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Non fiction

Teoría de Galicia

By Ramón Otero Pedrayo

About this book

Mr. Ramón Otero Pedrayo was the first columnist to write regularly in Galician. In Teoría de Galicia we gather for the first time in a single book, the 72 writings that the patriarch of Galician literature published between 1926 and 1963 in the magazine Vida Gallega. In this carefully edited volume of four hundred pages, we have both his lyric prose and chronicles of his time, dissertations and fiction stories. The vision of these writings together in this book provides a whole theory of Galicia. Apart from the texts, this edition includes several unpublished manuscripts by the author and photographs of a life dedicated to culture and our country. Marcos Valcárcel, professor, historian and writer, presents the introductory study “Otero Pedrayo in Galician journalism”.

Mr. Ramón Otero Pedrayo (Ourense 1888-1976) was the great architect behind a Galician identity. He was a professor chair in Geography and History, a member of the Generation Nós, MP during the 2nd Republic... His monumental knowledge and his extraordinary capacity for oratory made him while he was still alive, the Patriarch of Galician Letters. “Holding you is like holding Galicia”, Castelao said about him.

Book fragment

The mámoa.

Walking around the Galician moors (naked slopes, flowers of rockrose, heather and briar trembling with the blowing of the wind in the serene tops of the high lands) there are many times, isolated, or in a group, legendary mámoas. They are legendary because, though we know what they are and what they mean, they are like memories of a cycle of culture. The country people recognised them long ago and the shepherd feels when he is close to them some kind of mystery. Is there anything simpler than a pre-historic tool of rocks? This looks like a kid’s game or the work of water. However, it awakens in us something that is not awakened in the presence of large works of architecture, of perfect works from an artistic or technical point of view. The mámoas, the morchados of stone, are a treasure of prehistoric archaeology. It is mysterious and evocative because it speaks of our origin. These problems of origins are something for all times, new and old alike. The more we refine a culture, the more that feeling of a distant dawning is awakened.