FROM ONDARROA AROUND THE WORLD

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 coastal fishing towns, the paved-over rivers of urbanized medieval cities, the remains of loving relationships, whether entirely uprooted or making do with companionable silence.

The Basque phrase—Bitartean heldu eskutik—that 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.”

In our desert there is no sand.

There are growing boys

who cross the steel barriers and

play soccer on the thruway.

There is no water in our sea.

The waves were a thousand blue horses.

Once, with a thousand soldiers

they were carried away.

In our desert there is no sand.

But there’s a giant wall of stone

which, though we can’t see it,

has encircled us; closed in, close.

There is no water in our sea,

or any wake from the past.

Our futures recline on the beach,

big with tears and broken mirrors.

There is no water in our desert.

There is no sand in our sea.

Translated from the Basque by Elizabeth Macklin