Ríos, fontes, peiraos, and océanos: Hydropoetics and the Galician Cultural Imagination

Abstract

This chapter proposes reading Galician cultural history through a hydropoetic framework, that is, through an imaginary that privileges the intersection of aesthetics and history with the oceanic and maritime world. Using as case studies the contrasting works of Galicia’s national poet Rosalía de Castro and the liberal geographer Gabriel Castro Arias, it investigates their contributions to the nineteenth-century project to generate a meaningful cartography for the modern Galician nation. Ultimately, it argues that thanks to a combination of external pressures and internal priorities, it would be the former’s introspective geopoetic imaginary, rather than the latter’s demand for integration into grand maritime narratives, that shaped the emerging Galician cultural imagination.

Se a historia se escribise tendo en conta o que ocorre no mar e non só na terra Galicia tería moito que contar.

—Miguel Anxo Murado (“If history were written taking into account what happens at sea and not only on land, Galicia would have plenty to tell,” Murado, Outra idea.)