Biography
Bieito Iglesias is an established writer in the Galician language. He studied Geography and History at the University of Santiago Compostela and went on to become a teacher of Galician language and literature. He is the author of six novels, including History Is Written at Night (2001), winner of the García Barros Award, and The Life Sublime (2001), seven collections of short stories, and a children’s title, The Night of the Goats of the Air (1999), which received the Merlin Award for children’s literature. He was given the Blanco Torres Award for his work as a columnist in the publications A Nosa Terra and Tempos Novos. Together with Manuel Vázquez, he is the translator into Galician of the Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle.
Synopsis
The Life Sublime (160 pages) is Bieito Iglesias’s third novel in the Galician language and was first published in 2001. A dragon by the name of Arthur, who has been sheltering in the caves of Pico Sacro, a summit near Santiago de Compostela, before making his way beyond the Jordan valley to the Valhalla of the serpents, decides to pay a visit to the Galician capital, where the shrine of the apostle James is situated. He flies over the city.
Sample
Arthur slithered through the gorse with surprising ease, thrilled by the charge in his blood that summer morning. The only obstacles to his weaving descent were the irritating protuberances that had emerged when he molted in the Spring. By that mid-July morning, just before the Feast of Santiago, they’d already taken on the unmistakable appearance of wings. The giant serpent understood what was happening to him; his metamorphosis was complete. He’d become a dragon. The time had come for him to abandon the caves of Pico Sacro—the burrows that sheltered him during lethargic winters and the sunny hunting grounds rich with rodents and birds unable to meet his gaze.
He heaved his body onto a boulder warmed by the fleeting sun and readied himself to begin the first phase of his journey east, beyond the Jordan Valley to the Valhalla of the serpents. Propelled by the energetic midday sun, he beat his wings and felt the novel commotion of flight. For a creature thus far condemned to scrape his belly over the earthly crust, it was more exciting than the rise of the temperature or a succulent bite of goldfinch. He should head southeast, follow the route of the migratory birds who arrived as he emerged from his winter slumber and wrote Vs for “voyage” in the late-summer vault, which chills the blood of reptiles. But before setting out towards the crowded urbanities of the Mediterranean and the Middle East, he wanted to visit his city, the only one in the dusk-facing vicinity. He decided to trace a circle, coasting over the darkening lands and the Western ocean, before finally turning and fixing his rigid eyelids on the rising sun.
Portico of Galician Literature 