We speak a strange language. Its verbs,
the structure of its relative clauses,
the words it uses to designate ancient things
- rivers, plants, birds -
have no sisters anywhere on Earth.
A house is etxe, a bee erle, death heriotz.
The sun of the long winters we call eguzki or eki;
- as you´d expect - called eguzki or eki
(it´s a strange language, but not that strange).
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.
Yet its isolation could never have been absolute
-cat is katu, pipe is pipa, logic is lojika-
rather, as the prince of detectives would have said,
the hedgehog, my dear Watson, crept out of its hiding place
(to visit, above all, Rome and its progeny).
The language of a tiny nation, so small
you cannot even find in the map,
it never strolled in the gardens of the Court
or past the marble statues of government buildings;
in four centuries it produced only a hundred books...
the first in 1545; the most important in 1643;
The Calvinist New Testament in 1571;
the complete Catholic Bible around 1860.
Its sleep was long, its biography brief
(but in the twentieth century the hedgehog awoke).
Bernardo Atxaga.
Prologue to the English translation of Obabakoak
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