Kirmen Uribe - Using (fictional?) e-mails, letters, transcripts of recordings and diaries, he pieces together a vivid puzzle of three generations and a way of life, intimately connected with the sea and the traditions of the Basque Country, that is slowly being lost

Kirmen Uribe, Bilbao – New York – Bilbao, Trans. by Elizabeth Macklin. Seren, 2014.

chapter 4

kirmenuribe.com/en/

In 2009, Uribe won the National Prize of Literature in Spain for his novel Bilbao-New York-Bilbao, a very original work that was received as a literary event in Spain. The critics have highlighted its capacity for finding new narrative forms within fiction without losing authenticity and communication with the reader.

The novel Bilbao–New York–Bilbao is set on a hypothetical flight that its narrator, one Kirmen Uribe, takes from Bilbao’s Loiu Airport to New York’s J.F.K. On the flight the writer contemplates his supposed novel-in-progress, which is about three generations of a family, his own, whose life is bound up with the sea. Bilbao–New York–Bilbao is a novel with no conventional plot to speak of. Its structure is that of a net, and the knots of the net are the stories of the three generations as they intersect with crosswise stories and reflections on the twentieth century and on the art of writing.

Ollie Brock wrote about the novel in The Times Literary Supplement in August 2011: “Uribe has succeeded in realizing what is surely an ambition for many writers: a book that combines family, romances and literature, anchored deeply in a spoken culture but also in bookishness —and all without a single note of self-congratulation”.

“One of the  best novels of 2010”. —Qué leer.

The novel is set in a absolutely modern territory, usual place of key writers of our time as Emmanuel Carrere, WG Sebald, Orhan Pamuk and JM Coetzee. – Sudouest




“Uribe’s literary proposal is entirely fresh and innovative. A novel of our time. This writer who comes from a “small country” begins its journey through the field of universal literature, searching for transnational communication. ”






When Liborio Uribe found that he was going to die, he wanted to once again see a painting by Aurelio Arteta, his wife’s father. Liborio had spent his entire life at sea, like his son José, living out unforgettable adventures that fade into obscurity. Years later, faced with the same painting, Liborio’s grandson Kirmen, a writer and poet, uses these family stories to write a novel. Bilbao - New York - Bilbao takes place during a flight to New York and tells the story of journeys of three generations of the same family. Through letters, diaries, e-mails, poems, and dictionaries, it creates a mosaic of memories and stories that form an homage to a world that has almost disappeared, as well as a hymn to the continuity of life. A novel, it is also a reflection on the art of writing, and lies between life and fiction.


Well I originally set out to write this review a month and half ago and then saw the book wasn’t out yet , it was a book i read and just wanted to write about and even after a month I still feel the same .This novel was a real event when it came out in spain as Kirmen Uribe is seen as one of the brightest stars in Spanish/Basque writing .He grew up in a small fishing village an hour from Bilbao ,his father was a trawlerman , Kirmen started out as a poet and has done spoken word performances to music in the past ,this novel was his debut novel and won the Spanish literature prize in 2009 
Fish are always growing .Not us , we start shrinking once we’ve reach maturity .Our growth stops  and our bones begin to knit together .The person shrivels up .Fish , though grow until they die .Faster when they’re young , and as the years go on more slowly ,but fish always go on growing
The world of the fishing village is like men grow n and now shrinking , unlike the fish they catch
So Bilbao – New York -Bilbao , is a novel that to me as a reader was like getting really into the head of a writer for the first time , the plot follows Kirmen Uribe as he takes a flight from Bilbao to New York , whilst on this flight we see Kirmen drift into his own world ,his families world , he is in the middle of writing a novel about three generations of a fishing family , the family in the book is his own family from his grandfather to his father , uncles  and their years as trawlermen , the folklore of being a fishermen , his own life , the progress of the flight . 
A monster , a monster that roars .In the old Irish legends Rockhall island is called Rocabarragh .The rock that roars according to Celtic tradition , the third time the rock comes to light ,it is said , the end of the world will be at hand .It’s visible only in the summer , in winter the waves cover it ,until they’ve hidden it completely
I love the small snippets of fishermen folklore we see in this book .
Well that is all I’m giving you plot wise  on this  book as I feel it is one you really  have to discover yourself  .For me this book is almost in words, the working of the inner mind of a writer we see how Kirmen could have used all  that is in this book , the  memories ,folklore and dairies  to write another  novel ,an interesting novel within a novel or is the novel he was writing in the book I  am reading the book ? or is it another book at some  later point I as a reader will meet from him  .Is the kIrmen Uribe  in the book the KirmenUribe that wrote book ? What we see in the book is a real hymn to a dying world the world of his father and uncles ,the dying world of small trawler men in the Basque region .The world he writes about reminded me of the people I knew in the small fishing port where I worked twenty years ago .The world isn’t just dying the people in the world are looking beyond the boats , but also looking back at the boats ,as the world of small boats supporting families giving them a living is dying out as this sort of fishing is being driven out by bigger boats with smaller crews and thus less work in the small communities around the ports where these boats were based , this is the world we see in Kirmen’s book is  not quite gone but disappearing quickly .Th e other thing that comes across in the book is the sea , fishermens respect for the sea ,the folklore they build around the sea ,man being drawn to the challenges of the sea-going in boats round places like St Kildas ,were the world comes down to man against nature so much and although he is flying over this world maybe trying to escape it he in his own way as a writer is still drawn to this world , as thou you can’t escape the shadow of ones own past .I’ve not read any book that has touched me in  so may ways such as this book has , having  lived around fishermen for a few years and also spent a lot of my youth around the small fishing ports of the East Neuk in fife , spending my summers with my gran doing the fishing boat trail learning about the fishermen and their lives ,I admire Kirmen’s longing for this world at times .Kirmen Uribe cast his own net not a real net no a net of ones mind a drag up memories poetry and a truly unique book for us as a reader , I hope Seren discoveries the publisher publishes his other novel ,either that or I may have to teach myself Spanish to read it .
What was the last book that left you totally knocked back ? - winstonsdad.wordpress.com/2014/10/06/bilbao-new-york-bilbao-by-kirmen-uribe/


Which creative forms best allow us to capture the complex tapestries that bind together the stories of individuals, families, locations, and their relations with the world? This is the question that drives Kirmen Uribe’s debut novel Bilbao-New York-Bilbao, which as long-time readers might remember, has been on my ‘to read’ list since before the summer. Uribe, now 40, is best known to readers of Basque writing as a poet – he won Spain’s Premio de la Critica de Poesia en Euskera in 2001 for his first published collection – but in fact, he’s hard to pin down into any one genre. He’s worked with textual, graphic, musical, dramatic, performative and visual creative forms, and excitingly for me, is also an active translator of poetry.
Bilbao-New York-Bilbao was first published in Euskera in 2008, when it won the Premio de la Critica de Narrativa en Euskera, and appeared in a Spanish translation by Ana Arregi in 2009 – although according to El Pais (in Spanish), it was a while before the Spanish translation found its editorial home with Seix Barral. Also in 2009, Edicions 62 put out Pau Joan Hernández’s Catalan version, while Edicións Xerais published the Galician version by Isaac Xubin earlier this year.
The novel interweaves various threads, but the one that holds the text together is the narrator’s journey by plane, from Bilbao to New York , which is represented both textually in the story of the flight and his conversations with his seatmate and visually, through recreations of the seatback information screens with information about the plane’s progress across a series of landmarks familiar to all of us who regularly travel that route (Chicoutimi, anyone?!). This thread functions as a way for Uribe to tear back the ‘4th wall’ of fiction and show us the nuts and bolts holding together his text, as he moves easily between emails, notes, conversations and other documents; as a novel, this – well, it isn’t really a novel, more a reflection on the art of writing somewhere between life and fiction.
The mystery at the heart of the novel, or at least the question that drives ‘Kirmen’s’ quest to find out about his grandfather Liborio, is why Liborio called his fishing boat ‘dos amigos’ or ‘two friends’ – and the answer, when it comes, is the perfect key to a book I just haven’t been able to get out of my mind since I finished it. But I’m not going to tell you what it is – you’ll have to read it for yourselves! (I think the English version is in progress …) - booksonspain.wordpress.com/2010/12/12/review-kirmen-uribe-bilbao-new-york-bilbao/


After struggling for weeks – or actually, make that months – through Bolaño’s excellent but challenging Los detectives salvajes, I really needed something short, sweet, and decidedly less in-your-face high-brow. So I settled for a small novel I had (fittingly) bought in Bilbao back in April: New York-Bilbao-New York by Basque* writer Kirmen Uribe. Prepare, this review somehow got long and I got sucked into fundamentals.
It was perfect. It’s small (204 pages) and a non-trivial but entertaining read. The novel is woven around a flight from Bilbao to New York and based on Uribe’s own family history. In fact, it’s so close to his own life that I really can’t tell how much of it is actually fiction. Little stories Uribe collected from the inhabitants of his native fishing village Ondarroa, from other writers and poets, and from all kinds of other sources are woven together. Using (fictional?) e-mails, letters, transcripts of recordings and diaries, he pieces together a vivid puzzle of three generations and a way of life, intimately connected with the sea and the traditions of the Basque Country, that is slowly being lost.
For his innovative writing in New York-Bilbao-New York, Uribe won the Premio Nacional de Narrativa (Spanish national literature prize) in 2009. And while at first sight the fact that there isn’t really a plot and this is not really a ‘novel’ in the traditional sense might seem tedious, it was actually a very pleasant and relaxing read.
What I kept wondering, though, was the extent to which New York-Bilbao-New York could speak to anyone who has no idea about the Basque Country. Uribe, like many of his fellow countrymen, is very proud of his people’s culture and traditions, and this shines through in many aspects of the novel. So for anybody not familiar with this cultural backdrop, reading the book might require a bit of Googling and Wikipedia research on the Basque language (Euskera), the Basque Country, and its (recent) history (there, I’ve made it easy for you).**  Towards the end of the book, Uribe wonders why  Basque literature hasn’t made it into the canon of world literature. It’s a good question, and many reasons can be cited for it (Basque is a language with a very rich oral, but little written tradition, it was forbidden under the Franco dictatorship, and so on), but I think one of the reasons – at least for recent Basque literature – is that it is quite self-involved. Two books very successful in the region – Bilbao-New York-Bilbao and Obabakoak by Bernardo Atxaga – are both excellent, but readers with no connection whatsoever to the Basque region might not feel easily at home in either novel. With Bilbao-New York-Bilbao, Uribe wants to reach out. I think he’s onto something and has made a start. After all, he won a national-level prize, so at least the jury ‘got’ Bilbao-New York-Bilbao.
But it’s a little bit like with Latin American literature. In El Insomnio de Bolívar, Jorge Volpi comments that for Latin American authors, it was difficult to move beyond writing ‘Latin American’ novels (and someone who wrote about other places was looked at strangely). Maybe it’s a bit the same with Basque literature, obviously for different reasons and on a smaller scale. Does it have to move beyond the Basque Country and Basque culture before really ‘making it’ outside? Or would that mean that it’d lose its distinctive flavour and become amalgamated into Spanish or wider European literature?
So far, Bilbao-New York-Bilbao hasn’t been translated into English or other languages for an audience outside the Iberian peninsula (and Latin America), but it’s available in Basque, Spanish, Catalan, Galician and Portuguese. I hope it gets translated though, because I really wonder whether it would have a shot at becoming a success. - booksbikesfood.com/2011/06/18/kirmen-uribe-bilbao-new-york-bilbao-2009/
















Kirmen Uribe, Meanwhile Take My Hand, Trans. by Elizabeth Macklin, Graywolf Press, 2007.

The American debut of Basque writer Kirmen Uribe's "simple, devastating poems" (Bob Holman)

Whenever we're saddened everything looks dark,
When we're heartened, again, the world crumbles.
Every one of us keeps forever someone else's hidden side,
If it's a secret, if a mistake, if a gesture.
                                                             --from "May"

 

Kirmen Uribe has become one of the best-known Basque-language writers--an important contemporary voice from a vital but largely unknown language. Meanwhile Take My Hand presents Uribe's poetry to American readers in both the original and in the poet Elizabeth Macklin's skillful and award-winning translations.

In these poems are the drug addicts of Spanish fishing towns, the paved-over rivers of urbanized medieval cities, the remains of loving relationships, whether entirely uprooted or making do with a companionable silence. The Basque phrase Bitartean heldu eskutik, which became the book's title--Meanwhile Take My Hand--Uribe has said is "what you say when there's nothing at all you can say."

Uribe is a big fish in a small pond: the serious and energetic young poet stands among the leading contemporary writers in Basque (Euskara), the language spoken and written in Uribe's ethnically distinct region of Spain. Though published verse in Basque began in the Renaissance, Uribe's own work looks decidedly contemporary, a sometimes laconic, sometimes effusive free verse open to emotional extremes: in "Cardiogram" a heart resembles "a frozen lake," where "the face of the child that he once was/ is erasing itself in there." A superb love poem recalls "that epoch when we slept holding each other,/ scared tiger cubs in our vigil"; one of several poems set in the harsh coastal landscape of Uribe's youth advises us that "the moment/ you start to worry, life escapes you." Quoting accessible English-language influences from Anne Sexton to Dylan Thomas, Uribe takes on topics local and universal, from sexual delight to drug addiction to the fate of minority languages: born in 1970, he manages to bring into his lines both the hip internationalism of his European generation and the commitment to particular villages, folkways and words that his language and his region own. Sensitively colloquial facing-page versions by Macklin (You've Just Been Told), a New Yorker who has lived in Bilbao, make this vivid collection the first book of verse ever translated directly (rather than via Spanish) from Basque to English. - Publishers Weekly

The language of the Basques--the oldest, as they are the oldest people, in Europe--doesn't have a large literature; this literature is merely 361 years old, a fraction of the people's age (for more about them, see Mark Kurlansky's marvelous The Basque History of the World, 1999). Perhaps because it is small, it is fully usable by a relative youngster like Uribe, who is 36. His poems recall writers of the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, as well as the twentieth century, as casually as if they were neighbors only yesterday. He also recalls Raymond Carver in the same spirit. Writing of love and ordinary living, family history and the deep history of a place, superstition and technology, being native and being a bewildered alien (indelibly in the dramatic monologue "Mohammed"), home and away, he sounds unusually wise for a young man, though not wizened; indeed, the very reverse, enough so to pen this haiku: "Two naked bodies / in bed. The night's been mild, but / there's dew on their skin." - Ray Olson


“The poems are a beacon of light and memory, surrounded by conflict, explosion and interruption.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review


“Unusually wise for a young man.”—Booklist


“[Uribe’s] lyricist’s sensibility teaches him to write poems as lucid and lilting as songs.” —The Harvard Book Review


“These poems are lyrical and spoken, speaking of love and family, of legend and of war, of dangerous friends and the dangerous world. They weep out of the particular with wisdom and feeling.” —American Poet


“Elizabeth Macklin’s translation is crisp and pure.”—New York Newsday


“Elizabeth Macklin is the first American poet to venture deep into Euskara, that unexplored territory, and she’s found there a contemporary ancient lyricist. Fishermen and modernists, history and eroticism, cuckoos and e-mails, fairy tales and newspaper clippings: Uribe’s olive tree ‘lives two thousand years but tends to remember nothing.’ His poems remind us that poetry tends to remember everything.”—Eliot Weinberger


“Thank you Elizabeth Macklin for bringing to English readers the poetry of Kirmen Uribe written in the oldest European language. Macklin’s English, like Uribe’s Euskara, is lyrical with a hard edge, sad and funny, rich in paradoxes. Uribe is a poet of consequence and Macklin has accomplished no small feat.” —Mark Kurlansky


“Sharply alive, prolific of freshness, in Meanwhile Take My Hand no poem lacks its flash of discovery and verbal surprise. Here is new pleasure, access freely given to a deep culture unknown to most of us. A vivid inheritance, written and oral, comes over to us richly in these savvy, wry, and hope-filled lyrics. Uribe welcomes us with incursive thought and a ready diction, quick to strike home. Because the English text is such a joy to read, the translations must be excellent. Quotable examples are on every page. Read it and see.”—Marie Ponsot


“Elizabeth Macklin’s translations of Kirmen Uribe’s poems throw a door wide open on a landscape both foreign and familiar, whose otherness is explicated by the clarity of the light in which it’s bathed. Uribe is a poet whose concerns embrace all that’s human (lovemaking, fable-making, growth, and death): like Darwish, Ritsos, or Zagajewski, he’s a poet of worldwide scope.”—Marilyn Hacker




Between assimilation and Difference. From Contemporary Basque Literature: Kirmen Uribe's proposal, 2013. 


The sea is always a reason for writing. Galway Advertiser, April 05, 2012. 


www.3ammagazine.com/3am/maintenant-67-kirmen-uribe/ (3:AM Magazine)