Rossetti's Obsession by Ramon Saizarbitoria: on the seduction of minority literary fields
Résumé
In Rosettiren obsesioa (Rossetti’s Obsession), a short and explicitly meta-literarynovel published in 2000, Ramon Saizarbitoria presents a Basque writer wrestling aformidable lover: the Spanish readership. The question that Eugenia, the woman fromMadrid, constantly asks the writer, «*Qué os pasa a los vascos*?*» (“What’s wrongwith you Basques?”) encapsulates the ambiguity of the relationship which unites thesetwo indisputably allegorical characters. The difficult interaction between the powerfulSpanish literary field and the emerging Basque literary field, doomed to coexist andmoved by reciprocal feelings of fascination and irritation, becomes the novel’s subjectmatter. Is translation – and its corollary, an access to a larger literary market – a pureand neutral instrument of liberation for the writer who expresses himself in a minoritylanguage, or could it become, in certain circumstances, a threat to his autonomy?