á la humilde campesina que nació para vivir y morir entre las flores del campo y la soledad de los bosques, vestida con pobres ropas que la prestan más poesía que el más preciado ornamento de aristocrática dama. (25)
(Subjecting Galician-language poetry to many artistic forms is like imprisoning the sweet-singing nightingale behind golden bars; like reducing a tree’s luxuriance to symmetrical dimensions; like dressing a humble peasant girl in the gaudy garb of a courtier, when this girl was born to live and die among the flowers of the field and in the solitude of the forest, dressed in her poor, plain clothes, which confer more poetry on her than the most prized adornment of an aristocratic lady.)
The positively connoted images of the tuneful nightingale and the lush, leafy tree serve to align Galician language with images of harmonious nature. Soon enough, however, natural candidness turns into naivety, or the limited understanding, condescendingly portrayed as blissful, of the disenfranchised. Here the trope of the peasant girl in rags – which constantly appears in hyper-sexualized form in Galician cultural nationalism’s imaginary, from Eduardo Pondal to Ricardo Carvalho Calero – falls short of fulfilling the usual tale of male-induced upward mobility that it usually betokens. On the contrary, the Galician language is represented as the poor, unassuming peasant girl whose state of isolation is so all-embracing that she is incapable of the kind of self-awareness that would lead her to covet the status of others. Further, this inability for self-drive is indicative of her own doomed fate: only by not resisting her own destruction will she afford herself a dignified death ‘among the flowers of the field and in the solitude of the forest’, irrelevant and unsung.
As the text moves on to other compositions by Alfonso the Wise and the troubadours of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, González Besada progressively builds on his theory of Galician language and literature as naturally – and suitably – defective. This theory rests on the acknowledgement that the language displays both assets and shortcomings. Thus, after pointing out that, by virtue of being expressed in the ‘dialécto de Macías’ (dialect of Macías) (1885: 28), no poetic composition in Galician can show any artistic quality, the historian admits that it will still display a triad of qualities conferred to it by the Galician language itself: ‘Facilidad, sencillez y armonía’ (Facility of expression, simplicity and harmony) (1885: 28).4 In his discussion of the main differences between the Galician poetry of the Middle Ages and that of his contemporary period, the trope of Galician’s simplicity is again conveyed through a reworking of the peasant metaphor:
La poesía de entonces es melodiosa y áspera al mismo tiempo, con una melodía y aspereza que recuerda el llanto y la risa de la mujer del pueblo, que conmueve, alegra y molesta á un mismo tiempo; la de hoy es tierna y sentida y sin gran arte corrige sin embargo la escesiva melosidad del dialécto y yá llora yá rie el poeta, pero con un llanto, con una risa que recuerda el gemir de una madre, sin violentos arranques, sin gritos altisonantes, sin conmovedores y molestos esfuerzos … (1885: 38)
(Poetry in those times was both rough and melodious in ways reminiscent of the weeping and the laughing of the peasant woman, which moves, cheers and annoys us at the same time. Today’s poetry is tender and heartfelt, and yet it artlessly rectifies the dialect’s excessive sugariness, and the poet sometimes weeps and sometimes laughs, but with tears and laughter that recall a mother’s lament, without violent outbursts, without high-flown shrieks, without touching, tiresome exertions …)
We see, then, how a curious evolutionary logic informs the historical transformation of Galician as a literary language. Early Galician-language poetry displayed the irritating roughness typical of country women, while its nineteenth-century counterpart has gained, in mother-like gentleness, a kind of soft-heartedness that avoids making any loud claims for itself. As this image makes clear, the transition is not one of progressive development, but one of implicit stagnation, and the specifically female body that serves as a thread between one and the other historical stage helps strengthen the point that the language’s state (and status) invariably falls out of favour with the established taste.
The identification of Galician poetry with femininity played an instrumental role in the ideological casting of Galician identity, first as naturally sensitive to lyricism and, ultimately, also as feminine. For this metaphoric assemblage to work, the historian sets out to settle the controversy over the feminine origins of popular poetry in Galicia, first of all by conceding in his Historia crítica that ‘las mujeres – ya de antiguo listas y poetisas – son según sabios autores cuentan, las inventoras de la poesía popular’ (women – from the earliest times smart, and poetesses – are, as wise authors tell us, the inventors of popular poetry) (1887: 86). In order not to run counter to the propositions of those learned men before him – to whom he will reverently refer as ‘el ilustre Sarmiento’ (the illustrious Sarmiento) and the ‘no menos ilustre marqués de Santillana’ (no less illustrious Marquis of Santillana) (86) – González Besada chooses to bypass this philological question by invoking the metaphoric equation between women and sentiment: ‘Siendo la mujer encarnación del sentimiento, es lógico y natural suponer que sea verdad la noble invención que se le atribuye’ (Seeing as women are the embodiment of sentiment, it is only logical and natural to suppose that the noble invention attributed to them is true) (1887: 87). Galician women’s momentous merit of bringing Galician popular poetry into being is gladly offered here as a historical concession. It will become apparent, however, that, whenever the metaphoric triad ‘women–sentiment–poetry’ is brought to bear on descriptions of Galician literature, it will act as a politically functional form of ingratiation. In other words, while Galician is portrayed as a tender and melodious language, perfectly moulded for the expression of sweet sentiments in all manner of nuance, the region and people that the language represents are simultaneously transformed into a feminine, sentimental entity, innately disinclined to violent action. The correlation between femininity and sentimentality is therefore historically significant, and was particularly aimed at dismantling alternative discourses of Galician sentimentality as a positive national narrative in circulation during the second half of the nineteenth century. By contrast, the link between sentimentality, femininity and Galician poetry acts as a channel for a less felicitous legacy for Galician identity:
Todas las mujeres tienen sus cualidades buenas ó malas, pero al fin y al cabo características y hasta me atreveré á decir originales; además de éstas que bien pueden llamarse anímicas porque radican en el alma, hay otras que más que tales, son rasgos distintivos, perfiles fisonómicos. Pues bien: la poesía no en vano pertenece al sexo y por eso no es de admirar que esté adornada de esas cualidades y aquellos rasgos … La espontaneidad, la sencillez y la ternura son los perfiles fisonómicos, los rasgos distintivos, las cualidades que afectan á la forma de esas composiciones. (1887: 104, emphasis in the original)
(All women have their good and bad qualities, but after all they are specific to them and even, dare I say, original; apart from these, which can well be called qualities of the soul, because this is where they are rooted, there are others that rather than qualities are distinctive features, physiognomic traits. Well then: it is not in vain that poetry belongs to the fair sex, and so it is not surprising that it is embellished by those qualities and those features … Spontaneity, simplicity and tenderness are the physiognomic traits, the distinctive features that affect the form of those compositions.)
While the features of spontaneity, simplicity and tenderness are presented as the desirable, natural adornments of a language that has been described as feminine, these traits are quickly assigned to Galician-language poetry with a variety of debilitating effects. Spontaneity, for example, is defined as ‘algo parecido á la irreflexión en las personas’ (something similar to a lack of reflective thinking in people) (1887: 110, emphasis in original): the historian is quick to dwell again on the correlation between Galicians, their natural poetic streak and, ultimately, their inability for measured thought and their irresponsibility (111). The quality of simplicity is also endowed with negative connotations, as Galician-language poetry is further described as unfit to don the luxurious garbs of historical or romantic poetry. Here the link
