Basque seems like drawing done by a butterfly wing. It is interesting how different each language can act. For the first time I wrote both versions, Basque and Spanish, simultaneously. I completed my last novel, Life Before Dolphins, in New York. Would it have been the same book if it was written in Dublin? He wrote it in English in a French-speaking city. New York gives me a sense of shelter to write in Basque, provides me with the distance and the freedom that maybe I could not have had in my country. I think writing in Basque is contributing to a culturally biodiverse planet, a multilingual one. It is the smallest language among those that I speak. It is my mother tongue and I have developed my writing career in Basque. I live in New York and I create mostly in Basque. We were Basque-Spanish bilingual children during school years, and now, living in New York, English is our third language. My whole life I have been living between languages, going from one to another on the same day or even in the same conversation. So, I can say that translations made me a writer. The bookseller, a middle-aged man who introduced worldwide music and literature into our lives, was responsible for my early interest in Raymond Carver, Sylvia Plath, Italo Calvino, Anna Akhmatova, Natalia Ginzburg, Yehuda Amichai… They were all translated authors. There was a tiny good bookshop in my hometown. I had to find outside what I could not get at home. Of course, I liked writers from my community, but there were not so many books published in Basque at that time. Reading was like talking to friends from all over the world, opening windows to other cultures. I loved books, especially translated literature. I was a shy boy, and books were my closest friends. That was our deal, “I will go to the doctor as long as you buy me a book.” On our way home, Mom used to take me to the bookshop next to the doctor’s house and treat me to a book. I have to admit that visiting the doctor was not so bad after all. Why don’t you talk to him?” The reason was that his rudeness scared me, and I took shelter in my mother tongue. “Don Antonio will think you don’t understand,” my mother barked. My mother translated the conversation between the doctor and the patient. During consultations, he used to ask me questions and take notes. Antonio was a rural doctor sent far away from Valladolid, Central Spain, to a tiny Basque-speaking fishing village. Maybe my dreams come already translated.”ĭon Antonio was the physician during my childhood in Ondarroa, my hometown in the Basque Country. My answer is, “I do not know, it depends. “What language do you dream in?” When you are a multilingual person, there is always somebody who asks you this question.
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