Basque Week: Beatriz Chivite, Amama and Eneko Aizpurua

The Etxepare Basque Institute and University College Cork will host a ´Basque Week´ from Monday to Friday, 22-25 November. The first activity will be a ´Basque language taster´. Workshops of this type introduce a language, in this case Euskara, teaching basic vocabulary and grammar, as well as language-related topics on cultural aspects, such as history and the arts. The event will take place from 3-4pm in the O’Rahilly Building, room 201.

On Tuesday, November 23rd, from 4-5pm, writer and translator Eneko Aizpurua Urteaga will give a talk titled Subir el Bidasoa: senderos de libertad y vías de escape por el río Bidasoa (Up the Bidasoa: paths of freedom and escape routes along the Bidasoa River). The presentation can be followed online.

The aim of the book Bidasoan Gora is to recover the diverse memories of people and places attached to the Bidasoa river and surrounding borderlands by doing a journey on foot from the mouth to the source of the river. In his speech, Aizpurua focuses on freedom trails and escape routes across the Bidasoa river used by different fugitives and organizations, such as allied pilots guided by Basque smugglers of the Comète Network, Jewish exiles helped by Portuguese consul in Bordeaux Aristides de Sousa Mendes in World War II and undocumented Portuguese migrants in the 60s and 70s of the past century.

Another ´Basque language taster´ workshop will be held on Wednesday at 9am in the O´Rahilly Building, room 244. At 6:30pm the film ´Amama´ will be screened in the Brookfield Health Science Complex, room 101.

Finally, Navarrese writer Beatriz Chivite will give a talk as part of the ´Basque Week´ event organised by University College Cork. Chivite will be in conversation with Siobhán Ní Dhomhnaill on Thursday November 25th at 6pm. You can follow the event online via this link.

Chivite will also be giving other talks in the coming days. At 11:30am on November22nd, she will be speaking at the University of Warsaw, Poland. And at 6:30 p.m on Wednesday, November 24th, she will join Victoria Field and Leo Boix in ‘Three poets by candlelight’. The event will be held at Waterstones Bookshop in Canterbury, England.

On Tuesday November 30th, Chivite will join Gorka Mercero in Manchester, England, for an online poetry encounter in English organised by the Cervantes Institute. The event will begin at 7pm and will revolve around Chivite´s poetry.

Chivite’s books are: ‘Pekineko kea’ (Pamiela, 2017); ‘Metro’ (Arabako Foru Aldundia, 2014, translated into English as ‘The Blue Line’); ‘Biennale’ (Erein, 2017); ‘Mugi/atu’ (Pamiela, 2019) and ‘Hirietan / En las Ciudades / Nas Cidades’ (Papeles Mínimos, 2020). Chivite has received numerous awards in Spain and the Basque Country. Her poetry has been translated into Spanish, English, Galician, Slovenian, Frisian, Gaelic and Italian.