Amaia gabantxo biography for kids

Amaia Gabantxo is a writer, flamenco singer, and literary translator specializing in Basque literature. Holzer later said that this idea had been incubating in her mind for over twenty years: projecting Basque poetry in Basque and English on the façade of the Bilbao Guggenheim Museum.

Now, we can make up for not blogging about that thanks to this extraordinary article published by Izidora Angelon the website Proyecto Plume, which offers us a profile of Amaia Gabantxo that’s full of human details and reflections on her work and the concepts that guide it.

It’s quite hard to understand and explain how much it means to Basques that their language still occupies a place in the world.

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 is the most prolific translator of Basque literature 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 year long artist-in-residence award at the Cervantes Institute in Chicago.

She does it from a perspective of universality, respect, knowledge, intelligence, and determination that there is no language in the world that is more important that Basque, nor is there any language in the world that is less important.

That means that all those who decided Basque was destined to disappear because it wasn’t useful, dignified, or able to be a “modern” language were wrong.

And this place is ever more settled in, reaching landmarks that the pessimists of the 19th century, with their made-up minds, could never have imagined.

It’s quite hard to explain, but it’s also quite easy, if you speak from experience and from the heart, as Amaia’s mother did on the day she saw Holzer’s piece: “You can’t even begin to imagine what this means for my generation, to see Basque projected, after everything we went through in the dictatorship, when it was prohibited to use it, speak it, write it”.

Amaia is one of those many key pieces in the clockwork that is keeping our language moving forward.

Soniché, where she performs with classical musicians in ensembles that hybridize flamenco and classical traditions; the Lorca Project, which thanks to the Mellon Fellowship, will bring together flamenco artists and a multidisciplinary group of academics in a project that will aim to come up with new English translations of Lorca’s poetry, and to ‘translate’ Lorca’s poetry into a variety of media; and Almas, a collaboration with Iranian-American poet Sholeh Wolpé and ‘tar player Sahba Motallebi that brings together Iranian and flamenco music, Lorca’s songs, and new interpretations of Lorca and Attar’s poetry.

Her latest literary translations, due to be published in late 2016 and 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, Soul & Soil and Downhill, for the University of Nevada Press.