Source: Camiños Da Fin Da Terra

Courtesy of   Alejandro Ferreiro Barreiro

Author: Eduardo Freire Canosa

I grant the translations herein to the public domain

Translator's Preface
All the poems follow the index of the original edition published in 1863. The Galician title of every poem is also respected. However I have occasionally taken the liberty of writing English titles that convey a poem's content more accurately. The reason is that De Castro did not, generally speaking, title her poems, and the publishing house saw fit to assign titles identical with the first line of every poem (except for poem #34, "Alborada"). But such a procedure spawns a highly misleading index. For example the Galician title of the fifth poem, "Miña Santiña," translates literally as, "My Dear Female Saint," which might prompt the casual reader to suppose it a religious poem. It, however, blends the folklore fantasy of Halloween with a social critique wrapped in sarcasm, and this kernel warrants the fresh title, "Conversation With A Pumpkin On Halloween."

All the poems incorporate De Castro's punctuation except where this action is patently detrimental. Her style, conventional in Spain at the time, implies a profusion of commas and semicolons that would normally not translate well into English. However, since the reading of a poem entails a continual skipping of lines—with the eye blinking for a duration more or less equivalent to skipping past a comma in prose—De Castro's frequent insertion of commas or semicolons at the end of a line does not hamstring the lecture as much as it might in prose.

"Cantares Gallegos" makes extensive use of the affectionate diminutive form peculiar to the Galician language. The affectionate diminutive ends in iña (singular feminine) or iño (singular masculine). The plural variation is iñas and iños. However not every word that ends thus is necessarily an affectionate diminutive. Every poem is preceded by a tally of words that end in iña(s) or iño(s). The tally identifies which words are not affectionate diminutives and lists for those that are affectionate diminutives a range of possible translations together with a short explanation of the choice made.

The affectionate diminutive complicates the job of translating because there is no unique English resolution normally. Nonetheless to yield to the temptation of treating it as a nuisance and ignoring it altogether would deprive every poem of its full pathos. On the plus side the affectionate diminutive offers the translator an opportunity to add alliteration, internal rhyme and lyrical sharpness to the text. The objective is to find the best adjective, adverb or noun which conveys size, frailty, sympathy or endearment intended by the context. This objective normally winds down to a personal choice, which sometimes might even be to ignore an affectionate diminutive because it contradicts the context or crimps the fluidity of the translation or makes the text unadvisedly cloy. The exercise can be tedious, challenging and time-consuming, but to sideline affectionate diminutives altogether in the translation of "Cantares Gallegos" is to deprive the English reader of an approximation to what De Castro dubbed, "those tender words and those idioms never forgotten which sounded so sweet to my ears since the cradle and which were gathered up by my heart as its own heritage."

Hyperlinks to YouTube videos are deliberately few to give this presentation an academic hue.

A "livelier" abridged rendition of "Cantares Gallegos" is offered by:

Translation from Galician to English of 11 poems by Rosalía de Castro

and by:

Archived translations from Galician to English of poems by Rosalía de Castro.

The Appendix (final Index entry below) contains two poems which the translator feels do not belong to the authentic Cantares Gallegos. My contention is that De Castro wrote the poems under pressure from the publishing house which insisted on it and prescribed the subject-matter for both.

Lastly the reader may open/download the PDF version of this website by pressing the button below. Every PDF page has a nominal margin of 2 cm on its top, bottom and right-hand sides, and a wider margin of 3 cm on its left-hand side to enable binding. "Landscape" orientation is recommended for printing.
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Index
  •     Foreword   by Rosalía de Castro (year 1863)
  1.     Poem   You Must Sing
  2.     Poem   I Was Born When The Seedlings Sprout
  3.     Poem   My Sweet Kitchen Maid
  4.     Poem   How Can I Depart If I Love You?
  5.     Poem   Conversation With A Pumpkin On Halloween
  6.     Poem   Our Lady Of The Barge
  7.     Poem   Flight To Wonderland
  8.     Poem   Lure Of The Piper
  9.     Poem   Though It Be A Sin
  10.     Poem   Black Carnation
  11.     Poem   Bells Of Bastabales
  12.     Poem   Where Many Spit, Loam Turns To Muck
  13.     Poem   A Maiden's Prayer
  14.     Poem   Lass Of The Green Mountain
  15.     Poem   Good-Bye Rivers, Good-Bye Fountains
  16.     Poem   I'm Not Afraid Of You, Little Owl!
  17.     Poem   Breezes, Sweet Airy Winds
  18.     Poem   Prejudice
  19.     Poem   Flow Past, River, Flow Past, River
  20.     Poem   Poverty's Child
  21.     Poem   I Say Nothing...But Really!
  22.     Poem   Yet He Who One Day Loved True
  23.     Poem   Castilian Woman Of Castile
  24.     Poem   Darling Of My Eyes
  25.     Poem   A Galician Story
  26.     Poem   Lass, You The Most Beautiful
  27.     Poem   What's With The Boy?
  28.     Poem   Castilians Of Castile
  29.     Poem   The Galician Bagpipe
  30.     Poem   Come, Girl
  31.     Poem   When The Solitary Moon Appears
  32.     Poem   Spree At O Seixo
  33.     Poem   How It Drizzles Heavily
  34.     Poem   Morning Song
  35.     Poem   My Saint Margaret
  36.     Poem   I Sang As Best I Could
  •     Appendix   The two hectored poems