Elizabete Manterola, author of a PhD thesis on the translations of Bernardo Atxaga’s work

This past February Elizabete Manterola presented her PhD thesis to the School of Letters at the University of the Basque Country at Vitoria-Gasteiz. The thesis is titled "Euskal literatura beste hizkuntza batzuetara itzulia" ("Basque Literature Translated to Other Languages"), and the focus is the translated works of writer Bernardo Atxaga. The thesis was supervised by Ibon Uribarri; Ur Apalategi, Xosé Manuel Dasilva, Jon Kortazar, Raquel Merino and Julio César Santoyo served on the defense committee.

The aim of her research was to analyze translated Basque literature. To do so, she had to determine what Basque literature has been translated to other languages.

As a first step, all translated works were catalogued and then analyzed according to various criteria (authors, titles, target languages, etc.) to get an overview of what’s been translated.

In dealing with this complex diglossic literary system, different types of translation were identified in analyzing the catalog: self-translation, collaborative translation, and allographic translation into Spanish, and direct and indirect translation into other languages. Thus, a second phase had the goal of analyzing and comparing the different types of translation.

The scope of study was limited to works by Bernardo Atxaga, and the different types of translation were compared using this reduced corpus.

Miren Ibarluzea interviewed Elizabete Manterola for Bizkaie.biz (in Basque).