16th-century Basque literature
[note 1] Regarding Leizarraga, translator into Basque of the New Testament and other works on religious themes, he stands out for his attempt to find a unified language—a concern of many of the later authors—and for his use of cultured verbal forms and compound sentences, nonexistent in written literature up to that time.
The main impulse to the literary use of Basque was given by the queen of Navarre Jeanne d'Albret, when, in 1559, she converted to Calvinism and decided to promote the Protestant Reformation.
While this was happening in the French Basque Country, in Hegoalde (Spanish Basque Country) the feudal system suffered a severe blow with the appearance of a new legal figure, the universal hidalguia for Vizcaya, Guipúzcoa and some Navarre and Alava valleys,[note 2] although clashes between the Ahaide Nagusiak (high nobility families) continued to dominate part of the political life.
In 1534, he published Vie horrifique du grand Gargantua, père de Pantagruel, where he already included a sentence in Basque:[1] Lagona edatera!
")The second edition (1542) of Horribles et épouvantables prouesses du très renommé Pantagruel, roi des Dipsodes represents the appearance of the first complete and printed text in Basque (in chapter IX).
According to the 31-line prologue he wrote in his work, he was parish priest of Eyheralar, a town near San Juan Pie de Puerto, in Lower Navarre, present-day France.
The theme of love is treated with innocence, but with freshness, according to Julio Urkixo, so it has been said that it is halfway between the Cantigas, by Alfonso X, and the Libro de buen amor, by Archpriest of Hita.
Pruden Gartzia defends that Lazarraga could have had contact with Garibay due not only to the proximity, but also to the taste of both for history and chronicles, which the author would capture in the Genealogy of his family, by which he was known until the discovery of the manuscript.
[5] The manuscript is composed of 102 pages in total, of which two-thirds are poetry and the rest is part of a growing genre that had many followers at the time, the novela pastoril from the renaissance.
Influenced by Latin, he used a syntax similar to that of Romance languages, with abundant subordinate sentences, although he masterfully alternated short and long propositions.
In this regard, the following theories have been put forward: On the other hand, it must be taken into account that the coast of Labort at that time was of great economic importance at the European level and, although it was not integrated within the Kingdom of Navarre, Leizarraga used the verbal inflection of this region as a basis.
The translation made by the Alava-born Juan Pérez de Betolaza is the first Christian doctrine published in Basque and the first testimony we have of the Western dialect—or Biscayan dialect—despite the clear influence of the Alavese dialect.
[11] Its interest is mainly linguistic, since except for an extensive prayer in verse, the rest of the work is a translation of the princeps edition of catechism by Jerónimo de Ripalda.
Koldo Mitxelena recovered this translation due to its great linguistic interest, since the author was born in Álava and the work was published in the then Lordship of Biscay.
On the other hand, this doctrine was published for the Basque provinces and in Bilbao, and the Alavese dialect is similar in many grammatical and syntactic features to the current Biscayan—due to the fact that this one absorbed in later centuries the one spoken in Alava.
