Nationalism,masculinity and multicultural citizenship in Serbia*

In Rossettiren obsesioa (Rossetti's Obsession), a short and explicitly meta-literary novel published in 2000, Ramon Saizarbitoria presents a Basque writer wrestling a formidable lover: the Spanish readership. The question that Eugenia, the woman from Madrid, constantly asks the writer, “¿Qué os pasa a los vascos?” (“What's wrong with you Basques?”), encapsulates the ambiguity of the relationship which unites these two indisputably allegorical characters. The difficult interaction between the powerful Spanish literary field and the emerging Basque literary field, doomed to coexist and moved by reciprocal feelings of fascination and irritation, becomes the novel's subject matter. Is translation – and its corollary, an access to a larger literary market – a pure and neutral instrument of liberation for the writer who expresses himself in a minority language, or could it become, in certain circumstances, a threat to his autonomy?