Words of Idoia Santamaría when collecting the Euskadi Translation Award
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Good afternoon.
1. The first task is to thank you. And I have reason. First of all, the jury for rewarding my work in the translations that were published in 2019.
My second thanks to the correctors I have had next to me in the translation process: Xabier Olarra, Maialen Berasategi and Juan Garzia; without their correction, recommendation, comment and increase the result would be different. The working phase of these translators is very important both the work done by the correctors and the work that we then see and learn with them, and the resulting distillation always improves the result. If the work of translators is, by definition, the shadow of the author, the correctors tend to be in an even darker, more diffuse corner. But there are excellent professionals, and we all have a lot to learn from them.
I would also like to thank Beñat Sarasola, especially for the rigorous and always pertinent literary recommendations that sought a model for preparing the translation.
I would also like to thank Elhuyar's colleagues, and especially the team of translators and correctors at Elhuyar, where I have sharpened the pencil for the last twenty years so that I can then deal with literary works.
And of course, those at home, because my obsessions and crises in the translation process have led me to patience.
2. It has been a privilege for me to immerse myself in the world of Bachmann and, by the way, in Central Europe for a few months, and every evening, at the end of my usual work in Elhuyar, to be able to go from Usurbil to Klagenfurt and Vienna to another language and to another country. Bachmann, Austrian, lived in many European cities and spent most of his years in Rome. He was often asked why he lived in Rome if all his stories were located in Austria and normally in Vienna. He said that nothing more to enter his office in Rome was in Vienna and that in Vienna he was fine because he lived in Rome, because without distance he would not be able to write.
I would also sign these words. However, I did not live in Rome, but in San Sebastian, but I was content to go all the evenings from Usurbil to Klagenfurt or Vienna; then in the middle of the night, like the Cinderella, I went home to get to Usurbil in time the next day. It is nice to live in another language, even for hours, and be aware that you are someone else in that language and that your voice also has another tone. In most cases we talk about the target language, the Basque language, in our case, here. For once, I want to claim the original: to live somewhere else with other words and be able to go with them to other places. You don't pay cash. And that's one of the privileges of literary translation: founding in the original, fleeing with the original, guessing in the original unpublished nuances, understanding more than ever an irony, naming a smell, believing that you live in Vienna…
3. I want to end with a quote. It is from Anjel Lertxundi, from the memorable book Itzuliz usu begi; for me, one of the most beautiful books published in 2019 and the most praise ever written in Basque about translation and translators. The theme of the quotation is what playing fields we would have to have at present the creators and the translators, and today we have gathered creators and translators, so I thought it was very appropriate:
Art is today the habitat of creation and translation. Aesthetics is, free in its flexible concrete, the fuero of both tasks. Basque literature has been liberated from the famous servitude experienced throughout history: transmitter of faith, driver of the Basque, server of ideology, mirror of didactics, and today we can speak of authoritarian literature. When he bet on it, with Aresti we are also in debt, the literature acquired a different autonomy from the one that had until then assumed a great benefit for literature, but also for the Basque himself. But it benefited him in depth, in the core where all the words converge, in the aesthetic capacity of language. Aesthetics collects, like a sheet, what Benjamin called poeticity. And if from time to time we are able to feel something like this with the creations and translations in the Basque, we in the candy!
We are working on a work we have chosen, and that always crying is not pleasant, that shows us the pride of the well-done work has not sinned […].
The projection of the literary republic has a much more limited scope than we think. It's for that. It has no extraordinary force in the socialization of its tool, language. We should mark the field of literature in literary quality and in the field of self-esteem that this can generate in speakers.
Pearls from their language and those translated into their language are the most appreciated treasures for speakers.
I fully agree with the words: we must seek literary quality at all costs. And I think Bachmann was also a person with Lertxundi, because many times they asked him why he stopped writing poetry after succeeding with the first two Pomparians and receiving great criticism. He always replied that he had stopped writing poetry because from a moment on he thought he was able to write poems but did not feel the impulse to write poetry, and that he would not write poems again until that impulse was felt again. He said that writing without danger is signing an insurance contract with a worthless literature.
Fortunately, when we, the readers, stopped writing poetry, among other things because Bachmann wrote this story book.
Thank you all, of heart and, above all, Ingeborg Bachmann.