{"id":478088,"date":"2025-01-19T15:20:50","date_gmt":"2025-01-19T14:20:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/artigos\/2025\/01\/19\/tenome-por-un-apaixonado-da-vida-478088\/"},"modified":"2025-01-19T20:12:18","modified_gmt":"2025-01-19T19:12:18","slug":"tenome-por-un-apaixonado-da-vida","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/artigos\/2025\/01\/19\/tenome-por-un-apaixonado-da-vida-478088\/","title":{"rendered":"I consider myself to be passionate about life"},"content":{"rendered":"

For Bernardino Gra\u00f1a there is no time for boredom. When it’s time to write, he writes. When it’s time to go down to walk among the trees, he walks. It is a vital attitude, he assures us, which has to do with the desire to do things, with passion and with a way of being.

-How long have you considered yourself a writer?<\/strong>
-Look, when I played at writing. I paraphrased verses and some stories. I’ve been writing for about fifty years, and I think I started to take it seriously when we started Brais Pinto as a publishing house. Ferr\u00edn took literature very seriously, much more than I did. When we started up the publishing house he told me, since you always write, get on with it and stop advertising it. It was 58, so I started on my first book. Before that I had written a few short stories and some odd things, in newspapers and magazines.<\/p>

-But once he started, he didn’t stop. Poetry, narrative, theatre and what’s left in between them all. In perspective, in which one do you feel better?<\/strong>
-Lately I’m very comfortable with narrative and even with theatre. But if you want me to tell you the truth, I don’t really understand editorial classifications or genres. Actually, I’ve always thought that you have to write what you feel and, more or less, that’s what I try to do, whatever genre it is. I’m more and more surprised by the classifications and I care less and less about them.<\/p>

-Narrative has been keeping you quite busy lately.<\/strong>
-I intend to make a trilogy with the Protoevanxeo<\/em> (winning novel of Eje Atl\u00e1ntico), telling the life of Xes\u00fas as a child, without going into the life of Xes\u00fas as an adult.<\/p>

-Religion is an argument that has gravitated over his work.<\/strong>
-Well, my father was a meter away from being a priest. He only had to put on the cassock. He studied to become a priest and he didn’t do it for love, for my mother’s love. He gave up everything to have me. It was an act of love and one of the things I never understood about the Catholic Church is that it can survive without believing in that love.<\/p>

-They still believe, but they dissimulate…<\/strong>
-Maybe it’s dissimulation. But if the Church wants to survive in the future and not to distance itself from the people, it will have to remove from its doctrine this story of celibacy, which is so inhuman.<\/p>

-Do you talk about love as a vital motor, does it weigh so heavily in your work?<\/strong>
-I think so. I consider myself to be passionate about life and love is the fundamental argument.<\/p>

-But to combat celibacy, you must have something to say about the other side…<\/strong>
-Of course, in my work there are traces of women. I have always felt a great attraction for them. Right now, I’m waiting for the day when my wife arrives.<\/p>

O mar est\u00e1 menos na mi\u00f1a obra do que se di. O que fixen foi facer o que dic\u00eda o meu t\u00edo Milucho: falar dos mari\u00f1eiros e da xente humilde<\/p><\/blockquote>


-Another of the themes of your work is the sea.<\/strong><\/p>

-I think less than people say. I don’t know if I’ve treated it as much as it’s written about, although it’s true that it is there. In fact, when I was new and lived in Darbo (parish of Cangas) I used to go fishing with my uncle Milucho. He always told me that I had to talk about the humble fishermen and the things that happened to them, how they lived, and that’s what I tried to do, to listen to my uncle.<\/p>

-You mean he almost made you a programme as a writer.<\/strong><\/p>

-In a way, yes. Let’s go fishing and he would tell me some things and he would tell me that they had to be told, that they had to be known.

<\/p>

-This has to do with social poetry, even if it’s a vague term.<\/strong><\/p>

-I never understood social poetry as applied to my work. I wrote what I wanted: whether it was interpreted in one sense or another is a major thing, but I didn’t do it with the intention of being part of anything or of being conscious of working in that sense. For me things are simpler: it was what I wanted to write. Then Celso Emilio appeared talking about these things and I thought it was good and that they were necessary.<\/p>

-But, as time goes by, there are two interpretations of the role of the writer: that of getting involved in society or that of concentrating on his or her work.<\/strong><\/p>

-It’s clear that writing requires concentration, but it’s also true that you must tell things that are necessary, not only for yourself but for society. I don’t think that some things are at odds with others. In the case of Galicia, the tradition of involvement and social participation of writers is very strong, with a lot of awareness and a lot of national identity. I think this involvement and its results are good. Then writers also must be present at some festivals, supporting their colleagues, participating in things.

-And the time to write?<\/strong>
-That’s the key. When I was writing the novel, I would sit down at four in the afternoon and write until nightfall. That’s a necessary discipline. I mostly spend my afternoons writing.

-To be or not to be a professional?<\/strong>
-Writing because you have to fulfil a contract or after receiving an advance. Writing under pressure from the editorial system seems wrong to me. I prefer the former system.<\/p>

-What is it?<\/strong>
-You look for something to make a living and then write what you want, without any pressure and without having to accept orders because you need money. I think literature can be better this way. Haste is not good for this kind of writing. Even more so. Nor do I really understand this eagerness to publish one, two or three books every year. A writer can be known, at most, for three of his or her titles, not for having published twenty or thirty. I prefer the idea of writing what your body asks for, because readers can’t read everything that is published either.<\/p>

I don’t understand this eagerness to to write one or two books a year. year. A writer is only known, at most, for three works\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>

-Well, this is another debate: should writers read more than they write or vice versa?<\/strong>
-No, in my case it’s like in periods. There are times when you start reading something and you can’t stop, and there are others when you are more focused on writing. For me they are compatible. Then there’s rereading, which is something I do a lot, which I like a lot. I reread the books that seem fundamental to me.
-What are they?<\/strong>
-I really appreciate the work of Ram\u00f3n J. Sender. I liked it when I read it and I continue in that vein. I was also a reader of the Bible, even involuntarily. My father, because of his education, taught me to read the Bible, but also when he spoke to me, he used many phrases from it, in many ways I was brought up in the Christian tradition. Another thing is the belief in the ecclesiastical apparatus.

-Some people think that writers’ lives are boring. Yours doesn’t seem to be.<\/strong> -I don’t get bored, and I don’t have much time. I’ve always preferred to get involved in a lot of things, to participate, and I did that whenever I could.<\/p>

Published in La Voz de Galicia. Suplemento Culturas, 17 September 2005.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bernardino Gra\u00f1a decided to go away to write. Or to live another life with the sea, reading and the humble people of the Earth. In September 2005, La Voz de Galicia published this interview with the writer in which he talks about literature, his motivations, his arguments and the fact that, perhaps, the sea was less of a protagonist than the people who lived by it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":477875,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[90],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-478088","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interview"],"acf":[],"post_template":"entrevista","post_subscription":"no","pretitle":"","content_extract":"For Bernardino Gra\u00f1a there is no time for boredom. When it's time to write, he writes. When it's time to go down to walk among the trees, he walks. It is a vital attitude, he assures us, which has to do with the desire to do things, with passion and with a way of being.-How...","reading_data":{"word_count":"1286","reading_seconds":"308","reading_time":{"minutes":5,"hours":0,"seconds":8},"reading_string":"5'8''","reading_human":"5 minutos"},"announcement":{"finishdate":"","finishdate_text":""},"opinion":{"subject":"","subject_info":[]},"event_info":{"startdate":"","starttime":"","enddate":"","endtime":"","entertainer":null},"interview":{"interviewed":"Bernardino Gra\u00f1a"},"phototext":{"text_author":"","text_photo":""},"video":{"video_source":""},"promotion":{"action":"default","action_data":""},"categories_list":[{"name":"Interview","id":90,"slug":"interview","parent":0,"template":"default"}],"visible_author":"Camilo Franco","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/478088"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=478088"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/478088\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":478226,"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/478088\/revisions\/478226"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/media\/477875"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=478088"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=478088"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pisofranco.gal\/en\/api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=478088"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}