Magazine

from the May 2017 issue

A Memory

They told us to be careful, that men would do nasty things to us at the smallest slip-up. The saying carried the sound of sewer waters, of something dirty, and dark, like forest tracks. Despite this, we let it nestle in our mouths, to have a feel of its viscous, foreign nature.

In hallways, sprawled under weak light bulbs, the hard coldness of the floor tiles traveled up our buttocks, and we pressed our legs tight to conjure up a spark from our rosy pearl. We checked the limpets on our chests. We licked teaspoons.

Right after we would pull up our white socks and run through the streets, schoolbook satchels to the wind. Our knees were trusting doves; the ribbons in our hair, delicious bait.

And we kept silent. We let the days pass is all, waited, until the moment came to let someone touch us.

"Oroitzapen bat" © Miren Agur Meabe. By arrangement with the author. Translation © 2017 by Amaia Gabantxo. All rights reserved.

Read more from the May 2017 issue

Further Reading

Not Bread Alone: Food and the Refugees in Greece

Just Dinner, but Oh, What a Feast

The Fall of Icarus

Miren Agur Meabe

Miren Agur Meabe (Lekeitio, 1962), holds degrees in teaching and Basque philology. She worked as a teacher in the Kirkiño Basque school in Bilbao and as a publisher in Giltza for many years. She writes literature for children and for adults, both poetry and prose. Her prizes include the 2001 and 2011 Critic’s Poetry Awards for Azalaren kodea and Bitsa eskuetan, and the 2002, 2006, and 2011 Euskadi Prizes for her three young adult novels, Itsaslabarreko etxea, Urtebete itsasargian, and Errepidea. Her book Mila magnolia-lore is on the 2012 International Board on Books Honour’s List. Her latest work, Kristalezko begi bat, received the 2013 Beterriko Liburua Award and the 2013 Zazpi Kale Prize, and was published in English as A Glass Eye in 2017. Some of the honorary awards she has received are the Lauaxeta Prize (2007), the Rosalia de Castro Prize (2012) and the Deia-Hemendik Prize (2015). Her writings have been translated into several languages, and into Braille. She has been a member of the Basque Academy of Letters since 2006.

» More about Miren Agur Meabe

Translated from Basque by Amaia Gabantxo

Amaia Gabantxo is a writer, flamenco singer, and literary translator specializing in Basque literature. She currently teaches creative writing at the University of Chicago, and performs regularly in venues all over the city. She is the most prolific translator of Basque literature into English to date, as well as a pioneer in the field, and has received multiple awards for her work, most recently, the OMI Writers Translation Lab award, a Mellon Fellowship for Arts and Scholarship, and a yearlong artist-in-residence award at the Cervantes Institute in Chicago. She has published and performed on both sides of the Atlantic: in Ireland and Great Britain, the countries in which she carried out her university education, and in the US, where she currently lives.

Forthcoming literary translations in 2017 include Twist by Harkaitz Cano for Archipelago Books in NY, A Glass Eye by Miren Agur Meabe for Parthian Books in the UK, and two seminal collections by the father of modern Basque poetry, Gabriel Aresti, Rock & Core and Downhill, for the University of Nevada Press.

She is currently writing a "novel in flamenco form," a work structured around a chain of flamenco songs, a hybrid that is both literary and performative.

Photograph: Casey Mitchell

» More about Amaia Gabantxo

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