"Poetry and the Blank" by Kirmen Uribe, translated from Basque by Elizabeth Macklin
Among Basque ballads, there’s one that’s enigmatic. It’s about a conflict that took place in 1390, in the vicinity of the tower of Unzueta. You can’t really say it’s a ballad, since only the first line has survived, like an ancient Greek epigram. This single phrase was what they wrote in the chronicles. Hearing it, the whole ballad would come into the mind of a person of that time. With oral transmission cut off, though, only that phrase remains. The rest we can imagine, however, the stanzas and the events, the details and symbols, even though the ballad itself doesn’t exist.
That remaining first line is this: “acundia, lejarr (...) ga lejarbaga.”
It means: already there is no ash tree on the hill. The ash grove (lizarraga, in the present-day spelling), the place where many ash trees grow, now has no ash tree (lizarrik) in it. In wartime, ash trees were used to make arrows. The length of the war, the ceaseless making of arrows, has emptied the mountain. The human being has changed the appearance of nature—the savagery the human being has brought into being.
From that time forward, the ash grove will no longer be what it once was. Lizarraga, the word used to name the place of the ash trees, has lost its whole meaning now. The old ballad is emptied out—we’ve got only the opening phrase—and the mountain is stripped, too. It is not what it was at one time.
What’s missing, what isn’t there, creates the poetry. Beckett’s Godot isn’t there and won’t be coming. The blank of a Rome that isn’t there is what Ovid has in his exile, what perhaps once was. The woman who isn’t there is what Sappho misses in her poems, who maybe existed only in her mind.
The grove that the war destroyed is the reality. And the very thing that isn’t there is poetry, what perhaps was there and won’t be again.
A 2018-19 NYPL Cullman Center Fellow in fiction, Kirmen Uribe is a Basque writer living in New York. As a Cullman Fellow he did research for his fourth novel, whose working title is The Book She Writes. These poems are from his second collection of poems, 17 segundu (17 Seconds), which was published in 2019 in Basque, and came out in Spanish translation (17 segundos) last year in Spain.
Elizabeth Macklin’s most recent book of poems is You’ve Just Been Told. She was the English translator of Kirmen Uribe’s novel Bilbao–New York–Bilbao and of his first book of poems, Meanwhile Take My Hand, and is currently at work on his second collection.
