I have a library card. It's great; it's like I live here or something. And I managed the whole transaction and found and checked out a book without a single language disaster. Woohoo! Hooray for very small victories. The library here is the quietest mostly-Spanish-speaking place I think I've ever been.
It's sort of silly to talk about a Basque Shakespeare -- hardly anyone even speaks Basque so hardly anyone writes in it, and until fairly recently no one wrote in it -- but apparently if you were to use such a term, you'd be talking about Bernardo Atxaga. I'm now the proud borrower of a book of his short stories, self-translated into Spanish. It would be a lot easier, and a lot faster, and I would understand better if I would just admit that I'm still a little over my head and read things translated into English. It's not like I'm reading the original Basque, anyway. But where would be the fun/growth/torture in that?
Also, I have a sort of blanket apology/explanation/excuse/whatever. I'm spending a month in the Basque Country partly because I love it here, but mostly because my subpar Spanish level been bugging me too much for too long and I'm finally going to do something about it, god dammit. So I'm trying really hard to do the whole immersion thing and, when I'm not talking or reading in Spanish I try to make myself think Spanish thoughts in my head. But my Spanish thoughts are generally at the intellectual level of maybe a 12-year-old. So when I sit down to write, I don't have much interesting to say. I wish I knew how to fix that.
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