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Luis Mitxelena: A Basque of International Fame by Gorka Aulestia The great Basque linguist, Luís (Koldo) Mitxelena, died in 1987, but few American Basque are aware of the magnitude of his contributions to Basque language and culture. On the second anniversary of his death, I presided over a religious memorial to Mitxelena and took advantage of the occasion to speak with his friends and family members. Two of his friends were especially close to him for they spent years with him in Spanish jails under sentence of death. I hoped to learn more about this period in Mitxelena's life. I was surprised to find that these former cellmates were unaware of Mitxelena's intellectual greatness until after his death. I promised them that I would present a study to the world of his life and work. This article is my attempt to keep that promise. I am moved to write this article for another reason as well. In 1975, Koldo Mitxelena, then a professor at the University of Salamanca, was invited to the Basque Studies Program to write a Basque-English dictionary. I joined the Program to help Professor Mitxelena in his task, but shortly thereafter I learned that he would be unable to take on the challenge. I stayed in the United States for fourteen years, and spent over ten of them producing the Basque-English Dictionary, but always regretted having missed the opportunity to get to know the great Mitxelena better. Koldo Mitxelena wrote twelve books, 260 articles, and 236 reviews and critiques, but I will concentrate here on the life of a man who moved from the obscurity of a prison to the international renown of a great professor and linguist. Mitxelena's life is an example of commitment--work, study, and service to science. He amazed us with his capacity for reading and observation, with his brilliant intelligence, his profound knowledge of the Basque language, and his extraordinary linguistic background. He was gifted with an insatiable intellectual curiosity and an uncommon sharpness of mind. He was obsessed with perfection. He was a man completely dedicated to maintaining Basque commitment to language and culture, which he believed to be an essential part of Basque consciousness. We must also admire the rigor of his scientific methodology in the broad field of Basque studies. He was involved in onomastics, lexicography, linguistics, dialectology, philology, morphology, literature and literary criticism, but he was most outstanding in the fields of linguistics, philology, and literature. Mitxelena had a great desire to pass Basque culture on to the young students in his charge. His work was not limited to his writings but also included the young professors whom he trained and the school of literature that he founded. In the history of Basque literature three schools of thought stand out, deeply marked by the influence exercised by their founders: the school of Sara, headed by the best Basque writer of the time, the Navarrese "Axular" (1556-1644); that of Larramendi (1690-1766); and that of Sabino de Arana (1865-1903). Mitxelena's school should be added to this list, even though it was not a literary school per se. Although it may still be too early to evaluate the depth and extent of its influence, it must be said that the great majority of Basque professors currently teaching in the fields mentioned earlier have been, directly or indirectly, Mitxelena's students. Professor Mitxelena inspired respect in his students, both on human and intellectual levels. Luis Mitxelena was born in Rentería (Guipúzcoa) on August 20, 1915. He was the son of a working-class family. His father was a basket maker. He was a sickly child. He completed high school (the bachillerato) at the Instituto de San Sebastián. It was at about this time that his nationalistic tendencies began. At fifteen he joined a batzoki, a social center established by the Basque Nationalist Party. His father fell ill and he had to go to work in a factory. At eighteen he joined the Basque Nationalist Party and the Solidaridad de Trabajadores Vascos (STV-ELA), a Basque labor union. During this period he made friends with the priest of his village, Martín Lekuona, who was to have a major influence on the young Mitxelena's life. Lekuona pointed him in the direction of Basque literature and helped him to improve his Guipuzcoan Basque. When Mitxelena was twenty-one years old, the Spanish Civil War broke out (1936-1939), and Koldo enlisted in the "Itxarkundia" batallion to defend the Basque Country against Franco and his allies--Hitler and Mussolino. The war was, without a doubt, the one event that affected Mitxelena's life most strongly. He was always proud of having been a gudari or Basque soldier. He recalled with great sorrow the bombing of Gernika that he was able to witness from the little Vizcayan coastal village of Ispaster. When the Basques lost the war, young Mitxelena was captured and spent the years 1937-1942 in three different prisons, El Dueso (Santander), Larrinaga (Bilbao), and Burgos. In El Dueso he suffered from starvation and was condemned to death by the Council of War. From there he was transferred to Larrinaga, where executions were carried out by firing squad or garrotting. Koldo was convinced that he would be shot and, as a final consolation, he received a visit from his aged mother. In July 1938 he and 600 other prisoners were transferred to the jail at Burgos. In the custody of two companies of Guardia Civil, they were piled like animals into a few train cars. The majority of the prisoners were Basques. Their welcome in Burgos was a harsh one. The people laughed at them. Even a priest laughed out loud upon seeing the Basque prisoners bound like animals. I have in my possession a few verses written by my godfather, Marcos Gabikaetxebarria, Koldo's cellmate, and dedicated to Mitxelena posthumously on October 17, 1987. The simplicity of these lines does nothing to hide the troubles suffered by those Basques who were treated like animals in prison. "Six hundred condemned to death We left Larrinaga tied With rough cords and in the custody of the Guardia Civil and soldiers And thus we traveled two by two in a long line Walking toward the Abando station. There we were loaded into enclosed train cars While all of Bilbao slept. They treated us worse than animals In those cars they led us to, We did not even have straw on the floor. And it is possible to believe The hateful reception that awaited us at Burgos, Impossible to forget the forced march to the Prison, a distance of eight kilometers." Mitxelena's stay in the Burgos prison was terrible. The food was very bad; the prisoners were beaten in the punishment cells where they were held incommunicado for thirty days. In September of 1939 Mitxelena's death sentence was commuted to thirty years in prison. For the young Mitxelena, jail was his first university, and in it he studied with tenacity and purpose despite the limited means at his disposal. His cellmates remember him as an obstinate student who did nothing but study, stretched out on his humble bunk. There he pondered classical and modern languages: Latin, Greek, English, and French. Already in El Dueso he had plumbed the complexities of the Basque verb. At Burgos he further studied the Basque language and its dialects with his companions, who were from other Basque provinces. However, euskera, or the Basque language, was not the ultimate target of the young student's interest. He was actually more taken by the literary and linguistic aspects of euskera because he always considered himself to be a failed novelist, in spite of being an avid reader of the black genre of the novel. In jail he also became acquainted with Spanish prisoners, one of whom was later a fellow professor at the University of Salamanca. In 1942 Mitxelena's case was reviewed and, thanks to various amnesties, his sentence was reduced to fourteen years, seven months and one day. At last, on January 13, 1943, he was released on probation. He was then 27 years old. Returning home was very difficult. Many people had been executed in his home town, including two priests. One of them was his old friend Martín Lekuona. Hunger and fear were rampant. Even four years after the end of the war, executions continued at the Ondarreta prison in San Sebastián. Many people were afraid to speak Basque in the streets, because to do so was sufficient reason for imprisonment. In 1942 the Military Governor of Guipúzcoa published an order full of hidden menace: "It is now all right to speak in dialect." The Civil Governor of Vizcaya, Genaro Riestra, went as far as destroying the stones in the cemeteries that contained Basque inscriptions. Young Mitxelena could not find work in his village and had to move to Madrid, where he worked as a bookkeeper from 1943 to 1946. In 1944 he began taking part in clandestine activities under J. Rezola, an official of the Basque Government in Exile. Once again Mitxelena was detained and imprisoned in Alcalá, Ocaña, Yeserías, and Talavera. Upon his release he decided to return home because of his mother's failing health, but arrived only in time to attend her funeral. On July 2, 1949, he married Matilde de Ilarduya, who became his closest companion for nearly forty years. She took care of their home and two children while Mitxelena studied. She urged him to finish his studies and take part in the competitive exams. In 1951 he received his licenciate in classical philology from the University of Madrid. He finished in just three years and won the prize for most outstanding student in his field. During this time Koldo made friends with two very important figures in the world of Basque letters: Julio de Urquijo (1871-1950) and Resurrección María de Azkue (1864-1951). In 1954 he was named director of the publication Seminario Julio de Urquijo. His studies did not preclude him from political commitment, and he acted as secretary for Juan Ajuriaguerra, leader of the Basque resistance movement during Franco's forty-year dictatorship. These activities, however, were voluntary, and Mitxelena had to look for work. He wanted to teach, but Franco's society denied him the opportunity. While his prison record impeded his job search, he finally found a position at the Instituto de Enseñanza Media in San Sebastián. In 1953, Mitxelena was named as a member of Euskaltzaindia, the Academy of the Basque Language, but he was not officially inducted until 1961. Manuel Lekuona's glowing reports of Mitxelena influenced his entry into the Academy. Once Mitxelena obtained his doctorate in 1959, there were many willing to help him find a position. Between 1958 and 1966 Rector Antonio Tovar invited him yearly to give lectures at the University of Salamanca. In 1967, at the age of 52, Mitxelena won the Chair of Indo-european Linguistics after a brilliant performance in the competitive examinations. While in that position (from 1967 to 1977) he also managed to teach for a year at the Sorbonne in Paris, and in 1975 he was invited by the Basque Studies Program at the University of Nevada, Reno to prepare a Basque-English dictionary. Unfortunately, he was unable to accept the offer. Finally in 1977, he left the University of Salamanca. He declined many offers from private universities and accepted the post of Vice-Rector of the University of the Basque Country at its Vitoria campus. He did this because he had always felt that one of the greatest tragedies of Basque society was its lack of a university. In 1978 he was appointed to the Chair of Indo-european and Basque Linguistics for the University of the Basque Country and was part of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters on the Vitoria campus. In this position he contributed greatly to the body of knowledge concerning Basque philology. Mitxelena's intellectual efforts and abilities began to be rewarded in 1983 when he was named Doctor Honoris Causa at the Universities of Bordeaux in France and the Autónoma de Barcelona in Spain. The Minister of Education and Science awarded him the "Premio Menédez Pidal," Spain's ultimate distinction in the field of human research. He was also honored with the "Alfonso X el Sabio" cross in Spain and the "Ossian" prize from the F.V.S. Foundation in Hamburg, Germany. During the academic year 1986-1987, at the age of 72, he was named Professor Emeritus of the University of the Basque Country in Euskadi. After his retirement, Mitxelena continued to collaborate with his university. On September 29, 1987 he attended the defense of a doctoral thesis and just a few days later on October 11, he died in a hospital in San Sebastián, depriving the world of a master teacher and a beacon for young professors and students. No one has been able to fill his shoes in the field of Basque culture. No one else has reached the intellectual heights of Professor Luís Mitxelena. When God sees fit to grace the Basque Country with another intellectual giant of Mitxelena's stature, he or she will surely owe a great deal to the trailblazer. Mitxelena was the first professional linguist in the Basque Country, and he was the most representative figure of the Basque scholarship in his era. |
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