Galician Literary Movements: Minerva Generation and New Narratives

The Minerva Generation and Galician Literary Renewal

The Minerva Generation is formed by writers born between 1930 and 1940 who began publishing their works in the fifties and carried out a profound renewal of Galician literature.

Generational Characteristics

They all share some generational characteristics:

• The majority have a university education. During their college years, they participated in events like the Minerva Festival (literary competitions organized by the University of Santiago where narrative and poetic works written in Galician were awarded), and wrote for the newspaper La Noche, among other activities.
• They are monolingual Galician writers.
• Aware of the lack of freedom existing in Spain at the time due to the dictatorship, they maintained active political involvement, and many of them played an important role in the rise of Marxist nationalism.

New Narratives

The term "New Narratives" gathers a group of writers who published their work in the late fifties and sixties. They are all very young writers who sought to overcome existing literary models and were inspired by American and European authors who revolutionized twentieth-century literature.

Thematic Innovations

The main thematic innovations include:

• Presence of anonymous, marginal, rootless, disoriented, violent, unbalanced characters, often sunken in pathological states.
• The world of the subconscious, drawn from Freudian psychoanalysis.
• Expression of the absurdity of existence.
• Nasty, claustrophobic urban environments.
• Escape from the specific location of narrative spaces.

Formal Innovations

Among the formal innovations stand out:

• Alternating time planes.
• A plurality of narrative voices.
• Prevalence of interior monologue or stream of consciousness, attempting to reproduce the character's thoughts as they arise.

Key Poets of the Generation

Maria Manuel

As a poet, after an initial existentialist phase, his work gave way to landscape poetry, and especially social poetry, which he championed for his generation.

His poetry has a remarkable ideological content, reflecting his nationalist commitment: denouncing colonialism, the suffering of the people, and the aggression suffered by Galicians... in short, a poetry of complaint and claim. Among his numerous titles are: Muiñeira de Bretaña, Terra Chá, and Poemas para dicilo a dous tempos.

Bernardino Graña

In his poetry, there are two major themes: nature and love. His books Profecía do mar (Prophecy of the Sea) and Non vexo Vigo e Cangas (I do not see Vigo and Cangas) earned him the qualification of "poet of the sea" because of his focus on the sea and seafaring life. He also uses sailors' words and idiomatic turns from the living language of Cangas.

His poetic work includes the following titles: Poemas do home que quería vivir, Profecía do Mar, Non vexo Vigo e Cangas, and Se o noso amor e os peixes.