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Bernardo Atxaga in Obabakoak (1988), as elsewhere, develops deep metaliterary discussions about Euskara, the Basque language. This paper puts Atxaga's metaliterature into the context of Boccaccio and Cervantes linguistic fights, romantic philosophy, and today's linguistic politics. The Euskara language has a negligible literary tradition according to a number of Basque authors, such as B. Atxaga and Iban Zaldua, among others. Anything written before the 1980s would be of little value by international standards, but Obabakoak changed the landscape. Atxaga offers a combination of wit, literary tradition and theory, and good story telling at the service of literature written in Euskara. But, building a literary tradition in Euskara is also a political stance, and Atxaga's own linguistic politics are based on an artful discussion of plagiarism, originality, language status, and literary tradition. Yet, in Obabakoak, the debate on how to create an international tradition for Basque literature ends in the mumbling of a wilful narrator neutralized by a lizard that eats his brain and words away. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]