Böcker i Galician Classics-serien

Álvaro Cunqueiro (1911-1981) is one of Galicia's best loved writers. Born in the cathedral city of Mondoñedo to the north of Lugo and a short flight of the imagination from the sea, he is best known for his collection of literary sketches Folks From Here and There and for his Arthurian novel Merlin and Company, published in Colin Smith's English translation in 1996. His portraits of local characters are done with great humor and tenderness and the reader is left wondering if these characters existed in real life or were imagined. Cunqueiro was an accomplished poet, journalist and dramatist, who published also in the Spanish language. This English edition was first published in 2011 and is now reprinted.

Long Night of Stone is the most famous book of Galician poetry published during Franco's dictatorship. The poem with this title is the result of the author's imprisonment in Celanova Monastery during the Spanish Civil War; the book is read as a metaphor for the long years of dictatorship that ensued. Celso Emilio Ferreiro, a man of unwavering commitment, who stands with the downtrodden and oppressed and refuses to give up hope on the world, was himself born in Celanova, a town in the province of Ourense, in 1912 and died in Vigo in 1979. The message the book contains is surprisingly modern, inviting us as it does to investigate the truth of our own time and find our poetry. This English edition was first published in 2012 and is now reprinted.

'Poetry is the taste of thinking in the mouth,' writes translator Erín Moure in introducing New Leaves. In the face of so much migration and precarity, poet Rosalía de Castro sets herself to thinking and recognizes repetition as key to humanity; she views the social as intimate; she creates poems in dialogue so that subjectivity reverberates; she examines the notion of home and articulates the effects of migration on women, the widows. 'Thinking,' continues Moure, 'fills the absence when love and hope are missing.' New Leaves confronts the conundrum of human existence and the injustices suffered by those left behind in the fight (flight) for (economic) survival. As such, Rosalía de Castro is our contemporary in our own times of migration. New Leaves was her second and last major work of poetry in the Galician language, after Galician Songs, and is here presented in award-winning poet Erín Moure's memorable translation.

Lois Pereiro (1958-96) was born and spent his childhood in Monforte de Lemos, an important railway hub in the east of Galicia. At the age of 17, he went to Madrid to study sociology and modern languages (English, French, German), where he was involved in editing the magazine Loia (Skylark). It was here, in 1981, that he suffered from toxic oil syndrome, traced to adulterated rapeseed oil. This had a very debilitating effect on Pereiro, who later moved to Coruña (where he helped edit another magazine, La Naval) and travelled through central and western Europe. An addiction to heroin led to the author contracting AIDS, which was the cause of his untimely death, aged only 38. Pereiro published two poetry collections in his lifetime: Poems 1981/1991 and Last Poetry of Love and Illness 1992-1995. A posthumous collection of early poems, Poems for a Skylark, appeared one year after his death. All three books are included in this volume, first published in 2011 and now reprinted.

There are three bestsellers of Galician literature: The Carpenter's Pencil by Manuel Rivas, a love story set in the Spanish Civil War; Winter Letters by Agustín Fernández Paz, about a man who decides to find out if a haunted house is really haunted (this title is also available from Small Stations Press); and perhaps most famously of all Memoirs of a Village Boy by Xosé Neira Vilas. This book, according to Wikipedia, is the most published work of Galician literature and has sold 700,000 copies in the Galician language. Now this work is being made available in an English translation by John Rutherford, founder of the Centre for Galician Studies at Oxford University and translator of Don Quixote and La Regenta for Penguin Classics. The book is a diary kept by Balbino, a village boy, 'in other words a nobody'. In the first chapter, he describes the village as 'a mixture of mud and smoke, where the dogs howl and the people die "when God sees fit"'. He would like to see the world, to go over seas and lands he doesn't know. He was born and brought up in the village, but now it feels small, cramped, as if he was living in a beehive. Behind the detailed description of village life, there is a fierce indictment of the iniquities of Galicia's feudal system, which is remarkable in a book first published in 1961, at the height of Franco's rule. Memoirs of a Village Boy paints a picture of the hardships and hard-won joys of life in a Galician village in the middle of the twentieth century, a life that was once common, but is now distant from our technology-dominated lives. It is a book to relish as one is transported by the richness of the language to another place and time.