Memoirs of a Peasant Boy

About the Book

Balbino,"a boy from a village", a "nobody" who writes a notebook about everything that happens to him within the repressed and stifling society of Galicia in the thirties and forties. He tells of the moral and social atmosphere that prevails asking and answering questions and details the most elemental social struggle. There is also however the story of a true but impossible love.

This book was first printed in Argentina in 1961 and became one of the most successful Galician books published. It has a lyrical style that immediately evokes sights and sounds of this part of Spain.

The author Xosé Neira Vilas writes from his experiences of the era and the lifestyle of boys growing up in that society and provides a rich insight to life of the peasant boy "Balbino".

About the Author

Xosé Neira Vilas is one of the Galician most prestigious writers. He was born in Gres, a small village in Pontevedra, Galicia, Spain, in 1928. His home was by river Ulla and its landscape is essential to his writings since the characters in his novels live and die within this environment, which Neira Vilas loves so much. It was there that he spent the first years of his life, attending school and helping his parents, who were peasants. By not being able to study due to the narrow, restricting society and the poverty that surrounded him, he tried to find an outlet for his need for culture through reading, organizing a theatre group, writing poems and tales.

When he was 19, he went to Argentina, where he discovered city life, full of opportunities and activities, but also the darker side of emigration. Four years later, he founded "Galician Youths" and in 1956, he was one of the organizers of the "First Meeting of Galician Emigration". In 1961, already married to the writer Anisia Miranda, he went to Cuba, where he got involved in the Cuban revolution. A few years ago, he and his wife returned to his village in Galicia.

As a writer, he became famous with Memoirs of a Peasant Boy (1961), one of the most successful Galician books. Other books are: Xente no rodico, Reuíño de sombras, Camiño bretemoso, A muller de ferro, Querido Tomás, A Marela Taravela, and many others. He is also a researcher who has published many works related to Galician literature.

The translator, Camilo Ogando Vázquez, was born in Ourense, Galicia, in 1958. He studied English Philology at Santiago University. He has also completed a postgraduate course in English-Spanish translation at U.N.E.D., and attended several courses at the Institute for Applied Language Studies, University of Edinburgh.

He has been an English teacher since 1983 and for the last twelve years, the headmaster in a High School in Galicia.