Are you ready?

Alex Gurrutxaga: No. [Laughter]. If you ask me, I will tell you the truth.

Knowing this, we started. How did friendship between the two emerge?

G: I'm going to tell my version. I met Angel in healthy kids, knew and read his books, and I saw this man in the street, and for me he was a figure. Then I was lucky to know the figure and know it. How does the topic say: a very good writer, a better person? In this case it is true.

Anjel Lertxundi: For my part it was a pleasure, and the honor, said of all, when he sent me his thesis to look at me, and I was looking with an incredible illusion. That confidence was very important to me.

Both suffer from literary illness. How do you experience that relationship?

L: I've dedicated your whole life. How many times have I thought what would be without that… I don’t imagine if you don’t read and write down my life. However, I find it more surprising that cultured people do not read. Going through college and going through so many places and how literature, music or similar artistic disciplines doesn't tell you anything; cultured people have never gone to an exhibition.

G: I'm a reader. That's the relationship I have with literature. I'm a Humanities student, I think I'm a student even when I'm a professor and I'm still studying. And in the literature, I'm a reader, especially. If I've published something, it's not because I'm a writer, it's because I read it. I always remember Iratxe Retolaza saying that people who move in literary criticism are always asked when to write. It's the usual question. Or if you write a literary essay, or an academic article, it's the next question, but when should you write a novel? I have never been tempted to do so.

L: But in his texts, in his articles – and above all it is a book by Xabier Lete that clearly demonstrates it – there is no academic writer, there is a person who writes literally literature. Which literature can be written, unfortunately…

G: As can be irreplaceable, yes.

L: In his case, he made his thesis about a writer and then published it as a book. But at least in my opinion, it's possible to do a literary essay even when it talks about science. For example, George Steiner and Albert Einstein were great writers, and their texts are fantastic when they talk about science. But why? They flee from academicism.

G: I don’t know if we have worked hard on this tradition… I have recently read a work by Beatriz Fernández in outreach [Hizkuntza gogogoan; Erein, 2021], and he’s talking about linguistics, but he’s addressing the literary essay. I think we do not have many traditions in this regard, I would like more.

And without the intent of yourself, Alex?

Q: I feel like it, I recognize it. There are things I would like to do and I would say something about the subject, but the essay, or these kinds of books, I think they have something else, and there you have [Anjel Lertxundi] the example of Itzuliz usu usuak: they ask for a huge job to say something like this. There's reading and critical thinking behind it, it's a work of years.

L: Well, this kind of work emerges from the obsessions of a lifetime. One day you have material, but not because you've been collecting, but because you've been remarking, and you also know what you've read and what you don't, and what you should read.

You are friends, but is the relationship between writer and literary critic not conflictive?

G: Let's imagine that now we put the translator where we put the literary critic. How does a writer get along with his translators? I do not know, but I imagine there is a balance between the writer’s relationship with his own texts and with himself. If the writer is more true to himself, because he means to his situation, rather than to his text, he will have a relationship of five hard with the translator; that relationship will be complicated before or after, when the translator says: “This will be just as wrong”… But then there are writers who say “Ene! It's gone." Anjel is the second type. One example is that you haven't translated your texts, for example. That is fidelity to the text. I think those people don't get as bad as the early writers with their translators and critics.

L: Criticism, comments and all these circumstances are consequences of literary action. When you post some of you, you put it for that, and you'd like what you put to be the greatest possible success -- I mean success in terms of meaning. But this package includes the fact that someone did not like their work and that someone considers their work to be bad and, of course, has an obligation to tell him that he also found it to be bad. Then the question is how I will react to this. And there are intimate reactions, which each keeps, and others public. I do not know if I have always acted correctly, but I have always tried to eat my reactions.

G: In literary criticism, lately my impression is that we have on the one hand academic criticism, which does not reach society. And then, in some press reviews, I think prestige is lost. At the same time, people who hit very well the written press criticism, saying it's very bad or not critical, move on social media, in very few characters, saying anything in any way, and I think for many writers that has to be very painful. One thing is to criticize the text by reading the text, arguing it, but today is spreading that slight partition of wood… I have a very bad time with that.

Why did he stop criticising?

G: I got tired and…

L: How long?

G: Five years.

L: So much?

Q: Enough.

What did he get tired of?

G: I find it hard to agree with my texts, Angel knows. And instead, on social media, you could say very light things. I recognize that I lived with injustice, how much I suffered or how much I worked, and then it is better for a famous to say on social media that the book is wonderful. And you may have found many problems in the book, it seems to you that the reading and the argument and the search you have made is not worth it. It happens to a lot of critics, if you're young, or if you're a woman, what you say is justifiable. That was a great deal.

I would like to end with a sweet taste by mouth and, let's say, one of the hobbies you share: Italy.

G: I only spent a year living there [Trenton]; it's not much, but I really enjoyed it, I had very good literary teachers. There I had the first professor who hooked me up to Spanish literature. Then I had a lot to think about: going to Italy to read Calderón de la Barca at ease. It says something about how to teach literature. In Italy they have a great humanitarian tradition and more prestige. There is a great tradition, which comes from humanism and the Renaissance.

L: In my case, Rome was something else: going from fascism to a country that had long overcome fascism. I made two friends right away, two great friends on the same estate. You had a little store and you were a fascist. The other was the doorman of the house and the communist. On Sundays they took the Communist's car and took me to try the cafes of Rome.

G: Fantasy.

L: And what debates they had and what they did not say, politics and everything! I would come home convinced that the next day they wouldn't talk. Well, the next day it seemed like nothing happened! Going through the political environment here, all the silence, all high, of that darkness, and knowing that naturalness, in addition to the caste of the Italians… There is no more university than the one that has taught me.