Galician literature
The Galician literature includes the works in Galician language , a Romance language in Galicia is spoken in the northwest of the Iberian Peninsula. Galician is now the official language of Galicia and is taught in schools and universities; about 70% of the population of this region speak only or mainly Galician. Galician is closely related to Portuguese and formed its original form: For a long time it formed a common language area or a dialect continuum with Portuguese with transition dialects to Asturian . In contrast to Portuguese, which became the language of a sovereign state, it could only develop into a regional idiom that for a long time was discriminated against as a language of the common people, the writing of which was unnecessary or even harmful.
Early days
The roots of Galician literature go back to the 12th century. The oldest known and still extant literary text in the Galician-Portuguese language is a hymn of praise written between 1196 and 1216 by the trobador Xoán Soares de Pavia (also Johã Soares de Paiva, João Soares de Paiva). The oldest document in Galician language that was written in what is now Galicia is the granting of city rights to the Foro do Burgo de Castro Caldelas (1228) by Alfonso IX. from León .
Galician-Portuguese literature flourished for the first time in the form of the medieval Minnesian poetry of the Cancioneiros . Spanish poets (including King Alfonso X, the Wise ) wrote in the 12th-14th centuries. Century poetry in Galician-Portuguese language. The 426 Cantigas de Santa Maria are at least partially ascribed to him or the trobador Airas Nunes (approx. 1230–1293) ; they form the basis of Galician poetry. The women's songs ( Cantigas de amigo ) by Martim Codax (2nd half of the 13th century) take on a more popular tone . The meaning of the Marian poetry results from the devotion to Mary on the stations of the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela .
In the 15th century, Castilian became the language of the upper classes. With the development of the unified Spanish state, Galician was banned as an official language. Although the Galician language was the most common language in the region during the 16th to 18th centuries, there is no real literary evidence of this period. This time is known in Galicia as the "dark centuries" (Galician: Os Séculos Escuros ). An indication of the dominance of the Castilian upper class is that in the period from 1550 to 1800 of the 144 bishops of Galicia only 16 were Galicians. Only the Benedictine Martín Sarmiento (1695–1772), a representative of the early Enlightenment, advocated the use of Galician in schools and the preservation of folk culture and handed down 1200 song verses in Galician from around 1745. Many of his manuscripts remain Unpublished during his lifetime, were only printed posthumously or only received attention again since the 1970s.
Romanticism of the early 19th century ( Prerexurdimento )
It was not until the Napoleonic occupation that patriotic literature in Galician language emerged with a new political self-confidence. a. by José Fernández de Neira. Neo-Galician literature reached its first high point with the romantic poem Alborada (1828) by Nicomedes Pastor Díaz (1811–1863), followed by the first Galician drama A casamenteira (1849) by Antonio Benito Fandiño. This first phase of the renewal of the Galician language - roughly at the same time as the Catalan Renaixença - is also known as Prerexurdimento ("time before the resurrection"). Efforts to establish Galician cultural institutions have been suppressed since the Carlist War of 1847–1849. At the same time, there was an exodus of many Galicians to Latin America, Barcelona or the Basque Country, which halved Galicia’s share of the total Spanish population between 1850 and 2000. So the Galician came more and more under the influence of the Castillano , while at the same time more and more Galician settlements emerged in the Diaspora.
The rexurdimento
The polyglot nephew of Napoleon I, Louis Lucien Bonaparte , who presumably never was in Galicia himself, began around 1859 in connection with the Galician poet and doctor Vicente de Turnes on the occasion of a translation of the Gospel of Matthew into Galician, which was published in London in 1861, the Exploring language more closely. He tried relatively successfully to get a correct spelling , the elimination of Castilian terms and a precise, regional demarcation from Portuguese.
Eduardo Pondal, the poet influenced by Ossianism, published his first poem in Galician in 1858. He is also the author of the text of the Galician national anthem.
The publication of the Cantares gallegos ("Galician songs") by the feminist poet Rosalía de Castro in 1863 is considered the beginning of the actual Rexurdimento , the national language renewal movement . Her themes are loneliness and the sadness of love, saudade , the temptation to suicide. Her second volume of poetry, Follas novas (New or Young Leaves), was edited in Havana and printed in Madrid in 1880. This indicated her close relationship with the Galician emigrants in Cuba, who - due to the rural misery in their homeland - had emigrated in large numbers there and to Argentina. She dedicated her poem ¡Pra a Habana! (German: "Off to Havana!"). It was only through Rosalía de Castro that the Galician language regained literary status. Probably only through her and the two other important poets of this epoch Manuel Curros Enríquez (he published Aires da miña terra in 1880 , a collection of poems that was banned by the Bishop of Ourense ) and Eduardo Pondal ( Queixumes dos pinos, 1886) survived Language.
The romantic Juan Manuel Pintos (1811–1876), who also wrote bucolic idyll , is worth mentioning as the narrator of this period . The first novel in Galician was published in serial form since 1880 by Marcial Valladares Núñez (1821–1903), one of the most important representatives of the literary and linguistic renewal movement. In 1886 the first Galician literary competition took place; the first dictionaries and grammars appeared around the same time. The author Filomena Dato , who only published a single volume of poetry in the Galician language ( Follatos , 1891), advocated women's rights early on .
Modern
At the beginning of the 20th century, the growing cultural self-confidence manifested itself in the establishment of magazines in Galician language (especially A nosa terra , 1907–2011) and an academy ( Real Academia Galega ). Epigonal , rural ( ruralismo ), Costumbrist and historical dominated. The realism was weak.
The importance of the cancioneiros for the renewal of the language was recognized only late, for example by Antonio Noriega Varela (1869–1947), who after costumbrist-ruralistic beginnings showed himself to be influenced by Rubén Daríos modernism . The novelist and poet Ramón Cabanillas (1876-1959), who temporarily lived in Cuba , became an important figure in the Galician national movement and the peasant movement, the Acción Gallega around 1910 . As an author standing between the Resurximento and the modern, between Catholic late romanticism , symbolism and post- symbolism , he is counted among the Xeración antre dous séculos ( generación entre dos siglos , generation between two centuries).
In the 1920s the movement split into a conservative and a modern one; the latter, influenced by modernism and French avant- gardism , so-called Xeración de 25 , which roughly corresponds to the Spanish Generación del 27 and whose most important figures include the poets Manuel Antonio (1900–1930), Luís Pimentel (1895–1958) and the narrator Rafael Dieste (1899–1981), rebelled against the conservative Catholic environment and tried to catch up with the European avant-garde.
However, under the Franco regime , any possibility of maintaining regional languages was suppressed. Some authors who were close to the Galician national movement such as Celso Emilio Ferreiro , Alfonso Daniel Rodríguez Castelao , Luís Seoane (1910–1979) and Rafael Dieste, who wrote a large part of his narrative work in Castellano, and the narrator and essayist Xosé Neira Vilas left into exile.
Probably the most important Galician author of the 20th century, the journalist and avant-garde Álvaro Cunqueiro (1911–1981), wrote mainly his early poetry in the Galician language. He initially sympathized with Franquism , but made a significant contribution to the survival of cultural identity in his novels in the 1950s and 1960s through the design of Galician fabrics. Cunqueiro's work is characterized by a penchant for the mysterious and the fantastic. He draws on the mythical Celticism and the Arthurian novels, on oriental stories and classical Greek mythology. In As crónicas de sochantre (1956) he lets an army of dead emigrate to Brittany.
1975-2000
After the end of the Franco regime, which largely suppressed publications in the Galician language, Galician literature experienced a new phase of boom. In 1963 Galician Literature Day was introduced as a secular holiday. It is also celebrated in countries where many Galicians emigrated, such as Argentina and Cuba. After Franco's death, Xosé Fernández Ferreiro (1931–2015) wrote numerous novels from the 1970s after an early start as a poet. a. the first Galician “ Western ” A morte de Frank González (1975). The multiple award-winning lyric poet and narrator Xosé Luís Méndez Ferrín (José Luis Méndez Ferrín, * 1938) shares the fondness for the fantastic, which is also said of other Galician authors, but associates it with political intentions. He was nominated for the 1999 Nobel Prize in Literature . The narrator, novelist and children's book author, essayist and magazine editor Carlos Casares Mouriño (1941–2002) was the first recipient of the Premio de la Crítica de narrativa gallega , awarded since 1976, for his novel Xoguetes para un tempo prohibido (1975, new edition 2005) ) about the growing up of a boy in the country, the Catholic morality and the disillusionment of the revolutionary utopias.
Other Galician authors of the post-war generation who became active in the period after Franco are the poet, essayist, author of young books and university professor José Maria Alvarez Cáccamo (* 1950), the poet and translator Xavier Rodríguez Baixeras (* 1945) as well as the poet, narrator and Essayist Manuel Forcadela (* 1958). Juan Abeleira , born in 1963 as the son of Galician migrants in Venezuela, lives in Madrid and writes essays in Gallego.
Above all, the poet, journalist and narrator Manuel Rivas (* 1957), whose short story The Tongue of Butterflies was filmed under this title in 1999, became known abroad . The popular author and director Suso de Toro (* 1956) works for television and radio, and has published more than 20 novels in Gallego since 1983.
present
Xavier Frías Conde (* 1965), philologist and writer, writes short stories, poetry and children's books in Spanish, Galician, Asturian and Portuguese. The philologist, translator, poet and essayist Olga Novo (* 1975) works as a university teacher in France. The engineer Antonio Manuel Fraga (* 1976) writes fantastic books for children and young people. Patricia Janeiro (* 1978) ( Caixa de mistos , 2005) wrote Perspectiva desde a Porta (2009) based on her own research, a book on Galician nationalism and its victims on both sides. One of the younger authors is Óliver Laxe (* 1982), a well-known director who sometimes writes his own scripts ( Todos vós sodes capitáns , 2010; Mimosas , 2016).
The Premio da Crítica de narrativa galega has been awarded since 1976. Since then, works by Carlos Casares and Manuel Rivas have each received three awards.
Book market and dissemination of Galician literature
Today, Galician is spoken by almost three million people in Spain and several hundred thousand abroad, mostly in Venezuela. The majority of Galicians know and use it as their mother tongue.
In 1975, 68 works were published in Galician, in 1998 there were 1,106 works with a total print run of just under two million copies and in 2010 already 2,544 works. Editorial Galaxia in Vigo, which has existed since 1950, only publishes books in the Galician language; by 2019 there were around 2,800.
Many neofalantes (" Newspeakers ") had to learn Galician again, to which the television contributed, which despite the standardization of the language in 1982 is still characterized by dialects and is looking for ways of expressing modern issues that were previously reserved for the Castellano.
It owes the successful dissemination of literature to its standardization and numerous translations into Spanish and from Spanish into other languages. However, in the opinion of critics, the development of a uniform language standard can rob it of its original expressiveness and diversity. The use of either the Portuguese orthography or the Spanish-based spelling standard always represents a political statement that becomes invisible through the orthographic standardization and especially through the translations. After all, when translating via Spanish, subtleties such as changing from Galician to Spanish are lost in the dialogue between members of different classes.
literature
- Orlando Grossegesse : Galician literature since the "Rixurdimento". In: Walter Jens (Ed.): Kindlers new literature lexicon. Volume 20, Munich 1996, pp. 63-65.
- Johannes Kabatek, Axel Schönberger (ed.): Language, literature and culture of Galicia. 1993. ISBN 978-3927884311 .
- Manuel Rodríguez Alonso, Xavier Frías Conde: Historia de la Literatura Gallega. Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED), Madrid 2009 (Spanish).
- Ancho Gómez Sánchez, Mercedes Queixas Zas: Historia xeral da literatura galega. Vigo 2001 (Galician).
Web links
- Galician language and literature on universal_lexikon.deacademic.com
- Galicia Center of Heidelberg University: Galician literature on wordpress.com
Individual evidence
- ^ Earl Dennis Tolman: Critical Analysis of a Cantiga d'Escarnho. in: Luso-Brazilian Review , Vol. 8 (1971), No. 2, pp. 54-70.
- ↑ Manuel Rodríguez Alonso, Xavier Frías Conde: Historia de la Literatura Gallega. 2009, p. 7.
- ^ Sarmiento on the Galician Council of Culture website
- ↑ John Kabarek: Louis Lucien Bonaparte and Galician. In: Language, Literature and Culture of Galicia. Volume 1. (= Supplements to Lusorama. First series, Volume 4.) Frankfurt 1993, pp. 85-109.
- ^ German language website for Rosalia de Castro
- ↑ New sheets on rosaliadecastro.de
- ^ Website of the academy
- ↑ Grossegeste 1996, p. 64.
- ^ Marco Kunz: Spain / Portugal. In: Hans Richard Brittnacher, Markus May (Ed.): Fantastic. An interdisciplinary manual . Springer 2013, pp. 181-183.
- ^ Johannes Kabatek: The speakers as linguists: Interference and language change phenomena depicted in Galician contemporary. Berlin 1996.
- ^ Christian Bahr: Language rescue through translation? In: Relü - Review magazine for literary translation, issue 14, 2013.