""Santiago de Compostela (1837) - Madrid (1885)
Writer. Symbol and representation of Galician sentiment, maximum exponent of the poetry of its people. In addition to the figure of the writer, the monument includes popular characters, soul in her works, and titles of her best-known publications: The Knight of the Blue Boots, Galician Songs, On the Banks of the Sar, Follas Novas. There are also various commemorative plaques from Galician groups that remember her: A Unidade Galega from New York, O Centro Galego from Puerto Rico, Peña Gallega Manuel Murguía (Santa Fe, Argentina) and a crown from 'Els Cataláns'. Work by Isidro de Benito and Francisco Clivilles (1917)."
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THE PERSON:Rosalia de Castro
(Santiago de Compostela, Spain, 1837 - Padrón, id., 1885) Spanish writer in Castilian and Galician languages. Belonging to a noble family through her maternal line, her adolescence was dominated by a profound crisis due to the discovery of the illegitimate daughter of a priest, and by her delicate health, which she never improved.
Her first book, La flor, was published in Madrid in 1857 and received rave reviews from Manuel Martínez Murguía, a prominent critic of the Galician Renaissance, with whom Rosalía de Castro married the following year. She lived in the midst of constant economic hardship, dedicated to her home and her children; the death of her mother and that of one of her children were two hard blows for her.
His first work of maturity refers to this bitter experience, the book of poems A mi madre (1863), which was followed by the Galician Songs (1863), a song to his rural Galicia, full of longing and denunciation of the exploitation of the reapers. by Castilla. With Cantares Gallegos, written entirely in the Galician language, the poetic renaissance in that language began, which would soon be endorsed by Manuel Curros Enríquez and Eduardo Pondal.
She later returned to the novel with Ruins (1866), the story of three exemplary and unhappy women in a modern environment that they perceive as alien. A year later, her most successful narrative work was published, The Knight in the Blue Boots (1867), a mysterious and fantastic novel that connects with the best of her lyrical work.
In 1880 her second book appeared in Galician, the Follas novas, an anguished and intimate expression about the death and loneliness of the human being. Her literary production is closed by the novel El primer loco (1881) and the poetry book in Castilian language En las orillas del Sar (1885); the latter continues the line of metaphysical meditation begun with Follas novas, although this time accentuating the religious sentiment.
Rosalía's work, which moves between a social concern for the harsh conditions of Galician fishermen and peasants and another of a metaphysical nature that places her within existential literature, has been equated with that of Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer as What a late representative of Spanish Romanticism, although this relationship comes more from the community of literary sources than from a real affinity of literary and vital attitude. Bécquer and Rosalía are pointed out by critics as the initiators of contemporary Spanish poetry; Rosalía's verses anticipated some aspects of Rubén Darío's modernism, and her influence extended, through Antonio Machado and Juan Ramón Jiménez, to the generation of '27.
Rosalía de Castro's poetry, in particular, denotes anxiety, an anguished restlessness in the face of strange forebodings that are perceived as one's own in the closest environment. Likewise, her painful sensitivity projected a set of magnificent visions of the Galician landscape in which a gray atmosphere of indefinable sadness predominates. That sensitivity was the one that conveyed a conception of nature as that of an animated, mysterious reality, whose most visible signs speak of a suffering life.
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