“Soon for the Galician Studies Seminar”

ANDIn September 1936 — two months after the ominous uprising — Don Ramón Otero Pedrayo wrote a poem he called For Estadea, an extensive composition of 138 verses, of which 18 are in Latin. It is known that Don Ramón is the last president of the famous institution created in October 1923 (10 years ago) by a small group of curious and Galician students (Lois Tobío, Xosé Filgueira Valverde, Fermín Bouza Brey…). This first hundredth anniversary is elementary justice to remember to Estadea (synonymous with Santa Compaña) and evoke the circumstances in which this unusual text was created.

The song is performed by ten explorers, nine two streets are ghosts, estantigas in procession, as happens in the stages described by popular belief: either the writer Vicente Risco (“na man, o femur xigantesco de Breogán”), or the archaeologist Florentino L. Cuevillas, or the historian Xesús Carro, or the naturalist Lois Iglesias (“lepidopterizando nas caretas”), or Otero Pedrayo himself (“fuma o seu charuto”)…

Beheaded or Seminario pola brutalidade do novo Réxime, or the author, give us nine two of his members as men who, wounded feito, will die; Therefore, they go, like spooks, to this unique Estade, where these banners carry or offer traces of humor in order not to overly dramatize the funeral procession.

But, twice, there is one who walks in the procession as a person who is among the living, who does not die. This is the ethnographer, expert in material culture, Xaquín Lorenzo xocas, who just arrived in Ourense, comes from Villablin (León), where he was seriously injured. Or the authorto Estadea, aware of his troubling situation, does not characterize him as dead (“i é o soio vivo qu’hai en tanta xente”). De feito, occasionally when he writes to Estadea Otero Pedrayo was brought to Ourense by a wounded soldier in the war, although due to magic, the author was beheaded by the institution he loved so much and the day he so longed for. Iso, when I exhumed and published an unusual song in 1998, titleino In Estade or Pranto polo

Galician studies seminar.