ROSALIA CASTRO
A sweet singer--A drop of Galicia’s life-blood--Rosalia’s
lyrics--Home-sickness--_Cantares Gallegas_--_Follas Novas_--The
ancient Britons--A star of the first magnitude--The outpourings of
a poetic soul--A harp of two strings--Why the poetry of Galicia
cannot be translated--Rosalia’s remains transferred to Santo
Domingo--The procession--The poetry of Galicia
Galicia has had many sweet singers since the “days of Macìas, the poet
of true love, but none have poured forth a more moving or a more
plaintive song than Rosalia Castro. This poetess loved her beautiful
Galicia with a passionate love that could not be surpassed. Her tender
woman’s heart ached with the pain of her country’s ever-bleeding wound,
and she realised only too well that every bright and promising youth who
left those shores to seek his fortune in a distant land represented a
drop of Galicia’s life-blood. She wept for the old people whose children
were torn from them in the first bloom of their manhood; she sorrowed
for the lonely young wife left behind, and for the helpless babe that
never knew its father; tears filled her eyes at the sight of those
luxuriant hills and valleys with no peasants to cultivate their rich and
fertile soil--
“Now this one goes, then that one,
And all, all will go;
Galicia is left without a man
Her fruitful fields to plough.
Her little ones are orphans,
Her valleys desolate;
Her mothers mourn their children gone,
Her fathers emigrate.
True hearts are worn with waiting
Through long and weary years;
Widow and wife together weep,
And none can dry their tears.”
A strain of exalted sadness runs through all the poetry of Rosalia
Castro, and its nature is essentially elegiac. Rosalia suffers with
those who are afflicted, and speaks for those who are dumb. Rich and
poor alike repeat her verses to express their deepest and most tender
thoughts; there is not a Gallegan who does not quote her, not a peasant
girl who does not love her name. All Galicia’s sorrows find an echo in
her poems, and her sorrow of sorrows, the pain of parting, the anguish
of absence, the throb of home-sickness--the sorrow of emigration, is
felt in almost every line.[197]
Rosalia’s lyrics are sweet and simple idyls of Galicia’s pastoral life.
As we read them we wander among the green valleys and beside the clear
waters of her myriad brooks; we hear the singing of the wooden cart
wheels in the country lanes, and feel the humidity of the mist-laden
air. We rejoice with her in the warm spring sunshine, and when the
summer comes we share with her the aroma of the abundant fruits and
flowers; we hear the peasant boy singing to the accompaniment of his
beloved _gaita_; we watch the white sails of the boats as they glide
upon the calm blue surface of her glorious rias; we see the ocean foam
dash mountain high against her rocky coast, and through all we feel the
throbbing presence of Galicia’s pain and sorrow.
The beautiful hills and valleys of Galicia inspire her children with
such a wild and passionate love of home as I have never met with
elsewhere. Emigrants from all countries suffer more or less from
home-sickness, but it is only the emigrants of Galicia who die of it.
Yes, many and many a Gallegan peasant has died of sadness because he
could not return to his native land. This home-sickness is a real
malady, it has a special name in the Gallegan language; it is called
_morriña_.[198] It is not surprising, then, that Galicia’s sons far away
in Cuba should have collected money to raise a monument to the memory of
a poetess who expressed their woes with such idyllic sweetness, and in
the melodious dialect of their dear native province that they had
learned as children at their mother’s knee. And this fervent
appreciation of the poetess is no mere local cult; it goes wherever a
Gallegan goes, it accompanies the emigrants as they embark for other
shores, and the name of Rosalia Castro is honoured wherever Gallegans
are to be found.
Rosalia Castro was brought up at Padron, and it was there that she
breathed her last; a tablet on the house that she lived in bears the
date of her death, 15th July 1885. Her earliest work, and perhaps her
best, was a small volume of popular poems entitled _Cantares Gallegas_:
she also wrote a book entitled _As Viudas d’os vivos e as viudas d’os
mortos_ (“The Widows of the Living and the Widows of the Dead”). Rosalia
began to write poetry at the age of eleven. At the age of twenty she was
married to Señor Murguia. Her death occurred in her forty-eighth year.
She published several novels, and wrote a great deal more poetry than
was ever published, but before her death she expressed a wish that all
her unpublished writings might be burned--and her friends respected this
wish.
_Follas Novas_ is perhaps her most popular volume; it consists of a
collection of short lyrics. I tried hard to buy a copy, but it has long
been out of print, and was not to be had even in Madrid. Failde[199]
relates that a man who possessed a copy, being asked to sell it, replied
that he would not part with it for its weight in gold. The only one of
Rosalia’s books which reached a second edition is her first, _Cantares
Gallegas_, but that, too, is now out of print. Both of these volumes
were, however, lent to me during my stay in Galicia, and from them I
copied a few of the lyrics that pleased me most.
So well are the _Cantares_ known in Galicia, that every one of them has
become a part of the folklore of the province. “We hear them sung,”
writes Failde, “in the most lonely villages on the most distant heights,
and in the largest towns.” Yet Rosalia was not Galicia’s only poetess;
contemporary with her were Sofia Casanova, who is still living, Narcisa
Perez de Reoyo, “whose life was that of a flower,” Avelina Valladares,
and Filomena Dato Muruáis, whose acquaintance I had the pleasure of
making during my visit to Orense.
Failde speaks of Rosalia as “an Æolian harp made of Celtic oak,” and
“Galicia’s nightingale,” and he tells us in his little biography of the
poetess that she was a model daughter, wife, and mother. She came of an
old and noble Gallegan family, a family that had already produced many
poets. Rosalia was born at Santiago on 21st February 1837. She was
always “very delicate,” and the greater part of her life was a martyrdom
through ill-health. In some of her poems she complains of the damp and
cold of the long Santiago winters.
Rosalia’s poems are not in sympathy with the socialistic agrarianism
that is spreading so fast in Andalusia; she liked to think that there
was not a family in Galicia, however poor, that did not possess its own
home and its own bit of land.
“Miña cariña, meu lar,”
were words breathed from her very soul, and we English can translate
them by our own equivalent--
“Home, sweet, sweet home.”
Thierry said of the Ancient Britons that they lived upon poetry, and
their poets had but one theme, the destiny of their country, its sorrows
and its hopes. The Gallegans come of the same Celtic stock, and their
love of poetry and their passion for home are quite as intense. “A
Gallegan sticks to his native land,” says Failde, “like meat to the
bone.”
Rosalia’s poetry, though full of majestic sadness, is by no means
pessimistic; she is full of Christian resignation, but she is not devoid
of Christian hope. “Rosalia,” wrote Emilio Castelar, “by her Gallegan
lyrics has become a star of the first magnitude in the vast horizon of
Spanish art.” There is nothing more tender or more full of feeling to be
found in Spanish poetry than her lyric, “Padron, Padron.” One of the
most striking characteristics of this poetess was her insight into the
relationship between the exterior and the interior world. To her the
earthly horizon was an emblem of the horizon that spreads before the
human mind, the light of the stars spoke to her of the light of the
eyes; a shower of rain reminded her of human tears, electricity in the
clouds brought to her poetic mind the electric current of human
sympathy. Nature spoke to her, and she listened. There is no effort
about her verses; they are the outpourings of a poetic soul, candid and
pure and simple and sparkling as the limpid waters of her native
streams. “I have only had a village education,” she says naïvely in one
of her prefaces, and in another she says, “We women are like a harp with
only two strings, imagination and sentiment”;[200] and she adds that if
a woman touches science she impregnates it with her innate debility.(!!)
Rosalia writes because she cannot help writing; she is like a musical
instrument that sounds because the strings are touched.
“Aimer, prier, chanter, voilá’ toute sa vie ...”
As de Voguë said of the Russian poets, “Les poetes Russes no sont et ne
seront jamais traduits,” so it is with the poetry of Galicia. Both the
Russian and the Gallegan are full of sweet and tender and untranslatable
diminutives infinitely musical and vividly expressive.[201] When we try
to interpret them into a foreign tongue their music dies and their soul
evaporates, leaving nothing behind but a dry husk of words.
Here is one of Rosalia’s shorter lyrics:
“Un-ha vez tiven un cravo
Cravande ne corazon
Y eu non m’acordo ẍa s’era aquel cravo,
D’ouro, de ferro, ou d’amor
Soyo sei que me fiẍo un mal tan fondo,
Que tanto m’atormentou
Qu’ eu dia e noite sin cesar choraba
Cal chorou Madanela n’a pasion.
--Señor, que todo o’ podedes,
Pedinele un-ha vez á Dios,
Daime valor par’ arrincar d’ un golpe
Cravo de tal condicion
E doumo Dios e arrinqueino,
Mais ... quen pensara?... Despois
Ẍ non sentin mais tormentos
Nis soupen soupen qu’ era dolor
Soupen sô, que non sei que me faltaba
En donde o cravo faltou,
E seica, seica tivan soidades
D’aquela pena.... Bon Dios!
Este barro mortal qu envolve o esprito
Que-o entendera, Señor?”
I have translated it as literally as possible for those of my readers
who may not be able to read the original--
“A nail had once been driven
Into my very heart;
But whether of gold, or iron, or love?--
I only remember its smart.
I only know the anguish
And the torment that it gave:
All day, all night, it made me weep,
Like Mary at the grave.
‘My God!’ I cried, ‘give courage
That I may tear away
That cruel nail.’ My prayer was heard,
I tore it out that day.
But oh, who will believe me?
I did not know ’twas pain;
I felt an aching, aching void,
And a longing to have it again!
What? Was I really yearning
For the anguish I had lost?
Good God! Who understands it--
Our spirit’s mortal crust!”
On 25th May 1891, the earthly remains of Rosalia Castro were transferred
to the church of Santo Domingo, “the Gallegan Pantheon.” The whole town
of Santiago took part in the ceremony, and a procession followed the
bier,--a procession in which all the societies, the university, the
colleges, the professors, the students, the employers of the telegraph,
of the banks,--in fact everybody took part. Long rows of children
bearing lighted candles preceded the hearse, which was followed by men
bearing the standards of Galicia; Cuba was also represented.
All the shops were shut, and the whole town presented an appearance of
mourning. The townspeople walked two and two in perfect silence from the
station outside the town to the entrance of the church, drawing up
before the steps of the university, where a local orator gave a short
address, upon the close of which a student recited one of Rosalia’s
poems to the listening multitude. Then the students showered a rain of
laurel wreaths upon the coffin, while the musicians played Shadello’s
“Pieta Signor,” and tears flowed on every side.
As the procession arrived at the church of Santo Domingo, an unusual
spectacle presented itself. The students of the university awaited with
lighted torches the arrival of the bier, and carried it into the church
upon their own shoulders. “I never saw anything more touching,” writes
Failde, “than the sight of so many young faces streaming with tears, and
I do not know whether those tears flowed more for their poetess or for
their country.”
“Lugar mais hermoso
No mundo n’ hachara
Qu’ aquel de Galicia
Galicia encantada.”
It has been said that only those regions which have a peculiar and
individual vitality can produce a literature of their own. The very fact
that Galicia possessed--in the early Middle Ages--both prose and poetry
composed and written in her particular dialect is a sign in itself that
she was once full of life and energy. As we have seen in a previous
chapter, the language of Galicia has justly been called the mother of
Portuguese. “Great is the excellence of the Gallegan tongue,” wrote the
Marquis of Figueroa,[202] “not only because it adapts itself so easily
to poetic expression, but also on account of its great and noble past.”
Galicia is rich in legends, which, to the ignorant peasants, are gospel
truths; she is rich in historic ruins; in every town the escutcheons on
her houses tell of noble families that flourished in her midst. Once one
of the most important and influential parts of the kingdom, she gave her
language to the court, and it was through Galicia that the poetry of
Provence passed into Castille and Portugal.[203] But after the fifteenth
century, when her autonomy had been taken from her, and when she had
sunk to the level of an abandoned and almost forgotten province, there
was no vitality left in her, and the stream of her literature was dried.
Her political decadence had brought with it literary decay. Her best
families left her to settle in Madrid and the rising towns of Spain, and
the interests of the province paled before those of the capital and the
Court. Even her poets abandoned the language of Galicia in favour of
that of Castille.[204]
For several centuries the poetry of Galicia lay as dead; there was
practically no sign of life, and even her glorious past seemed to have
sunk into oblivion. People even wondered, in the early years of the
nineteenth century, how it could ever have come about that the
_trovadors_ of the Middle Ages should have chosen her archaic dialect
for their medium. But there was a sudden and wonderful change a few
years later. Galicia woke out of her long sleep; she had found a poetess
in Rosalia Castro.
Rosalia’s sensitive and poetic mind was admirably adapted to interpret
the beauties of Galicia; “her refined faculties surprise, by means of
the secrets of language, the secrets of the soul.” Sometimes her verses
are full of tender melancholy, at others they are penetrated with gentle
irony, and now and again they reflect the innocent hilarity of
childhood. As one of Rosalia’s own countrywomen has said, “If her tears
are softened by smiles, her smiles in their turn are tempered by tears,
and the one and the other are mingled to the sound of the _gaita_.”[205]
By virtue of her selection and her delicate talent, Rosalia purged the
Gallegan tongue of certain prosaic vulgarities which her precursor, the
Cura de Fruime, and one or two of that poet’s contemporaries, had
allowed to creep into it, and so her name has come to stand as a symbol
of the renaissance of Galicia’s poetry, and she will always be regarded
as the first poet to open a new era in the annals of her native
province.[206] So far no other Gallegan poet of the nineteenth or
twentieth centuries has approached Rosalia in individuality. Clear and
distinct her poetic personality stands out from amongst all the rest;
she has given the impulse, and others are already following in the path
her genius has so clearly indicated, and a literary movement has been
set on foot which may possibly terminate in a third Golden Age for
Galicia.
Is it necessary for the complete nationalisation of France that the
language of Provence should die? Is it indispensable for the welfare of
Belgium that the Flemish tongue should disappear? Must Great Britain
drive her Welshmen to Patagonia if she hears them speak the language of
their fathers? No; a thousand times, no. It is base and cowardly to fear
a language. Rather, it is the bounden duty of Civilisation to do all in
her power to preserve every tongue which has produced a literature. If
we destroy individuality, we weaken nationality at the same time. It was
during the war with Napoleon that the Gallegan spirit began to awake
once more. Local writers made great efforts in the year 1808 to arouse
the dormant patriotism of their province;[207] it was in 1813 that a
native of Galicia living in London published a pamphlet, “_Os rogos d’un
Gallago_,” addressed to his Gallegan compatriots with the intention of
stirring them to action. When Ferdinand came to the throne the awakening
country fell back into its former apathy, and progress was once more at
a standstill. When Maria Christina succeeded Ferdinand, the dry bones
again began to stir; and more books appeared in the Gallegan dialect,
but matters moved very slowly. It was not till the year 1863 that
Rosalia Castro published her first volume of poetry, _Cantares
Gallegas_.