2023-12-10 23:01:43
Borges said that all literature, even radically realistic literature, ends up becoming fantastic. This precept is also shared by the writer and historian Iban Zaldua (San Sebastián, 1966) and he tries to capture it in his latest book, A hidden (Páginas de Espuma, 2023). It is a compilation of stories translated by him into Spanish from a book from almost a decade ago: Inon ez, inoiz ez (Elkar, 2014). “I am in favor of leaving a certain amount of time between publication in Basque and Spanish,” he tells elDiario.es.
A secret is a more compact compilation, where stories that were not in the original have been included. Therefore, it is a new book, but starting from an old one. In this sense, the most fantastic ones are rescued, but a fantastic one “close to reality capable of taking you to worlds different from the one we know or want to know,” he maintains.
Zaldua is capable of representing the contradictions of human beings in stories like Arguing with myself; resort to one of his most representative features such as humor in When he forbade me to read in bed; imagine the repercussions and what they will say after our death in Death by Twitter; throw a nod to climate change in The Flies or to Artificial Intelligence in The Jets of Gold. The author explains that what he seeks in each of them is to “subvert what we know as reality,” because he is not clear about it. He defends that many times what we know as real is “just a construction.” For this reason, he emphasizes that his stories have “a lot of playfulness and play like the fantastic” and that he is interested in that part to “go a little beyond what we see.”
In a total of 15 texts, the reader will notice that there is no specific theme. However, it does have an atmosphere. The writer is capable of metamorphosing into totally different characters, but with obsessions that often repeat themselves, such as family, friendship or a couple. “The fantastic usually involves a more or less surprising ending, which is precisely what life does not usually give us. Life ends in a rather unsurprising way in general and that element for me has its charm,” he adds. However, as we progress, a meta-literary obsession unfolds. We are going to find very Vilamatesque stories, where literature itself becomes the theme and the literary act becomes a fixed idea.
Precisely, the meta-literary game is captured in stories such as Revisited and Kafka’s Translator. The author from San Sebastian – although living in Vitoria – places Kafka in Palestine. “I returned to Kafka when he was translated into Basque for the first time. “I dove into his biography and that’s where I realized that, like many Jews of his time, he had flirted with Zionism,” he explains. In the story itself, the life of the author of Metamorphosis is given a second chance and his death is rejected, stating that he continued writing. Iban Zaldua asks “why not imagine a second life for Kafka?”, and to answer this he uses his knowledge as a historian, “putting it into play in the literary field.”
But being a historian, Zaldua distances himself from historical literature, since he considers that the historical part is only a support, a trick. “I trust historians more than novelists to learn from the past. When I use historical plots I do so from an absolutely literary conscience and starting from the fact that I am going to write fiction,” he says.
Civil Wars is one of the stories in the book that fill the author with the most pride. There is a paradox behind that text, which he defines as “an antimilitarist story.” Zaldua assures that he started “from the imaginary of Basque nationalism” which is what he received at school. The story offers a vision of the history of Euskadi, but with a background of the civil wars of the 19th and 20th centuries. The paradox occurs around the Carlists, considered ‘good’ in the wars of the 19th century and ‘bad’ in the Civil War and in the conflict with ETA. “If you ask those who are in Ferraz giving their all right now, I suppose they will think that the Carlists are the good ones,” he comments.
The author also admits that another of his objectives was to “go against the epic of the war narrative” that he defended as a young man. Although he later developed “a very anti-militarist conscience” he came to participate in the insubordinate movement and the protests of the 1990s. 90. “I wanted to make an amendment to the Iban of that youth who was so warlike and liked that masculine speech,” says the author.
In Civil Wars, on the one hand, they try to unite the high points that have crossed the history of Euskadi in the 19th and 20th centuries in an ironic way, but without the story being so. And, on the other hand, apply a certain anti-militarist reading to war stories. “The borders are blurred a little and I like that terrain in which you don’t know what is realistic and what is fantastic,” comments the writer about an interpretative duality that also occurs in the story Mother.
Iban Zaldua’s literary voice has two linguistic aspects, due to his bilingual condition. The writer does not use an external translator for his books, but rather translates them himself. He defends his position by saying that he has tried external translators, but “although the translation is very good,” it is not his “writing.” He insists that self-translation also has its disadvantages and that is that “while you self-translate, you do not create anything new and it is still a recombination.” At the same time, he clarifies that he does not consider one language to be more his than the other and that they are both his. He concludes that it is “less expensive for him to translate than to correct others who may translate it.”
Regarding the criticism of AI in the story The Jets of Gold, the author explains that it arose as a commission for a robotics book from the Faculty of Informatics of the University of the Basque Country. However, the existence of literature written by AI has been questioned. “Machines will end up writing literature and first they will write cheap, commercial and formula literature,” he says. Furthermore, he dares to point out that “we will surely be left without work, as happened to the English weavers with the machines of the Industrial Revolution.”
Beyond his assessments, Zaldua considers that all of this is “on the way” or “we are already reading books written by AI.” The author goes a little further and uses irony: “They will even have given him a Planet or a finalist, if you are careful.” The writer does not doubt that “AI can write a good story,” but the question would be “to what extent that can be good.” Above all, if we have as a reference the diversification of the field of short fiction. “I, without entering into pessimism, believe that if there is not a collapse of the global economy and of the world and of humanity in general, then it will happen,” he concludes.
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