15. Fate, thy name is…

Let me not think on’t–Frailty, thy name is woman!

~ William Shakespeare, Hamlet’s first soliloquy 

Rosalía was looking over her poem, the one that starts with “Galicia non debes chamarte nunca española.” She couldn’t know what the fate of that piece would be after it was published in 1863. She couldn’t know the importance of the collection of verses, Cantares Gallegos, would be. If only there were clues as to how she felt as she was writing the book that would be published when she was 26. She knew there had been no book in Galician for four long centuries and she might have known there were elements of castrapo in the lines, examples of the Spanish-Galician mixture that were evidence of the colonized mentality of her beloved nation-without-a-state as they call it nowadays. 

No, the author was looking over this poem and another and was thinking that they were perfect ways to instruct her English-speaking correspondents on what she wanted the world to know about her native land. She couldn’t know that in Spain many would ignore her work in galego, first because it was in a ‘rural vernacular’ with absolutely no claim to cultural value, and second, because her writing did not conform to the interests of Madrid, Spain’s capital. Oh, and third, because what could a woman have to say of any value about politics?

It has always been the same old story.

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(From Rosalía’s journal:)

I want to send two of my poems to America that might explain what it’s like living in Galicia. Nobody understands it if they have never been here. All they see are poor houses and poor people. They don’t have any idea of the trees and grass, streams and rivers. They don’t know the names of our mountains, haven’t seen the rocky coasts where so many ships have been wrecked. Few know how many of us have had to leave here in order to escape starvation. 

We’re supposed to be part of Spain, but it’s hard to get here except for the ports. Many small plots are farmed by our widows of the living, by women alone who can do all the chores but earn almost nothing. This breaks my heart, but we never give up. I hear the workers in the fields singing and their songs are my poems. So many men, unable to go west to America, have gone east to the hot cauldron of Castile. The air is parched, mouths are parched, skin is baked until it burns and cracks, like bread.

We get nothing from Spain, from Madrid, the capital. We’re nobody, we’re dirty, we’re slaves. I think my American friends might understand the feeling of slavery, because they’ve been abolitionists. If I can make them see how hard we work just to survive, how we have so little, maybe they can help. Not with money, but by writing about Galicia. They have places to publish there, in English.

Maybe I’m hoping for too much. Maybe they won’t care, but I have to try. People from Spain never notice us, except once in a while they are entertained by our music. They like our gaita, our bagpipe, and think it’s lively. They never think that our songs and dances are brief sparks in the midst of shadows. I’m going to send this poem, because it’s what life is really like here.

Probe Galicia, non debes 

chamarte nunca española, 

que España de ti se olvida 

cando eres, ¡ai!, tan hermosa. 

Cal si na infamia naceras, 

torpe, de ti se avergonza, 

i a nai que un fillo despreza 

nai sin corazón se noma. 

Naide por que te levantes 

che alarga a man bondadosa; 

naide os teus prantos erixuga, 

i homilde choras e choras. 

Galicia, ti non tes patria, 

ti vives no mundo soia, 

i a prole fecunda túa 

se espalla en errantes hordas, 

mentras triste e solitaria 

tendida na verde alfombra 

ó mar esperanzas pides, 

de Dios a esperanza imploras. 

Por eso anque en son de festa 

alegre á gaitiña se oia, 

eu podo decirche: 

Non canta, que chora. 

[Poor Galicia, you should never

call yourself Spanish, since

Spain cares nothing for you,

despite all your boundless beauty!

As if you were born in shame,

and are worthless, she regrets your birth

and a mother who scorns a child

is a mother without a heart.

No one comes to offer a hand

in order to help you rise;

nobody dries your tears,

and beaten down, you cry, you cry.

Galicia, you have no country,

you are so alone in the world,

and your many children

form wandering hordes,

while sad and alone

lying on a carpet of green,

you turn to the sea for help,

you implore God to grant you hope.

that’s why even when in celebration

our dear bagpipe sounds gaily,

I can say for certain: 

it never sings, it only wails.]*

* English translation of this poem, by K. March, is in draft form..

Will the American women understand? I hope the Grimkés’ experience in the South was a good lesson, since they left the slave society where they were born. I hope Harriet Beecher Stowe might feel as badly about us as she has about slavery in her country. But maybe one poem isn’t enough. They won’t understand how unjust our conditions are here, how little we have but how well people live in big cities.

Maybe poem will make it clearer?

Castellanos de Castilla,

tratade ben ós galegos;

cando van, van como rosas;

cando vén, vén como negros.

[Castilians from Castile,

treat Galicians well;

when they leave, they’re like fresh flowers;

when they return, they’re all burnt out.]

Cando foi, iba sorrindo,

cando ven, viña morrendo;

a luciña dos meus ollos,

o amantiño do meu peito

[When he left, on his face was a smile,

when he returned, he was dying;

the light of my existence,

the dearest part of my life.]

Aquel máis que neve branco,

aquel de dozuras cheo,

aquel por quen eu vivía

e sen quen vivir non quero.

[One whiter than snow,

one full of kindness,

one I’d give my life to

and without whom I can’t survive.]

Foi a Castilla por pan

e saramagos lle deron;

déronlle fel por bebida.

peniñas por alimento.

[He went to Castile to earn his bread

and they gave him bitter charlock;

they gave him hemlock to drink,

he received suffering to eat.]

Déronlle, en fin, canto amargo

ten a vida no seu seo…

¡Casteláns, casteláns,

tendes corazón de fero!

[In the end they gave him all

the bitter things life holds…

Castilians, Castilians,

your hearts are made of stone!]

¡Ai!, no meu corazonciño

xa non pode haber contento,

que está de dolor ferido,

que está de loito cuberto.

[Oh! My heart has no room now

for joy or contentment.

it’s ravaged by pain,

it’s swathed in mourning.]

Morreu aquel que eu quería

e para min non hai consolo:

so hai para min, Castilla,

a mala lei que che teño.

[The one I loved is dead

and there’s no consolation for me:

for me, Castile, there’s only

The hate for you in my heart.]**

** English translation of this poem, by K. March, is in draft form.

Maybe I can remind them of the hard climate, the hard labor, the fear and illness many of them felt when they first reached the western shore of the Atlantic. Many of them starved, yet all they wanted was freedom. That’s all we want, too. It’s not easy to feel the pain of others, but I want to try to make them see.

I don’t like that Shakespeare, as great as he was, implied that having doubts made a man weak, and that women are weak. That is not true. It’s not true and it’s not fair.

(End of journal entry.)

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No wonder Rosalía felt the need to study the world from the position of men, by dressing in men’s clothing. No wonder she wrote poems like “A xustiza pola man,” which we’ve translated as ‘Justice by my own hand’. Perhaps she could have been clearer about comparing the Castellanos to the British, but maybe that’s not the best comparison, because the ones who left England did so for religion, not to put food in their mouths.

Galicians aren’t Spanish. How many understand that? 

I think Lavinia can weigh in here, using data on emigration, to clarify the poems’ context even more. She might add population numbers and statistics of how many Galicians emigrated and where they went. She might even include a linguistic explanation, because not being Spanish speakers created a lot of problems, people were laughed at for not knowing the language of economic and cultural prestige. She might include numbers of farms run by women and how many of those who emigrated never returned.

Lavinia and I both think Rosalía was justified in facing society wearing male clothing. Because not everyone knows Lavinia’s story, how she came to Galicia and came to know Rosalía, I’ll probably need to provide more information on her.

In my other role as Translator I have tried not to be too conspicuous. I’ve been worried, though, about including so much that isn’t in English. The fact is, many people still don’t know about the Galician language or think it’s just a dialect. I feel like I need to help correct that idea. 

In the role of Editor/Educator, I probably should mention how the figure of the galego in Spanish authors was that of the country hick. A Latin American writer, the Cuban Miguel Barnet, was a lot kinder. Maybe I should figure out how to correct sites like Wikipedia and Amazon when they insist on calling Galician writers Spanish, or when they list a book written in Galician as being in Spanish or Portuguese. It seems Rosalía’s concerns were important ones. 

One thing for sure: we see how Rosalía escapes what would traditionally have been her fate by creating a community of literatas and looking outward, knowing how to stitch or weave them together, knowing she wasn’t afraid of insinuations of she cross-dressed, but probably never knowing that right up until today we would be reading her works in many countries and finding out that Galiza non é España, as the graffiti on city walls say.

And so I’ll leave it here for now, concerned that triple narrators (Rosalía, Lavinia, and I) might obfuscate the story we each want to tell but which forms a thread running through all of us and on to others. 

If this hasn’t seemed much like a story this time, please forgive me. Tonight I had a lot on my mind and needed to get things written down before metalepsis took over completely. Tomorrow is also time enough to sort out who is really responsible for telling the story, for writing Rosalía’s biofiction.