Despite being little known by the general Brazilian public, Rosalía de Castro was the most studied and published Galician author, and her popularity in Spain is equal only to that of Federico Garcia Lorca, who even dedicated six poems to her in Galician. Because it was produced in both languages, it was the object of study in both Galician and Castilian literary historiography.
Its production represents a milestone as it boosted the rebirth of a language that for centuries had not been expressed in written form. She was a pioneer in highlighting the popular culture of her region and the Galician language, with very common roots with Portuguese, at the time considered an uneducated dialect, and later banned by the Franco dictatorship. He joined popular culture, recovering excerpts from traditional songs, using rhythms typical of peasant dances and making numerous references to festivals, legends, superstitions and popular beliefs. His book of poems "Cantares Galegos" is considered the main (if not the first) publication in the language. The date of its original publication, May 17, became Galician Letters Day.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
The illegitimate daughter of a priest and a noblewoman, she was “the result of sacrilegious love”, “An evil spirit, some demon presided over her birth”. Little is known about his childhood. At the age of five, he moved with his mother to the town of Padrón (La Coruña).
Her adolescence was marked by a profound life crisis following the discovery of her status as an illegitimate daughter and by delicate health that never improved. He started writing when he was 12 years old. At 18 he went to Madrid for the first time, where he moved at 20 and published his first poem, still in Castilian, and married Manuel Murguia, an important historian, creator of the Real Academia Galega and considered an outstanding promoter of the Resurgence with his wife. . He greatly encouraged his writing career, despite the turbulent and distant relationship, as he traveled a lot and did not hide his relationships with lovers wherever he went.
Married life was a contingent series of changes of residence, due to the uncertainty of Manuel's jobs: an unstable home and increasingly precarious health, with economic constraints, seven births and six children, one of whom died in early childhood, in a tragic accident. They lived in Madrid, Compostela, Simancas, A Coruña, Vigo, Lugo, and, finally, Padrón.
Shortly before he died, he asked his daughter Alexandra to burn his manuscripts, which the girl unfortunately complied with, destroying an unpublished novel and other works. Manuel even burned his last letters, in a violent act of erasure and the reasons for which are controversial.
Rosalía's life is a fascinating story, full of historical, cultural and intellectual interest.
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ROSALIANA PRODUCTION
Rosalian production began timidly in 1857 with a book of poetry in Castilian, entitled “La Flor”. The author also published the novels in Castilian “La Hija del Mar”, from 1859, and “Flavio”, from 1861. In 1863, she published “A mi madre”, a brief collection of Castilian poems and “Cantares Galegos”, a work in Galician that would consecrate her. Rosalia also wrote the Castilian prose work “El Cadiceño” and “Ruinas”, from 1866, “El Caballero de las Botas Azules”, from 1867 and “El Primer Loco”, from 1881. In Galician she wrote “Conto Galego”, a story short posthumous publication.
The emphasis given by Galician critics to Rosalian's work falls on his poetic production. “Cantares Gallegos” is followed by “Follas Novas” written in Galician in the 70s and published in 80. In 84, a year before his death, his last book of poems, “Las Orillas del Sar”, was published in Castilian .
Rosalía's work, which moves between a social concern for the harsh conditions of Galician fishermen and peasants and another of a metaphysical nature that places it within existential literature, has been equated with that of Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer as late in Spanish Romanticism.
His poetry denotes anxiety, an anguished restlessness in the face of strange premonitions that one perceives as one's own. Likewise, his painful sensitivity projected a set of magnificent visions of the Galician landscape in which a gray atmosphere of indefinable sadness predominates. It was this sensitivity that conveyed a conception of nature as that of an animated, mysterious reality, and whose most visible signs speak of a painful life.
Furthermore, in her letters and some articles published in periodicals, Rosalía showed herself to be a feminist, one of the first in her country and considered the first in Galicia. According to María Xosé Queizán, writer, professor of Galician language and literature and relevant figure in the feminist movement in Spain, “Rosalía seems to call on women to be subjects of themselves, to be free and independent and not slaves”.
He denounced the sexist customs of the Autonomous Community, the weight that the exodus of men to metropolitan regions left on women (being a genuinely migratory region, the departure of men altered the social fabric, especially the behavior of women, who spent their lives waiting for their return husbands), and the struggle of female artists, which continues to this day. She herself had to dedicate herself to her 6 children while working tirelessly to publish her writings, as her husband, Manuel Murguia, was constantly traveling for work.
These themes, of valuing regionalities and feminism, still resonate and show that Rosalía de Castro is a figure who remains current and deserves to be encouraged to read her works. Knowledge of literature in Galician should also be encouraged, given its close relations with Lusophony and the possibilities for cultural exchange that this linguistic proximity offers.
GALICIA AND THE RESURGENCE
Located northwest of Spanish territory and north of Portugal, Galicia, like other autonomous communities in Spain, is a region that has its own geographic, racial, linguistic and cultural characteristics. With regard to literature, Galicia went through a period of heyday in the Middle Ages with troubadour lyrics in the Galician-Portuguese language.
From the 14th century onwards, however, Galician began to experience a setback as a literary language. This was due to the context of Castilian domination. For centuries Galician would be limited to orality, being considered a rural and peasant language that was without literary cultivation and subjected to a great diglossia, while other vernacular languages, such as Portuguese and Castilian, continued their literary evolution in written form. In Galicia, the Castilian language, urban and favored by the bourgeoisie, and the Galician language clashed.
The Resurgence (in Galician Rexurdimento and in Castilian, Resurgimiento) is the cultural stage in the history of Galicia that developed throughout the 19th century and whose main characteristic was the revitalization of the Galician language as a vehicle of social and cultural expression after the period of ostracism, known as dark centuries. This is a period that is simultaneous and similar to the Catalan Renaissance. The regional spirit and subjective identity of the Spanish regions were revived and Galician once again had written literary expression, at least in the field of lyric poetry. A national consciousness appears and the Galician language is claimed as a distinctive feature of Galicia's personality. Conventionally, it is estimated that the publication of Rosalía de Castro's first book, Cantares Gallegos, in 1863, is the starting point of the Resurgence.
RELATIONSHIP WITH BRAZIL AND LUSOPHONY
According to Érica Sarmiento, the third nationality to arrive in Rio after the Portuguese and Italians, 80% of Spaniards were of Galician origin. Figures from other states such as Bahia, Pará, Pernambuco and São Paulo, relating to the beginning of the 20th century, indicate similar percentages of Galicians among Spanish immigrants, varying between 70 and 96%.
It is essential to highlight the proximity of Galician to Portuguese even today. The two were separated much more for political and separatist reasons than linguistic ones. Although the standardization of the Galician language (created only after the redemocratization of Spain) brought it closer to Castilian spelling, there is a strong movement towards Lusophony among Galician intellectuals.
Several cultural entities in Galicia, such as the Academia Galega de Língua Portuguesa, have strong relations with the Community of Portuguese Speaking Countries and even seek the integration of Galicia into the body. The AGLP even prepared a selection of Galician words to be integrated into the Common Spelling Vocabulary of the Portuguese Language, with the purpose of being integrated in the future into the Dictionaries of the Lusofonia language. The word "saudade", for example, known to exist only in Portuguese, is actually of Galician origin and represents the melancholic feeling of these people. In addition to this, many others, as well as expressions and songs present in Brazil have their origin there.
There is a large underexplored opening for cultural and linguistic exchange between Portuguese and Galician, and we seek to move in the direction of this exchange and the presentation of the similarity between these two languages through the project.
FEMINISMO
According to María Xosé Agra Romero ““we must contemplate it as the recognition of one with her, at the same time giving her back her originality and universality, demystifying against the manipulation to which she was subjected for being a woman and writing in Galician, bringing to light machismo in literature ”.
“Quando os senhores da terra me ameaçam com uma mirada, ou querem marcar meu rosto com uma mancha de opróbio, eu rio como eles riem e faço, em aparência, minha iniquidade é maior que a sua iniquidade. No fundo, não obstante, meu coração é bom, porém não acato os mandos dos meus iguais e creio que seu feito é igual ao meu feito, e que sua carne é igual à minha carne. (...) Sou livre. Nada pode conter a marcha de meus pensamentos, e eles são a lei que rege meu destino.”
Rosalía wrote these words in “Lieders”, a text published in the “Álbum de Miño de Vigo”, in 1858. She was 21 years old and her precocious, critical and feminist speech was already shaped in this great declaration of intentions. She was a pioneer, therefore, of literary feminism in Spain and Portugal.
“Women’s heritage is the chains of slavery” , he analyzed in the same text. What is certain is that constant concern with the female condition permeated his work. As María Pilar García Negro argues in her article “A Feminist in the Shadow”, “to return the truth of her production, her radicality and her transgression as a free thinker and poet. It represents, in short, the beginning of Galician modernity.”
One of the clearest texts in this regard is the prologue of “La Hija del Mar”, a novel in which Rosalía makes a courageous and tenacious claim for the female condition. She is as scathing as she is ironic, and explains that, “once it was recognized that women also have a soul, perhaps a few more years will be needed to admit that the female sex is sufficiently capable of writing books, as it is still not allowed women to write what they feel and what they know” . Her work is a cry for justice for women.
