For some, Xosé Filgueira Valverde was a prominent intellectual whose selfless public service included a spell as mayor of his home town. But for others, he was a dictator's puppet who enjoyed a successful career thanks to his collusion with an authoritarian regime which repressed his home region's language.
These conflicting views have been at the heart of a bitter dispute surrounding this year's Día das Letras (or Day of Letters), when the region of Galicia, in northwestern Spain, celebrates its literary heritage.
On May 17th each year, and in the weeks leading up to it, children give readings in schools, literary activities are organised, concerts are held and one of the region’s more prominent, deceased, authors is the subject of a series of tributes.
This year the homage was aimed at Filgueira Valverde, a researcher and critic who worked in both Spanish and the Galician national tongue, Galego, and who died in 1996. But it is his political career under the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, particularly his term as mayor of Pontevedra between 1959 and 1968, which has sparked outrage.
Harshly repressed
Although Franco, who governed from 1939 until his death in 1975, was Galician, he harshly repressed the cultures and languages of Spain’s so-called “historic nations” in the north: Galicia, the Basque Country and Catalonia. As a result, the Galego language was rarely spoken in public for much of that time, being restricted mainly to rural communities.
"This is hardly an example for children," Ermitas Valencia, of the Galician Nationalist Bloc (BNG), told El País newspaper, in reference to Filgueira Valverde's choice as the writer of honour. "In Germany they would never do something like this," she added, in allusion to that country's Nazi past.
The library that Valencia heads in La Coruña was one of several that boycotted the celebrations in protest. The Queremos Galego (We want Gallego) platform organised a number of demonstrations on Sunday, and the well-known writer Suso de Toro declared: “The people who were supposed to celebrate this personality don’t see anything to celebrate.”
Compounding the hostility to the figure of Filgueira Valverde is the fact that the Galego language is in steep decline. A recent report by the Institute for Galician Studies (IGE) showed that 47 per cent of Galician children speak only Spanish, up from 30 per cent just five years ago.
Miguel-Anxo Murado, an author who writes in Galego, believes Filgueira Valverde is an inappropriate subject for a tribute, not because of his links to Francoism, but because his writing is too dry to inspire younger Galicians.
"The writers that are chosen, in general, are not first-rate ones with a significant output," he told The Irish Times. "So the problem is not so much with Filgueira Valverde: the problem is that anything that is written in Galego tends to be considered of value, merely because it has been written in Galego."
He added: “It’s overly moralistic to view artists through their politics as a way of trying to understand their work.”
