15
Everything on the site
Five sections, fifteen entries. The front page carries a selection; this page carries all of it.
01
Nimbos
One book, published in Vigo in 1961, and everything that follows from its size: what is in it, how few poems it holds, and the house that printed it.
- 01The bookOne collection, published in Vigo in 1961, and the only book its author published in his lifetime.
- 02The thirty-two poemsThe count is the first thing anyone says about it, and a book that small forces every poem to carry weight.
- 03Galaxia's editionThe publisher that carried much of the language's twentieth-century writing into print.
02
Díaz Castro
The life the book came out of — a parish in the Terra Chá, a seminary at Mondoñedo, a working life in Madrid, and the honour that decided he would go on being read.
- 01Os Vilares, GuitirizThe parish in the Terra Chá he came from, and the flat wet country its speech belongs to.
- 02Mondoñedo and MadridA seminary education and then a working life away from Galicia, which is the ordinary shape of the century.
- 03Día das Letras GalegasThe Real Academia Galega dedicates the day to one writer each year, and 2014 was his.
03
The Rexurdimento
The nineteenth-century revival that put Galician back on the page.
- 01Rosalía de CastroCantares gallegos, 1863, made Galician a literary language again after centuries in which it was spoken but barely written.
- 02Curros EnríquezAires da miña terra, 1880 — a combative public voice that got its author prosecuted.
- 03Eduardo PondalQueixumes dos pinos, 1886, and a bardic register built out of the coast he came from.
04
Carrying it over
Translation out of a small language into a large one is a series of losses.
- 01What translation keepsCarrying a poem from a small language into a large one always loses something; the question is which loss you choose.
- 02Versions and glossesA literal gloss and a verse version do different jobs, and printing both admits the poem cannot be replaced.
- 03Reading the lineWhere the line breaks and where the stress falls survive translation less well than the sense does.
05
The language on the page
The instrument itself: the spoken variety of inland Lugo, the spelling arguments that ran for a century, and the sound a silent reader has to rebuild.
- 01Terra Chá speechThe variety of the flat inland country, and what a poet does with a spoken register on a printed page.
- 02OrthographyHow a language is spelled is a decision somebody made, and in Galician it has been argued over for a century.
- 03Reading aloudThe poems were written for a voice, and the sound is the part a silent reader has to reconstruct.