The Apalpador Guide and Translation Notes
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The Apalpador Guide and Translation Notes The Apalpador (or Pandigueiro) is a Galician figure who brings presents to children near the winter solstice. His annual holiday is called Noite Do Apalpador or Noite Do Apalpadoiro. The Portal Galego da Língua (Galician Language Portal) helpfully links us to a study by poet, translator, and thinker José André Lôpez Gonçâlez.1 Entitled “O Apalpador: Personagem Mítico do Natal Galego A Resgate” (The Apalpador: Recovering the Mythical Character of Galician Christmas), the study unites the testimonies of many Galician locals to present as accurate a picture as possible of the Apalpador, with the goal of preserving this legend before it fades from popular memory. When the Apalpador arrives at a child’s home, he apalpa2 the children’s stomachs, through which he knows whether they have gone to bed hungry. The name “Apalpador,” then, literally means “patter,” or “toucher,” or “examiner,” all of which sound exceedingly strange in English especially in relation to children, so I chose to retain the name Apalpador. My retelling of the Apalpador’s story is based on the version by Lua Sende and Alexandre Miguens and illustrated by Leandro Lamas.3 Their story stars a little girl, Inés, and her dog Rulo, who live with her parents and grandma. They are foraging for food in the woods, and there is enough snow on the ground for Rulo to dig stuff up from underneath the snow cover. She is worried because it is almost Christmas, and there’s little food left in her house. Unbeknownst to them, the trasnos4 of these woods had been watching, and in fact they watch all children throughout the year to see if they had been good or bad. They report back to the Apalpador, who is described as enormous, gentle, and easily distracted. Caught up in his usual job of making charcoal, he forgets about Christmas preparations until the trasnos remind him. He hurriedly goes to gather chestnuts. That night, Christmas Eve, Inés’s parents scrape together a meal, but it’s not enough, and everyone goes to bed still a little hungry. Meanwhile, the Apalpador has roasted and packaged all his chestnuts and crafted some toys from wood. He falls asleep under a tree and has to be awakened by the trasnos. He then gets dressed in a haphazard way, wearing his socks inside out and putting two different shoes on. When he gets down the mountain, the trasnos point out to him the houses where children have been good this year. He enters any way he can, whether through windows or through the chimney, and he pats the children’s bellies. If they are full, he wishes them full bellies throughout the next 1 The most extensive biography I could find was this one, in a database of important Galician figures: “José André Gonzâles Lôpez,” Galicia Digital, accessed 26 April 2021. A 2010 interview about his work on the Apalpador can be found here: “José André Lôpez Gonçález: ‘Escrevim sobre o Apalpador porque via um mundo que estava a desaparecer diante dos olhos,’” Portal Galego da Língua, 31 December 2010. 2 The RAG defines apalpar as “tocar coas mans [unha cousa] para examinala, recoñecela” (to touch something with your hands in order to examine it). 3 Lua Sende and Alexandre Miguens, O Conto do Apalpador (Edições da Galiza, 2009). 4 The RAG defines trasno as “Ser fantástico nocturno que adoita facer estragos e enredar sen producir dano grave” (fantastic being that is noctural and likes to play tricks and mess things up without causing any serious harm). Although trasnos are uniquely Galician, they seem to be comparable to trolls, gnomes, or elves. Guide to “The Apalpador,” trans. Ceci Hsu, illus. Ellye Groh, 2021 1 year, leaves a little packet of roasted chestnuts, and kisses them goodbye. When they get to Inés’s house, the trasnos introduce her as someone who studies a lot, helps out her parents, and takes care of her grandma. The story then skips to the next day, Christmas morning. Not only are there roasted chestnuts by Inés’s bedside, but there is also a new dress for her mother, new shoes for her father, and a new handmade scarf for her grandma! Inés is perplexed, and her grandma explains that the Apalpador left these gifts. In the kitchen, they find a huge pot of soup over the fire, the pantry full of firewood, potatoes, beans, and greens, enough to last them until the spring. The Apalpador, meanwhile, sleeps while the trasnos, always the tricksters they are, stick little flowers and stalks up his nose to tickle him. For a long time, because of Franco’s love of Catholicism, the landscape of winter holidays was that of religious (Christmas Eve, Three Kings’ Day) versus secular celebrations, and of holiday cards being written in Castellano (Spanish) versus the local Galego (Galician), whose use in any official or educational capacity had been banned.5 A 1947 study of Galicia’s winter holidays only lists Christmas, New Year’s, and Epiphany and makes no mention of any characters outside of Jesus, Mary, and other nativity figures.6 A record of the Apalpador’s Basque brother Olentzero suggests that magical pagan figures did in fact exist in pre-Franco times but that they were imagined quite differently.7 Indeed, in a more recent paper, Olentzero is described as “a mythical character connected to pre-Christian beliefs and 5 Xesús Alonso Montero provides an overview of how Galician writers, especially leftist ones, used Christmas cards to preserve their language during and shortly after the dictatorship. There is no mention in his article of the Apalpador, nor of any other Galician folklore, suggesting that a cultural revival succeeded the linguistic one, and that the Apalpador was purposely dug up as opposition to mainstream Christmas figures, not because of any continuous tradition or memory. “O nadal nas letras galegas (1940–1979),” Madrygal 10 (2007): 11–33. 6 The author, Antón Fraguas Fraguas, spent his life studying Galician traditions, and he acknowledges in this study that Christmas celebrations were becoming more and more secular. However, I am not sure if censorship at the time (see his spelling of Orense vs. Ourense, of La Coruña vs. A Coruña) might have prevented him from talking about more local traditions that don’t involve Jesus and Mary. For example, was it true that the great majority of the rhymes he encountered for New Year’s Day actually featured the Virgin so heavily? “Contribución al estudio de la Navidad en Galicia. Nadales, Aninovos, Xaneiras y Reyes,” Revista de Dialectología y Tradiciones Populares 3, no.3 (1947): 401–446. 7 Folklorist Rodney Gallop observes that “On Christmas Eve in parts of Guipuzcoa the children either blacken the face of one of their number or make a ‘guy’ of straw and old clothes. They call him Olentzero or Onenzaro and take him round to all the houses. Olentzero appears to be a personification of jollity. When he has brought in all the food and coppers expected of him he usually ends his career on a bonfire. His song, which has no tune worth mentioning, is as follows: Here comes our Olentzero;/Silent he sits with a pipe in his mouth./To-morrow he will sup/On a couple of capons/With a bottle of wine” (333). Olentzero and the Apalpador both work with charcoal (thus the blackening of the face), wear ragged clothing, smoke a pipe, and are related to children’s presents. In this old Olentzero celebration, he works more like a Halloween costume character, or a caroling prop, soliciting gifts from neighbors rather than being an independent, magical figure who only appears unseen at night, like Santa Claus. “Basque Wassailing Songs,” Music & Letters 11, no.4 (October 1930): 333, whole article 324–340. Guide to “The Apalpador,” trans. Ceci Hsu, illus. Ellye Groh, 2021 2 customs that was used as Basque alternative to celebrate Christmas instead of the Three Wise Men.”8 There has recently been renewed interest in the Apalpador, too, as a symbol of Galician pride and as a more homegrown alternative to the imported Santa Claus and to the non-regional Reyes Magos (Wise Men).9 For example, the Fundaçom Artábria, a cultural institute in Ferrol, for several years held an Apalpador drawing contest for young children.10 The Apalpador has become accessible in other ways too, such as through writing letters11 and meet-and-greets,12 in much the same way that Santa Claus is to American children. A female equivalent, the Apalpadora, has also risen in popularity.13 Lôpez interviewed people from Lóuzara, Courel (where the Apalpador is purported to live, according to some versions of his story), and Cebreiro, all in Lugo, in the center of Galicia, and all very mountainous; this selection makes sense because the Apalpador by nature must descend from a mountain peak to hand out gifts. For this reason, we took inspiration from images of this region when illustrating little Noa’s town. As for Noa’s name, I simply took the second-most popular Galician baby girl name in 2019, the most recent year available;14 in first place was Sofía, which I wanted to avoid as this story is directed towards children at an age when it would be extremely difficult to explain the significance of accented letters to those who didn’t grow up with them, at an age when they might not even have grasped the English alphabet yet. The Apalpador is typically represented as a man with a messy red beard and green/brown clothing, perhaps reminiscent of Celtic origins.