EURO-DENTITY: Webs of Language and Self

Hosted by The Center for International Relations and the literary journal AGNI, with the American Literary Translators Association and Zephyr Press

The lecture EURO-DENTITY: Webs of Language and Self features speakers Bernardo Atxaga and Ilan Stavans, who explore the evolution of languages spoken by a small number of the earth’s inhabitants. Atxaga notes how the Basque language of Euskara received little to no recognition of its existence until the cultural movement of Romanticism gave it value. Stavans speaks of how the Hebrew language has experienced a revival, increasing from a vocabulary of 8,000 words to one of approximately 100,000 today.

Atxaga discusses how the Basque language — and the region, in general — lacked value and recognition until the 19th century. “The language was invisible for everyone,” he says. Atxaga explains that the Basque language was condemned to disappear until Romanticism brought attention to it and declared that the language of a place showed the spirit and culture of its people. Stavans focuses on the Hebrew language and its letters in particular because a number of Jewish languages have used the Hebrew alphabet. Indeed, the Hebrew language is very much alive today and has many variations. He explains that the Bible contains more than 8,000 different words and the Hebrew language today has close to 100,000. “Now that is a revival,” he says.

Boston Globe reporter Mark Feeney moderates a question-and-answer period that follows.

May 4, 2009 7:00 p.m.

Photonics Center

Video Length is 01:29:00.

About the speaker:

Bernardo Atxaga is a well-known Basque writer and a member of a group of authors who began publishing in the Basque language in the 1970s. He has also worked as an economist, a scholar of the Basque language, a publisher, and a radio scriptwriter. His writings, including his most recent work, The Accordionist’s Son, have been translated into more than 70 languages. He won Spain’s National Literature Prize for his book, Obabakoak, which was published in 1988. He studied economics at the University of Bilbao and philosophy at the University of Barcelona.

Ilan Stavans is the Lewis-Sebring Professor of Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. He has written extensively on Latino culture and his books include The Hispanic Condition and On Borrowed Words: A Memoir of Language. He is also editor of The Oxford Book of Jewish Stories, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, and Isaac Bashevis Singer: Collected Stories. Stavans was born in Mexico to a Jewish family and immigrated to the United States in the 1980s.

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