“Since the National Award, I have been in a kind of continuous Book Day; I do not stop”Pilar Barco
“Each book is special, but it is true that this one has a shine that differentiates it. We have to celebrate what is happening with him because the writer’s life is not usually like that,” says Patxi Zubizarreta. On the table are together, side by side, Zerria (Erein), with whom the author has managed the National Children’s and Youth Literature, the Euskadi in the same modality and the Xabier Lizardi Prizeand Porcus (Alandar-Edelvives), a translation into Spanish that has been made by Itziar Ortuondo with the “company” of the writer himself.
“Paul Auster and Milan Kundera said that translation is, perhaps, the greatest reward for a writer. In that sense, I am very satisfied“, he points out, before adding that “for our culture, every work that is published in other languages is a celebration. Step by step, this caravan of literature in Basque that we are involved in is reaching unexpected places.”
“On a social and political level, it is cold that is difficult to bear. “Literature, in that sense, shelters us and offers us a little fire.”
He says it in one of the few moments that, for some time now, he has been able to stay in Gasteiz. Above all, obtaining the National Prize for Children’s and Young People’s Literature has altered the agenda in an important way. Since its concession, “I am in a process in which I still live like a type of jet lag, like when you come from New York to the Madrid airport and your soul has not yet arrived. I’m a little lost,” she smiles.
Assuming that “I am lucky enough to enjoy everyday life”, the truth is that “since the National, I have been in a kind of continuous Book Day. I have not stopped and now I return to the meetings, to the fairs… and countless trips have arisen.” The agenda is complicated. But that’s not a problem. Quite the opposite. Zubizarreta repeats on more than one occasion the need to value literature and the meeting point that it represents between people. Beyond the fact that everything that is happening catches him “with nothing on his hands. I don’t have the need to write”. Of course, “I’m reading a lot on trips.”
A “hard topic”
In those comings and goings that take him away from the capital of Alava, Zubizarreta already carries a Porcus that presents to the public “a hard, caustic and uncomfortable topic”, a story made more than three years ago, “although since I am talking about it so much, it is still fresh for me.” The author remembers that “Luis Mateo Díez says that literature does not offer us a balm to heal us, but rather it shows us what we have. And what we have is a very complicated and cold world”.
“For our culture, every work that is published in other languages is a celebration. “Literature in Basque reaches unexpected places”
In this sense, knowing that “on a social and political level, it is cold that is difficult to bear,” Zubizarreta defends that “literature, in that sense, shelters us and offers us a little fire. Kafka said that a book has to be like an ax that breaks the ice inside us. It is the objective in this case, also counting on a few small doses of poetry”.
Thus, within these pages, we talk about disenchantment, climate change, the need to fight for what we believe in, the human condition… All of this starting from the character of a glaciologist who begins an investigation after finding two bodies in a glacier that is melting. That leads him to know a story that has a real basis, that of a siege “that causes a kind of infanticide in a village in Iparralde”. Of a pig that approaches the kitchen of a house, where it overturns the crib in which a child is, a baby that it bites, causing the child to bleed and die. The animal is judged, condemned and executed as if it were a human being.
“The key question is what differentiates us from animals. The answer is that almost nothing, if not culture, art, literature,” says Zubizarreta, who has once again brought this work into Spanish with Ortuondo, “a literary accomplice who has accompanied me since my first books”.
Patxi Zubizarreta Dorronsoro with the copies of ‘Zerria’ and its current translation into Spanish, ‘Porcus’.
In fact, the author returns to that idea of the caravan. A book is not just about one person. That is why he mentions in a special way the editor with whom he has worked in Porcus, Tower Plainsas well as the writer Manu López Gaseni, who has also contributed his perspective to a translation that is already available and that, in this case, does not have the contribution of the illustration that the original does have.
