Valentín Paz-Andrade, na luz e na sombra

Abstract

This paper makes an overall approach to the biography of Valentín Paz-Andrade, in its lights and shadows, from different perspectives. At first it highlights their status as enlightened intellectual, literary creator and professional in the field of law and of fisheries economics. Also, secondly, his political career, marked by galicianist ideology and by civilian conception of political practice, both in the times of the Second Republic and during the years of transition from dictatorship to democracy. In his work as a thinker and an economic analyst stands on the original reflection condensed in the book Galicia as a task, a great intellectual effort that exceeds the theoretical tradition of prewar’s galicianism to placing the center of gravity of the idea of Galicia in civic issues, as a “task” that galicians have to “do or redo every day.” And finally, there are some brief references to its presence in Latin America, about contacts with republican exile and about the consideration of Galician language as twinned with the Portuguese, thus becoming a transcontinental language.