Modernization and Evolution of Galician Poetry
Track 10: The Galician Language in the First Third of the 20th Century
Context
Modernization, based in Galician literature, expands the use of the language to tests, the press, translations, political rallies, and academic events. This coincides with the loss of monolingual Galician speakers and the beginning of diglossia. Reasons for this include:
- Teaching in Spanish crushes the language of the majority of children, creating the idea that speaking Galician is speaking badly, and fostering an inferiority complex. Students leave school without knowing Spanish and repudiate their own language.
- Migration over 30 years displaced 700,000 young people who spoke Galician.
- Migration from rural cities led to the covering up of one’s own language.
- Measures by Primo de Rivera against separatism prohibited the use of any language other than Spanish. The Church shifted from Latin to Spanish.
Modernization and Promotion of Galician (1900-1936)
- 1916: The Irmandades da Fala (Brotherhood of Speech), with the magazine Nós (Our Land), used theater and romance to get closer to the people (Dantas, Antón Vilar Ponte).
- 1920: The Irmandades continued upgrading and Europeanizing Portuguese culture with the magazine “Nós”.
- 1923: The Seminario de Estudos Galegos (SEG) was founded to study all manifestations of Portuguese culture, including short stories, novels, and geographical studies.
The Study of Language
This period saw the proposition of grammars (Leandro Carré Alvarellos, Lugrís Freire) and dictionaries. Galician was also studied by outside philologists (García de Diego, and the German Krüger).
Legal Recognition
In the first National Assembly of Lugo, the Irmandades da Fala called for Galician to be made official, but this was reversed with the rise of Primo de Rivera. In the 2nd Republic, the Constitution recognized the language of Galicia (and in the Statute of Autonomy of 1936).
Tradition and Change in Galician Poetry
Herdanza and Change
Poetry had experienced a special vitality over the preceding decades. The competition of voices belonging to various promotions made the panorama of the democratic season complex, occasioning tensions between different ways of understanding the genre. 1976 is usually marked as the beginning of a change of course in poetry. The reason for this choice is the publication of three books that offered an alternative to so-called socialist realism. One of these publications was Con pólvora e magnolias (With Gunpowder and Magnolias).
Perhaps the most influential publication at the time, Con pólvora e magnolias harmonized two poetic attitudes: a combative one (gunpowder) and a culturalist and precious one (magnolia). The second gloss of the sixties is still marked by the appearance of poetic groups. The most transcendent of these was Cravo Fondo (Deep Carnation), which was disruptive. Other groups, in addition to or as a result of Cravo Fondo, emerged. Studies tend to distinguish a poetry of the eighties from a poetry of the nineties, captions that shall be construed by some as dominant attitudes and not generations.
The Poetry of Independence
The outbreak of poetic voices that occurred in the early eighties, whose poetics were separated from the sociorealist schemes dominant in the previous stage, included Xavier Seoane, Pilar Pallarés, and Ramiro Fonte. The emergence of these poetic voices contributed to the changes that were occurring within the political and social fabric. The emergence of a new figure, represented by the Professor of Galician, was also significant.
The promotion of the poetic genre was also driven by two factors:
- The proliferation of literary prizes, such as the Premio Esquío de poesía (Esquío Poetry Prize).
- The creation of countless magazines, such as Dorna.
When we add to the previous the hard work during this year driven by cultural associations, which resulted in numerous recitals and poetry events, we can see the extent of the poetic revival.
From a literary standpoint, the poetic production of this period is dominated by the following characteristics:
- The trend towards culturalism.
- Frequent dialogue with voices of Portuguese literature and world literature.
- Care for formal verse and the poem.
- Abandonment of social concerns and a return to classical themes, such as love, the passage of time, and nostalgia.
- Cultivation of literature as its own theme.
While some poets cultivated culturalism and formal preciousness, others, like Miguel Anxo Fernández and Xosé María Álvarez Cáccamo, opted for a poetry of experience (Manuel Rivas), or for experimentalism and even the incorporation of social content. Throughout this decade, the first female voices, such as María Lado and Luz Pozo, began to appear. Some of them developed interesting poetics of gender in the nineties. This is the case of Pilar Pallarés, Xela Arias, and Ana Romaní. The poets of the eighties undertook significant work to modernize Portuguese poetry, incorporating new measures.
The Poetry of the Nineties
In the early nineties, Portuguese literature again witnessed a new outburst of poetic voices whose works were innovative in relation to the prevailing trends of the eighties. This new wave was characterized by a greater connection with the naturalization of poetry, and the ownership of a simpler and more communicative language.
These new writers were forced to seek strategies for dissemination, including:
- Creating new editorial spaces.
- Creating poetic groups, of greater or lesser aesthetic affinity. The Batallón Literario da Costa da Morte (Literary Battalion of the Costa da Morte) was perhaps the most active of the decade.
- Activating public events (bars, pubs, open spaces) and incorporating musical elements or scenes into the reading of texts.
In the nineties, an extensive number of authors made themselves known, including Chus Pato, Miro Villar, and Yolanda Castaño. There is, however, much less of a common aesthetic to all poetry of the nineties. Nevertheless, there are a number of attitudes typical of the era:
- A growing focus on everyday themes.
- Refusal of culturalism and baroque expression.
- A generalized bet on free verse.
- The establishment of proper spaces.
- Experimentation with and breaking of conventions.
- Merging of humor and parody.
The New Century
The poetry written in the new time by the council shows significant breaks with the main attitudes of the previous step. Point, however, to the heterogeneity of products and the vitality of the genre. Anti Otero, Xian Arias. These authors also explored alternative ways to disseminate their work in new technologies and found a way appropriate to the times. Blogs and personal pages. The network is used by some of those voices for the distribution of its products under free licenses.