In 1983, Granta magazine published a special issue: it was the spring, the time when plants flourish; in the case of topics, the months associated with youth; and if they joined this climate, the works of 20 writers that were considered a sample of the new British novel were published. Bill Buford, editor of the journal, has to be recognized as having a hard look, since seven of the authors that he put in the fokupa 36 years ago have been successful in his later trajectory. MARTIN Amis, Julian Barnes, William Boyd, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie and Graham Swift: The Granta generation. Over the years, they have become canonical in British letters and the band of the Nobel Prize in Literature, which Ishiguro won two years ago, has also opened the doors of the international parnasco.

It is a heterogeneous group, but identifiable by common characteristics. First, they were born at the same time, in the second century. Towards the end of the World War, when they dominated the novels of the Cold War by Graham Green, Italian neorealism, French nouveau roman, the American beat generation; and when the age came to publish it, the United Kingdom already had a prime minister named Margareth Thatcher and the music of the guitars of Sex Pistols and The Clash: Barnes is the group leader (born in 1946) and Ishiguro the youngest (1954). That is to say, it had been 30 years since the happy Granta number had put a magnifying glass on its texts.

In addition to age, they have been highlighted the attitudes of post-modernity – the ironic re-readings of tradition, post-colonial writers – the commitment they have shown in the war against cliché, the writing of style works that you do not expect much – for example, Barnes has a kind of cookbook that serves even to describe many people of this cultured nation, by the way: Pedant in the kitchen–. But if you look at their trajectory, what's most striking is that they've been able to achieve a difficult balance, at the cost of making top-quality literature, that they sell a lot; today and tomorrow you get the Booker Prize, which you see translated into languages around the world, because you're waiting for readers, because their stories are commercial, and they're written with the delicacy of a flourish.

For years, the only option the reader has had is to obtain his works in the original language, in Spanish or in French. But in the last decade the work of three British dream team writers has been translated into Basque. The first publication was the payment of Hoben by Ian McEwan, in 2013, in the editorial Igela, thanks to the translation of Xabier Olarra. It's probably McEwan's best-known novel, for its success in 2007, based on the book Joe Wright.

After reading the history of the Tallis sisters, they had to wait five years to read more works by authors of this generation in Basque, at least on paper – a story by Barnes translated at Earth level by Ibon Sarasola in 2016 Armiarma.eus – at least on paper. But suddenly, because the Basque publishers do not know this or, more likely, by good chance, last year published the latest novel by the writer Leicester (Single Story) Meettok – translated by Aritz Gorrotxategi; published before Spanish also in Euskera – and Elkar published one of the key novels of Kazuo Ishigukin.

We are therefore faced with a rather special situation: we can take a walk, without descending from our language, by the works of a generation of contemporary writers of international weight.

Frustrated and frustrating loves

“What would you prefer, love more and suffer more, or love less and suffer less? In my opinion, this is, after all, the only real question. (...) Who can control what he loves? If you can control it, then it's not love. I don’t know what you’ll call instead, but it’s not love.” With this declaration of intent, the protagonist of Barnes's Single History begins to speak with the reader. The character who looks at sentimental relationships from that rigid framework of romantic love recounts in the next 200 pages the slow wear of his relationship with the woman of his life and after reading how the lives of two people sink, doubts about what lasts in the end, love, sacrifice, custom or mercy; or a self-destructive combination of all the ingredients. The only thing I'm sure is that it's not that other love, the sweet and pink taste.

And the same can be said of the novels translated into the Basque language of Ishiguro and McEwan: love is there, but they go through a filter that does not give a very reliable aspect of the relationships of their characters, so that when anything appears that can resemble the stories of princes and princesses, it does not go down the path of expression that the narrations of this kind would need – and that the reader can predict friable meaning. Imperfect affects that challenge the reader intellectually.

Non-time-bound

II. Another common feature of the three novels is to contrast the years before the World War with the post-war period. At the time of the fight between Robbie Turner and Cecilia Tallis, the latter’s father spends many hours in the ministry, immersed in preparations for the coming military conflict. I. The sanctions imposed on Germany by the World War concern Lord Darlington, the main protagonist of The Waste of the Day, so the protagonist remembers the meetings he organized with the Nazi leaders in the 1930s in his palace near Oxford. Another thing is II. The appearance of the World War in the One Story, which is embodied in the husband of the woman who falls in love with his protagonist: the pathetic Gordon McLeod, sad and at the same time aggressive, which has nothing to do with the indifference of a young 19-year-old protagonist who has not known the front.

Everything that happened between 1939 and 1945, prewar and postwar, the moment that divided the 20th century: preexisting customs, obedience; fidelity and the bonds that seemed forever, both in society and among people; and a kind of innocence that might never return again. The post-war spirit, on the contrary, has more of the quest for personal freedom, the sexual revolution, a new youth fleeing from parental authority and loses innocence with confidence in sacred institutions. These are gigantic, traumatic transformations and in a very short time. And the characters that we found in the novels of these British writers are characters that were caught by that relentless roll of history.

Another feature of this way of looking at the recent past is the critical distance. The three writers were born after the war ended and the stories that are told in two out of three novels are not based on facts that the authors were able to live on. Moreover, it could be thought that there is a purpose to break down the myths of the war-making generation, when the only front scene described in Hoben Less is a lamentable withdrawal from the British army; or when the ties that a part of the English aristocracy maintained with the Nazis in the remains of the Day are suggested. Not only are romantic myths suspended, but also the stories of the wrestlers for an unshaken democracy.

Literary cocktail

But the most interesting thing is how writers make those stories work. We have already mentioned how Barnes, Ishiguro and McEwan are responsible for not taking their characters in overly worn paths. But that doesn't mean they start from scratch. The signs of the re-reading of the literary tradition of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are seen everywhere in Hobbit, The Waste of Day and The Only Story. For example, at the beginning of McEwan's book, it is inevitable to think of the novel by Jane Austen Pride and prejudices of 1813 – translated into Basque by Ana Isabel Morales in 1996; republished in the Biblioteca de Oro Mutua in 2013, in the same year that the Hoben's Pay was published – despite the differences in the evolution of the characters of both novels: The story of Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy has to overcome many misunderstandings to end well, while a single misunderstanding is enough to destroy Cecilia Tallis and Robbie Turner forever. Tradition can be reread, but it can also be rewritten.

More connection: how not to think of the unreliable narrator of Ford Madox Ford's Dark History (Igela, 1999) when reading the memoirs of the butler Stevens, who stars the remains of the Day, and little by little see how his way of looking at the past is filled with pious lies, rationalization and distortions that present more beautiful facts than they were. How not to remember the relationship between Frédéric Moreau and Marie Arnoux, who focuses the sentimental education of Gustave Flaubert, seeing that the protagonist of the Single Story falls in love with an older woman. Yes, these stories are told before. But all stories have been reported for a long time. Barnes, who distinguishes Ishiguro and McEwan, is the art they have when they recount.