Eduardo Pondal
| Eduardo Pondal | |
|---|---|
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| Born | Eduardo Maria González-Pondal Abente February 8, 1835 Ponteceso, Galicia, Spain |
| Died | March 8, 1917 (aged 82) A Coruña, Galicia, Spain |
| Occupation | Poet |
| Nationality | Galician |
| Period | Romanticism |
Eduardo María González-Pondal Abente (February 8, 1835 – March 8, 1917) was a Galician (Spain) poet, who wrote in both Galician and Spanish.
Of Hidalgo origin, Pondal was the youngest of a family of seven. From 1884 onwards he studied Latin in a school in Vilela de Nemiña which belonged to his cleric relative, Cristobal Lago. In 1848, he moved to Santiago de Compostela to study Philosophy and, afterwards, Medicine at University.
As a student, he was a regular at Liceo de Santo Agostiño, a place where literary debates took place. There, he was discovered as a poet during the banquet of Conxo. It was a banquet organized by liberal students in 1856 to honor "the third state", and where students rubbed shoulders with laborers. The toasts are retrospectively considered to have an important political meaning.
In 1860, Pondal completed his studies and began working as a doctor for the Spanish Army at Ferrol. He also published A Campana de Anllóns, his first poem in the Galician language.
In 1861, he opted for an official job working for the Crown. He got the job in Asturias, but he left it, and his career as a doctor.
He would soon retire and come back to the house of his family, where he lived with regular trips to Santiago de Compostela and A Coruña (Corunna), where he visited a library called A Cova Céltica, debating with Martínez Salazar, Manuel Murguía, Florencio Vaamonde, Martelo Paumán, Urbano Lugris and others. Through Murguía, Pondal would get to know James Macpherson's poetry, and decided to become the "bardo" (bard) of the Galician nation, becoming the guide and interpreter of the route it would follow.
He published Rumores de los pinos in 1877, a compilation of 21 poems in Galician and Spanish, which would become the basis for Queixumes dos pinos (1886). One of the poems in Galician, "Os pinos" (literally "The Pines") would become the lyrics for the Galician national anthem, with music by Pascual Veiga.
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