despite those difficulties, and as long as the dice — or the fates — fall pretty much in our favor, it is possible to advance and safely reach that final pond where the Great Mother Goose awaits us.

The player just setting out on his journey can hope for nothing better than for his counter to land on one of the squares bearing a goose, because that player can then jump from goose to goose and so keep advancing.

There is nothing worse, on the other hand, than to land on squares like number forty-two, the maze, or fifty-two, the prison, or fifty-eight, bearing a skull. Landing on any of those squares means a delay or even the postponement or abandonment of the journey.

I should say, in passing, that it is not insignificant that the game metaphor of which I speak revolves around the goose and not some other animal. And that’s because the goose can walk on the earth, swim in water, and fly through the air, which is why tradition has chosen it to symbolize wisdom, accomplishment, perfection.

The message of the game, therefore, is at once simple and difficult to grasp. It is to do things as well as possible, day by day, goose by goose; only such continuity can guarantee ultimate wisdom and perfection.

But let’s go back to the beginning and remember that the Game of the Goose can also be the description of a life, for example, the life of a Basque writer born in 1951.

And, of course, one notices coincidences the moment one looks at the board. Because a modern-day Basque writer, that is, a writer who began writing in euskera sometime in the seventies, bears a striking resemblance to that adolescent who appears on the first of the sixty-three squares on the board and who has as his only baggage a bundle.

Those of us who are just beginning to be translated into other languages, set off with very little baggage. We looked into our bundle and found only five, at most ten, books written in the language we were trying to write in. I read Gabriel Aresti when I was twenty; three years later, by the time I was twenty-three, I had read all the Basque literature that the dictator had not managed to burn.

This does not mean — as has so often been said — that we had no tradition, unless one is using the word tradition in some ancient, obsolete sense. Because, as we know, nowadays, in the middle of the twentieth century — and this is one of the characteristics of the modern age — the whole of the literary past, be it from Arabia, China, or Europe is at our disposal; in shops, in libraries, everywhere. Thus any writer is free to create his own tradition. He can read The Arabian Nights one day and Moby Dick or Kafka’s Metamorphosis the next… and those works, the spirit that they communicate, will immediately pass into his own life and work as a writer.

These days nothing can be said to be peculiar to one place or person. The world is everywhere and Euskal Herria is no longer just Euskal Herria but — as Celso Emilo Ferreiro would have said—“the place where the world takes the name of Euskal Herria.”

So I would never say that we present-day Basque writers lack a tradition; I would say that what we lacked was an antecedent, that we lacked books from which we could learn to write in our own language. Tom Thumb never passed our way and so we had no trail of bread crumbs to lead us back home.

This is a matter of some importance, and one which, as many will have guessed, has to do with literary language. Because, naturally, to write is an artificial act and that artifice, which is literary language, is something that develops over time and through the labors of many people, adapting itself to the expressive needs of each age.

One of the consequences of those labors is, to give one example, the invisibility of certain words. When a reader reads a novel with a lot of dialogue, he probably doesn’t even see the constant repetition in the text of “he said,” “he replied,” and “he retorted.” The words are there but the same thing happens with them as happens with the trees on his favorite walk: He has read the words so many times, he doesn’t even notice them.

Writing in euskera, I have no problems with “he said” (esan) or with “he replied” (erantzun) but I begin to have problems with “he retorted” (arrapostu) because this word is not familiar to the reader, because it’s a tree he recognizes but that, nonetheless, he has never seen on this particular walk. So the Basque writer knows that his reader will stop at that word, that it will be a stumbling block.

I would say that the first duty of literary language is to be unobtrusive. And that’s our weak point: Because we lack antecedents, there are not enough books to create the habit of reading in Basque. And in the sixties we had an even harder time.

However, like every adolescent artist, the young Basque writer had enough energy to cover the first squares of the journey almost without noticing what he was doing, without realizing what he had gotten himself into. Moreover, he felt he had a lot of things to say. Pío Baroja had not said it all.

Under that first impulse, the adolescent who set out on his journey with his bundle over his shoulder got at least as far as square number nine, as far as the second goose: He published the odd story (I did in the anthology Euskal Literatura, 1972), the odd short novel (Ziutateaz, 1976), and even the odd book of poems (Etiopia, 1978).

But that brief experience only served to make him realize the limitations of his baggage. He immediately felt like the boy on square ten who is shown sailing in a little paper boat. The moment of uncertainty had arrived.

Nevertheless, quite a lot of us survived the paper boat test and managed to get past square ten, trying, in the first instance, to reach square twenty-four, the one showing a hare reading a book, and then square forty-three, where a venerable old man is doing the same as the hare: reading a book and taking the air.

These squares are now within our reach. To put it another way, we now have a literary market, which, among other things, enables writers like myself to live off the royalties from such works as Bi anai (1984) and Obabakoak (1988).

The leap — from square ten to square forty-three — has been possible thanks to the help of various geese along the way. Gabriel Aresti, whom I mentioned before, was one of them, Luis Mitxelena another. They both worked so that we, the younger writers, would have a common literary language, the so-called euskera batua, so that we could exchange our bundle for a decent suitcase.

The journey continues and I think most of us believe that things will turn out well.

There are still fears, though. I look at the board and I see square fifty-two, the prison; I see square fifty-eight, the skull; I see, right on square sixty-two, the one before Great Mother Goose’s pond, a sinister man dressed in green and wearing a top hat… and I feel uneasy.

But we will keep trying, we will keep writing. The reason the board is there is for us to continue playing.

— BERNARDO ATXAGA

BERNARDO ATXAGA was born in Gipuzkoa in Spain in 1951 and lives in the Basque Country, writing in Basque and Spanish. He is a prizewinning novelist and poet, whose books The Accordionist’s Son, The Lone Man, and The Lone Woman have won critical acclaim in Spain and abroad.

MARGARET JULL COSTA has translated many Portuguese, Spanish, and Latin American writers, among them Javier Marías, Fernando Pessoa, and José Saramago.