REVIEW: Bernardo Atxaga - Sin City Through Basque Eyes • reviewsphere

2019 is the year when Scotland goes Basque. Unsurprisingly, therefore, this year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival features several events related to Basque-speaking authors, among them Bernardo Atxaga in conversation with his translator Margaret Jull Costa. This informal discussion, which was subtitled ‘Sin City Through Basque Eyes’ and was chaired by the British writer and translator Daniel Hahn, was supported by the Extepare Basque Institute.

The Basque Country, for those of you who don’t know, is a land straddling northern Spain and southern France, and its native inhabitants speak a language totally unrelated to any other in the world: Euskera, or Basque. Atxaga is one of the most famous living Basque writers, but refreshingly, rather than seeming arrogant as a result of his success, he comes across as friendly and down-to-earth. He evidently struggled a little speaking in English, which he apologised for, but he was actually remarkably coherent for the most part, with some help from Costa with the occasional word.

The focus of the talk was Atxaga’s new novel, Nevada Days, which draws on the time Atxaga spent living in Reno with his family. Atxaga described how he was dazzled by all the casinos, and left bewildered by the small differences that arise from living in a foreign country, such as the fact that it is rare in the US to take a walk somewhere, rather than just drive.

Atxaga then read an extract of his novel in the original Basque, followed by a reading by Costa of her English translation. Oddly, Costa doesn’t actually speak Basque, so she translates from the Spanish version made by Atxaga and his wife. She confessed that this makes her feel like a bit of a phony, but Atxaga said he doesn’t mind this, admitting that Basque is an extremely difficult language to translate.

Atxaga went on to stress that novels, in his opinion, should not be about their authors, but rather their characters. Copies of Nevada Days, as well as his earlier work Seven Houses in France, can be found in the Book Festival Bookshop. His 1988 short story collection Obabakoak, meanwhile, was in 2005 turned into a Spanish-language movie directed by Montxo Armendáriz: Obaba.