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I write in a strange language. its verbs, the structure of its relative clauses, the words it uses to designate ancient things -rivers, plants, birds- have no sisters anywhere on earth. A house is "etxe", a bee "erle", death "heriotz". The sun of the long winters we call "eguzki" or "eki"; the sun of the sweet, rainy is also -as you'd expect- called "eguzki" or "eki" (its a strange language but not that strange).Born, they say, in the megalithic age, it survived, this stubborn language, by withdrawing, by hiding away like a hedgehog in a place, which, thanks to the traces it left behind there, the world named the Basque Country or "Euskal Herria". Yet its isolation could never have been absolute -cat is "katu", pipe is "pipa", logic is "logika"- rather, as the prince of detectives would have said, the hedgehog, my dear Watson, crept out of its hiding place (to visit, above all, Rome and all its progeny).The language of a tiny nation, so small you cannot even find it on the map, it never strolled in the gardens of the Court or past the marble statues of government buildings; in four centuries it produced only a hundred book... the first in 1545; the most important in 1643; the Calvinist New Testament in 1571; the complete Catholic Bible around 1860. Its sleep was long, its bibliography brief (but in the twentieth century the hedgehog awoke). by B. Atxaga