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Gabriel Aresti (1933-1975) was the poetic voice of both resistance and renewal for a generation and beyond of Basques in the 1960s and until his untimely death at the age of forty-one. The collections included in the present work Downhill (1959, Maldan behera in Basque) and Rock & Core (1964, Harri eta herri in Basque) represent two distinct periods in his poetry: the former an epic dreamlike and visionary tale of descent and ascent, death and rebirth, a symbolist treatise on resurrection told through the voice of a superman an Ego. In a complete stylistic about-turn meanwhile the latter is a robust, gritty, and direct tract socially conscious poetry written in a clear, comprehensible form that plays on the metaphor of stone and rock as resistance, endurance. Amaia Gabantxo's stunning translation of these two seminal works from the original Basque, the first time they have been presented in English, brings the urgency and force of the originals to life and will take readers on an unforgettable journey deep into the rock, the core of Basque culture. It may be a bumpy ride at times, but the rewards will live long in the memory.

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Gabriel Aresti was born in Bilbao in 1933. He came from aBasque-speaking family that did not transmit the language to itschildren, obliging him to learn it for himself from scratch as a youngadult. After studying com­merce, he earned a modest living as anaccountant, trying to support his wife and three daughters on fairlymeager means. Outside his professional and domestic life, and alongsideEuskara (the Basque language), his other lifelong obsession was poetry.He pub­lished his first poems at the age of twenty­one but really cameto the fore in the 1960s with landmark works that revolutionized thegenre in Euskara. His was a socially aware voice that believedpassionately in the transformational capacity of poetry. A clearly urbanpoet, with the industrial city of Bilbao central to his work, henevertheless fre­quently invoked predominantly rural Basque traditions,such as the significance of bert­solaritza (oral improvised poetry). Inaddi­tion, he founded publishing houses and col­laborated on boththeater and music proj­ects. He was one of the principal champions ofestablishing a standardized form of Basque in the face of significantopposition from predominantly traditionalist sectors in the world ofBasque philology. And politi­cally, he challenged both the conservativeface of Basque nationalism and the brutal re­alities of the Francodictatorship. He died prematurely in 1975, but his legacy runs deep inBasque culture to this day.