Ernest Hemingway’s BASQUE ODYSSEY
PHOTO BY LLOYD ARNOLD, PUBLIC DOMAIN
PHOTO BY KAREN DAY
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www.idahomemagazine.com
BY DREW DODSON
In life, Ernest Hemingway illuminated the brilliance of Basque culture, one short sentence at time. In death, he is keeping with the tradition. An exhibit detailing the famed writer’s enduring affinity for Basque culture is now on display at the Basque Museum & Cultural Center in downtown Boise through September. The exhibit can be viewed from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, and from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturdays. The exhibit comes to Idaho courtesy of Euskal Herria Museoa, a history museum in the Basque Country, which is a region in northern Spain that encompasses an area about twice the size of the Treasure Valley. The series of panels in the exhibit were translated from Euskara, the Basque language, into English for its year-long residency in Idaho. Amaya Herrera, the curator of Boise’s Basque Museum, said that the exhibit is just the most recent way Hemingway’s celebrity has helped promote and preserve Basque culture. “That’s part of why we’re excited about this exhibit,” said Herrera, whose family immigrated to the United States in the early 1900s from the Basque Country. “It opens up our audience a bit more.” The exhibit chronicles Hemingway’s life through the lens of his passion for Basque culture, which he discovered in 1923 while covering the Festival of San Fermín in Pamplona as a journalist for the Toronto Star. The festival sparked Hemingway’s rise to fame through his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, which portrays PUBLIC DOMAIN the annual festival’s famous bull run through downtown Pamplona. The novel foreshadowed Hemingway’s lifelong passion for Basque people and customs that manifested in places as far as Cuba and Idaho. In the late 1930s, Basque culture came under attack during the Spanish Civil War. Hemingway reported on the conflict from Spain for the North American Newspaper Alliance. The three-year conflict gave way to the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, who made great efforts to wipe Basque culture from Spain and reigned until his death in 1975. “During the Franco dictatorship, you couldn’t speak Basque, you couldn’t dance or practice any kind of outward
