Jon Mirande

Who is Jon Mirande?

Jon Mirande was a Basque writer, poet and translator. He lived in Paris. Mirande exerted a great literary influence in the 1970s and 1980s, writing in Basque literary and cultural magazines as well as Breton ones. His contribution was an obvious thematic renewal. He wrote poetry and short stories in his youth, and essays and novels in his later years. Mirande is a nationalist and believes in the value of ethnicity, especially in the Basque language, but he is also pagan and lays claim to the values of paganism and of the ancient Basques.

Mirande managed to incorporate Basque poetry into the modern European poetry landscape through an aestheticism of symbolist characteristics indebted to Charles Baudelaire and Edgar Allan Poe. In his poetic works, Mirande covered topics never before dealt with by Basque poetry: prostitution, alcohol, pedophilic sex and so on.