Additional information
by Gabriel Aresti (Author), Amaia Gabantxo (Translator), Jon Kortazar (Introduction by)
Gabriel Aresti (1933-1975) was the poetic voice of both resistance and renewal for a generation and beyond of Basques in the 1960s and until his untimely death at the age of forty-one. The collections included in the present work Downhill (1959, Maldan behera in Basque) and Rock & Core (1964, Harri eta herri in Basque) represent two distinct periods in his poetry: the former an epic dreamlike and visionary tale of descent and ascent, death and rebirth, a symbolist treatise on resurrection told through the voice of a superman an Ego. In a complete stylistic about-turn meanwhile the latter is a robust, gritty, and direct tract socially conscious poetry written in a clear, comprehensible form that plays on the metaphor of stone and rock as resistance, endurance. Amaia Gabantxo's stunning translation of these two seminal works from the original Basque, the first time they have been presented in English, brings the urgency and force of the originals to life and will take readers on an unforgettable journey deep into the rock, the core of Basque culture. It may be a bumpy ride at times, but the rewards will live long in the memory.
Author Biography
Gabriel Aresti was born in Bilbao in 1933. He came from a
Basque-speaking family that did not transmit the language to its
children, obliging him to learn it for himself from scratch as a young
adult. After studying com-merce, he earned a modest living as an
accountant, trying to support his wife and three daughters on fairly
meager means. Outside his professional and domestic life, and alongside
Euskara (the Basque language), his other lifelong obsession was poetry.
He pub-lished his first poems at the age of twenty--one but really came
to the fore in the 1960s with landmark works that revolutionized the
genre in Euskara. His was a socially aware voice that believed
passionately in the transformational capacity of poetry. A clearly urban
poet, with the industrial city of Bilbao central to his work, he
nevertheless fre-quently invoked predominantly rural Basque traditions,
such as the significance of bert-solaritza (oral improvised poetry). In
addi-tion, he founded publishing houses and col-laborated on both
theater and music proj-ects. He was one of the principal champions of
establishing a standardized form of Basque in the face of significant
opposition from predominantly traditionalist sectors in the world of
Basque philology. And politi-cally, he challenged both the conservative
face of Basque nationalism and the brutal re-alities of the Franco
dictatorship. He died prematurely in 1975, but his legacy runs deep in
Basque culture to this day.
