Barbara Burns speaks to Laura Linares, whose book Translation Landscapes: Contemporary Galician Fiction in English recently appeared in the Legenda series Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures.

cover of Translation Landscapes

BB. Galician, spoken by inhabitants of the Autonomous Community of Galicia in northwestern Spain, is a language with a rich heritage. It flourished in the Middle Ages, but went into decline and was later abandoned as an official language. How many native speakers of Galician are there today, and what efforts have been made in recent years to revive and legitimize Galician as a language of cultural production?

Laura Linares

LL. Galician is a Romance language spoken primarily in Galicia and in the bordering areas of Asturias and León. It has just over three million speakers, but unfortunately its use has been in steady decline over the past few decades. In the most recent survey conducted in 2024, for example, only 10.7 percent of Galician youths (ages 5-14) reported using it as their mother tongue, a significant drop from the 25% in 2008 and a very concerning picture for the future of the language.

Some initiatives are in place to promote Galician, but the government has regularly come under criticism for a lack of commitment to many of these efforts. Regarding the internationalization of the language, which is the main focus of the book, there is institutional support through translation grants, promotional websites like Portico of Galician Literature, and participation in international book fairs. Still, these efforts often fall short, meaning that, although Galician literature is translated, it struggles to access distribution channels and, consequently, readers.

BB. Your study covers the period from 2000 to 2018, when 96 narrative books in Galician were translated into English. What types of books were these, and what trends did you identify?

LL. Of those 96 narrative books, 41 were adult fiction, including 24 novels. Key trends include a focus on contemporary literature over classics, but with a notable underrepresentation of women writers. This has slightly changed in the 2020s, but much remains to be done on this front.

Manuel Rivas was the most translated author by far, prompting questions about canonization in English but also about him being the ‘token’ Galician author in translation. Outside of Rivas (and Domingo Villar’s crime fiction), most translations of Galician literature have been undertaken by small, independent presses. The vast majority of them, in fact, have been the work of just one player: Small Stations Press. While this press has been key to bringing Galician literature into English, the lack of diversity among publishers is a key issue in the internationalization of Galician books, which depends on a very small number of agents to reach Anglophone readers.

BB. We all have some sense of the power of books in translation to increase international visibility for their country of origin. Why is this so important in the context of Galician cultural identity, and what are the challenges here?

LL. The act of translation is crucial for Galician cultural identity as it offers a sense of legitimacy for the language. The logic is: ‘if we are translated into other languages, it must mean that our culture is worth being shared.’ It’s like a symbolic boost of confidence for Galician people. This is not uncommon for smaller cultures, but it is a double-edged sword: sometimes, what happens is that a translation is funded with the goal of promoting this fact (that it was funded) within Galicia. This ends up being counterproductive because the distribution of translations is not supported, and thus many of them are never circulated or promoted among potential readers. So, what is effectively being funded is not the translation but rather the boost of confidence that promoting this has on Galician people, while Anglophone (and other) readers never fully enter the picture.

BB. Your book has a particular focus on two contemporary Galician writers who have achieved international recognition: Manuel Rivas and Domingo Villar. What can you tell us about their literary styles and thematic preoccupations, and how have they been received in the English-speaking world?

Manuel Rivas, born 1957, whose book O lapis do carpinteiro — The Carpenter's Pencil — is claimed to be the most translated work in Galician literature (Photo: Santos Díez (Ollo de Vidro-ACAB))

LL. Manuel Rivas is a highly regarded contemporary Galician writer, prolific across poetry, fiction, and journalism. His unique style often draws on oral narration, exploring themes like Civil War trauma, memory, emigration, and the dynamic between traditional and modern Galicia. He is well known for his lyrical language. In the English-speaking world, Rivas is associated with universal themes of war and love, and is often compared to international literary giants. The Carpenter’s Pencil is perhaps his best-known book in English and a short one to get to know his style, but my favourite is probably his memoir The Low Voices.

Domingo Villar, until his recent passing, was a best-selling Galician novelist, celebrated for his detective Leo Caldas crime series. His literary style is marked by bare, clear prose, extensive dialogue, and subtle humour. If we think about their translations, it is interesting to see different trends. As I mentioned before, Manuel Rivas is the most translated author, and because he is published by Penguin, he certainly reaches readers. The marketing of his books often highlights his success in Spain, sometimes downplaying the Galician origin of the novels and omitting cultural details. The literary critic Dolores Vilavedra has talked about the ‘appropriation’ of Manuel Rivas by the Spanish system due to his success.

Panxón beach, below Monte Lourido, where Villar’s Inspector Caldas has wistful memories of past happiness, and the fish market still auctions the catch the old-fashioned way, with none of the digital gadgets used elsewhere. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons user Joseolgon)

In the case of Domingo Villar, particularly in the 2010s, we see a different picture: In Villar’s crime novels, Galicia takes centre stage and is frequently portrayed as an exotic, ‘wild’ location with beautiful landscapes and delicious gastronomy. Here, there is not so much an appropriation of Villar as a Spanish writer, but rather an insistence on the Galician aspect of his novels, almost as if to show the area as a lesser-known tourist space in Spain. The problem with this is this is that the culture is commodified and reduced to an exoticized, almost ‘theme-park-like’ version of what it actually is. The books are page-turners, though, and are excellent examples of the importance of place in crime fiction, from the Italy of Camillieri to the Nordic Noir phenomenon. Water-blue Eyes is the first in the series, so always a good place to start.

As his investigations turn darker, Inspector Caldas likes to dine late at El Eligio, with its ‘old smells of stone, wood and wisdom’, where the ‘tastiest octopus in town’ is to be had, in ‘a small kitchen away from the visitor’s eyes’. With his rich descriptions of typical food and traditional scenery, Villar creates an evocative, almost tangible world for his readers, who can almost use his novels as a way of discovering new travel destinations. This has played a key role in his success, although it also results in a commodified portrayal of the culture. (Photo: José Antonio Gil Martínez)

BB. Are you a native Galician? What brought you to Ireland, and how did you end up working on Galician literature?

LL. Yes, I am a native Galician. I have always been interested in languages and studied Translation and Interpreting at the University of Vigo, my hometown. Initially I was more drawn to Anglophone literature and translating it into Galician. However, when I moved to Ireland and settled into a diverse group of Irish and international friends, I realized how joyful it could be to share my culture with others. I went on to work at University College Cork as a teacher of Galician and decided to continue my studies and focus my PhD on the translation of Galician literature into English.

BB. What in your view are the key opportunities and challenges for Galician writing in terms of participation in the global literary market of the future?

LL. One of the main opportunities I see for Galician literature is the increasing openness of Anglophone readers to translations. Younger readers in particular seem keen to explore other cultures, including ‘lesser-known’ ones. The Booker Prize did an interesting survey recently about who reads translated literature in the UK, and while the market is still small, the outlook looks promising when it comes to younger people.

If the Galician institutions seize this momentum and expand support to include the promotion and distribution of Galician books, and if collaboration with Galician and foreign presses is enhanced for participation in international festivals and book fairs, I think there is a lot of potential for connection with readers. The boom of indie presses in the UK is also something to keep an eye on. A greater diversity of publishers, particularly those who know the target market well and are able to identify opportunities to connect with readers, would be a game changer for the participation of Galician literature in the global literary market.

Some of the main challenges that I see here are things that I have mentioned before, such as the enduring power differential with Spanish culture, meaning that Galician writing is often mediated by Spanish success in its movement to global arenas. The precariousness of Galician presses and the lack of appropriate governmental support for them to participate actively in internationalizing the literature is an ongoing issue, as is the absence of a dedicated internationalization institute (such as the Institut Ramon Llull for Catalan or the Etxepare Institute for Basque).

The so-called Tower of Hercules, in A Coruña, was built by the Emperor Trajan and has been looking out from Galicia as a lighthouse for nearly two thousand years. (Photo: Diego Delso)

BB. I believe you have also worked as a translator in the video games industry. Are there connections between this activity and your research interests?

LL. Yes, absolutely. The research project I am currently developing is directly related to video games and how they can function as informal arenas to support language resilience in minoritized contexts. I am focusing on Galician again and hopefully expanding into Irish and Occitan in the coming years. Video games are very exciting spaces where people create, share and express identity – including linguistic identity – and I am looking forward to better understanding how video-game-related practices (gaming itself but also streaming, game jams, fan translations, etc.) are contributing to linguistic resilience.

Also, although this looks like a big departure from the book I’ve just published, much of the theory I’ve applied to literature is still valid for digital artifacts and I think it can contribute to better understanding how Galician language is used in society. I’ll also be using similar corpus methodologies, and translation is always a central issue for me: minoritized cultures often live ‘in translation’, navigating between their own language and the dominant one they share space with. In digital environments like games, this negotiation is key, making translation not just a tool – as in, for example, fan translations of games –, but also a lens through which identity and resilience are expressed.

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