Kirmen Uribe - Poetry and Multimedia

Poetry and Multimedia

The critic Jon Kortazar has said that the appearance of Kirmen Uribe’s poetry collection Bitartean heldu eskutik (Meanwhile Take My Hand), published by Susa in 2001, was a “peaceful revolution” in the world of Basque literature. It received the Critics Prize for poetry written in Basque, and its first edition sold out within a month. The book has since been translated into Spanish (Visor, 2003), French (Castor Astral, 2006), English (Graywolf, 2007), Catalan (Proa, 2010) and Russian (Издательство Герника, 2010). The U.S.-born writer Elizabeth Macklin translated it into English directly from Basque, and this would be the first time a book translated directly from Basque was published by a commercial press in the United States of America. Meanwhile Take My Hand was a finalist for the 2008 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, which recognizes the best book of poetry in translation published in the United States in the previous year.

Uribe has taken part in a number of onstage performances combining literature with other arts. In 2000, with musician Mikel Urdangarin and filmmaker Josu Eizagirre, he began work on Bar Puerto, which united poetry, music, video and oral history onstage, to recount the life experiences of the residents of an old neighborhood that was torn down to build a highway in Uribe’s home town. In the fall of 2003, in collaboration with musicians Urdangarin, Bingen Mendizabal and Rafa Rueda and artist Mikel Valverde, Uribe published the CD-book Zaharregia, txikiegia agian ("too old, too small, maybe"; published by Gaztelupeko Hotsak), which was the outcome of a half dozen readings-with-music the group had done in New York earlier that year; the question in its title refers to the Basque language, whether our language might not be too old and too small for our globalized times.

The filmmaker Arkaitz Basterra based his documentary Agian (Maybe) on the group’s work together; the film had its première at the 2006 San Sebastian Film Festival. When the French translation of Bitartean heldu eskutik appeared, that same year, Uribe worked in collaboration with the Bordeaux-born playwright François Mouget on the performance piece Entre-temps donne moi la main.