Ancient Art Is Thriving In a Modern World

Reno Basque poet Jesus Goni will have something to sing about when he wanders Fuji Park for St. Teresa of Avila's sixth annual Basque Festival on Sunday.

The poet was one of four Basques sharing a $20,000 National Endowment of the Arts Heritage Fellowship. But the official ceremony Thursday had to be delayed thanks to Hurricane Isabel.

Basque poets, or bertsolari, improvise topics from their surroundings, something Goni has been doing at Basque festivals all over the West.

"They wander around a festival and suddenly belt out in Basque what they see," said Tammy Westergard, who is handling publicity for the festival. "If they see two people dancing, they will start singing about it."

With 60,000 Basque speakers in the United States, mostly living in the West, Basque poetry is popular at festivals.

It is a link to the old country -- a heart-shaped region that straddles Spain and France along the western Pyrenees Mountains -- and to a culture that they hope to preserve.

Critical to that preservation is the Basque language, called Euskara, that is among Europe's most ancient.

It is in that native tongue -- which predates and is unrelated to Spanish, French or the other Romance languages -- that Basque poets perform.

"These guys are the spokesmen of the community,'' says Joxe Mallea-Olaetxe, a Basque scholar who has recently published a book, "Shooting from the Lip,'' about Basque-American poets. "The Basque people might not believe the politicians or even the priests but they believe these guys.''

Mallea-Olaetxe, a researcher at the Center for Basque Studies at the University of Nevada, Reno, prefers to call the art "improvise verse singing'' because it captures the oral, performance-based quality of the poetry. The poetry is evanescent -- its practitioners create both the words and music right on stage, rarely recording or writing it down for future enjoyment.

Mallea-Olaetxe's book, which is distributed by the North American Basque Organization, transcribes some of the verses from recent performances, reproducing them in both Euskara and English. The poems are often humorous, sometimes political and occasionally risque.