Troubling Silences: On Bernardo Atxaga’s ‘Nevada Days’

My aunt has a story about Bernardo Atxaga, the Basque Country’s most read and translated author. She lives in a village of scattered houses and rolling hills that faces the Bay of Biscay and the Cantabrian Sea to which it belongs. That day, she happened to be in a neighboring province’s capital. Here is how she tells the story: She was at a café with a friend, seated near the window, when her friend pointed across the street. “Look,” the friend said. Bernardo Atxaga was walking into the post office. “It’s the writer.”

That’s the story.

I was expecting more, too.

But such an anecdote, as brief as it is, speaks to the position Bernardo Atxaga holds in Basque society. Like Euskera, the isolate and pre-Indo-European language that he writes in, Atxaga’s fame may be unique. It was a short story collection through which he rose to eminence. won the Spanish National Prize in 1988 and has been translated into 32 languages. Since then, he by and by , both from Hispabooks. Before these, there was ’s , with ’s coming this month and by arriving to our shores next year. Nevertheless, it is Atxaga’s stories of village life, with its joys and nightmares and magic and the ways in which the political interrupts and informs it, that, for the last 30 years, have defined Basque literature for so much of the world’s readership.