Description: First English translation from Basque of the seminal works of Gabriel Aresti the great modern Basque poet.
Brief description: Gabriel Aresti was born in Bilbao in 1933. He came from a Basque-speaking family that did not transmit the language to its children, obliging him to learn it for himself from scratch as a young adult. After studying com-merce, he earned a modest living as an accountant, trying to support his wife and three daughters on fairly meager means. Outside his professional and domestic life, and alongside Euskara (the Basque language), his other lifelong obsession was poetry. He pub-lished his first poems at the age of twenty--one but really came to the fore in the 1960s with landmark works that revolutionized the genre in Euskara. His was a socially aware voice that believed passionately in the transformational capacity of poetry. A clearly urban poet, with the industrial city of Bilbao central to his work, he nevertheless fre-quently invoked predominantly rural Basque traditions, such as the significance of bert-solaritza (oral improvised poetry). In addi-tion, he founded publishing houses and col-laborated on both theater and music proj-ects. He was one of the principal champions of establishing a standardized form of Basque in the face of significant opposition from predominantly traditionalist sectors in the world of Basque philology. And politi-cally, he challenged both the conservative face of Basque nationalism and the brutal re-alities of the Franco dictatorship. He died prematurely in 1975, but his legacy runs deep in Basque culture to this day.