Spanish · 1837–1885
Rosalía was born in Santiago de Compostela, the illegitimate daughter of a priest and a woman of minor gentry, and registered as of unknown parents. In 1863 she published Cantares gallegos, the first substantial book in Galician since the Middle Ages, and the day of its publication, 17 May, is now Galicia's national literary holiday. Galician had been reduced to a spoken language of peasants for four hundred years; she made it a literature again in a single volume, writing about emigration, the sea, women left behind, and the contempt of Castile. Her last book, En las orillas del Sar, written in Spanish as she was dying of uterine cancer at forty-eight, is a work of such metrical strangeness and bleakness that Unamuno and Cernuda both claimed her as a modern. She asked for her unpublished papers to be burned, and they were.