The Master of the "Literatura De Cordel" Leandro Gomes De Barros: A Bilingual Anthology of Selected Works

By Mark J. Curran

"The Master of the 'Literatura de Cordel' - Leandro Gomes de Barros. A Bilingual Anthology of Selected Works" is Professor Curran's return to research and writing from his first days in Brazil in 1966-1967 on a Fulbright Hays Fellowship for Ph.D. dissertation work. This book treats "Cordel's" best known and arguably best poet, a translation to English of his selected works, and a commentary on his pioneering days of the "Literatura de Cordel." Among the poet's topics were the changing times, foreigners in Brazil, government-politics-and war, mothers-in-law, sugar cane rum, religion and satire, banditry, the oral poetic duel, and the long narrative poems from the European popular tradition. Curran in addition gives a synopsis of the "Literatura de Cordel" as it was in its heyday in his initial research in the 1960s. The translation was a challenge but also a great pleasure.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Mar 3, 2022
• ISBN: 9781698711300

Mark J. Curran

Mark J. Curran is Professor Emeritus from Arizona State University where he worked from 1968 to 2011. He taught Spanish Language as well as the Survey of Spanish Literature, a seminar on "Don Quixote," and Civilization of Spain and Latin American Civilization. He also taught the Portuguese Language (Brazilian Variant) as well as a Survey of Luso-Brazilian Literature, Luso-Brazilian Civilization, and Seminars on Chico Buarque de Hollanda and Brazil's Folk-Popular Literature (the "Literatura de Cordel"). He has written forty-four books, eight in academic circles before retirement, thirty-six with Trafford in retirement. Color images of the covers and summaries of the books appear on his website: www.currancordelconnection.com His e-mail address is: [e-mail]

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ISBN: 978-1-6987-1129-4 (sc)

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CONTENTS

Prologue

The Literatura De Cordel Revisited

a.Author’s Note

b.Introduction1

c.Author’s Postscript

d.Endnotes to the Introduction

An Introduction To Leandro Gomes De Barros

a.Leandro’s Place In Cordel Literature

b.Leandro’s Life

c.Leandro’s Story - Poems

The Texts Of The Story – Poems And Our Selection

1.Difficult Times

Os Tempos Difíceis

a.O Mundo às Avessas

The World Upside Down

b.Lembranças do Passado

Memories from the Past

c.As Cousas Mudadas

The Changing Times

d.Os Fillhos do Rei Miséria

The Sons of King Misery

e.O Sertanejo no Sul

The Back Lander in the South

2.Foreigners In Brazil

Os Estrangeiros No Brasil

a.Os Collectores da Great Western

The Ticket Collectors on the Great Western

b.Affonso Penna

Affonso Penna

c.O Dinheiro

Money

d.O Tempo de Hoje

Today’s Times

e.A Guerra, a Crise, o Imposto, Lembranças do Passado

The War, Crisis, the Tax, Memories from the Past

3.Governent, Politics And War

O Governo, A Política E A Guerra

a.O Dez – Reis do Governo

The Government’s Cut

b.Panellas que Muitos Mexem

Political Pots and Who Stirs Them

c.Um Pau com Formigas

One Stick with Too Many Ants

d.A Secca do Ceará

The Drought in Ceará

e.O Sorteio Militar

The Military Lottery

f.As Afflições da Guerra na Europa

The Afflictions of the War in Europe

g.A Allemanha Vencida e Humilhada; Victória dos Alliados; os Horrores da Influenza Hespanhola

Germany Conquered and Humiliated: the Victory of the Allies; the Horrors of the Spanish Flu

4.Women, Marriage And Mothers-In-Law

A Mulher, O Casamento E A Sogra

a.Gênios das Mulheres

Traits of Women

b.O Casamento do Velho

The Marriage of the Old Man

c.Vaccina Para Não Ter Sogra

A Vaccine to Not Have a Mother – In – Law

d.O Dezréis do Governo

The Government’s Cut

e.Um Susto de Minha Sogra

A Fright for My Mother – In – Law

f.A Caganeira

The Defecation

g.Uma Viagem ao Ceó

A Trip to Heaven

5.The Animal Game Lottery

O Jogo Do Bicho

a.A Ausência dos Bichos

The Absence of the Animals

b.O Soldado Jogador

The Gambling Soldier

6.Religion

A Religiao

a.O Padre Jogador

The Gambling Priest

b.Debate de um Ministro Nova – Ceita com Urubú

Debate of a Protestant Preacher with Master Vulture

7.Sugar Cane Rum And Aguardente

a.Discução do Vinho e a Aguardente

Discussion of Wine and Sugar Cane Rum

b.Adeus à Aguardente

Goodbye to Sugar Cane Rum

8.Banditry And Antonio Silvino

O Cangaço E Antonio Silvino

a.Nascimento (O) De Antonio Silvino

The Birth of Antônio Silvino

b.As Proezas De Antonio Silvino (circa 1907-1908)

The Deeds of Antônio Silvino

c.Os Cálculos De Antonio Silvino

The Strategy of Antônio Silvino

d.A Ira E A Vida De Antonio Silvino

The Anger and the Life of Antônio Silvino

e.As Lágrimas De Antonio Silvino Por Tempestade

Antônio Silvino’s Tears for Tempestade

f.Antônio Silvino Na Cadéia

Antônio Silvino in Prison

g.Antônio Silvino Se Despedindo Do Campo

Antônio Silvino Saying Goodbye to the Countryside

h.Antônio Silvino No Jury, Debate De Seu Advogado

Antônio Silvino on Trial, the Debate by His Lawyer

i.Sonho De Antônio Silvino Na Cadeia

The Dream of Antônio Silvino in Prison]

9.The Poetic Duels

A Peleja

a.Peleja de Manoel Riachão e o Diabo.

The Poetic Duel of Manoel Riachão with the Devil

10.The Long Narrative Poems

Os Romances

a.História Do Boi Mysterioso

[Story of the Mysterious Bull]

Conclusion

Addendum 1

About The Author

Published Books

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PROLOGUE

When I was twenty – five years old and on a Fulbright – Hays Graduate Fellowship to Brazil in 1966 for research for the Ph.D., the intended topic was to research Brazil’s folk – popular poetry, A Literatura Popular em Verso as it was called then. Later it became A Literatura de Cordel. The nexus for cordel in those days was Recife and environs, including neighboring states of the Northeast, Paraíba, Ceará, Bahia, and smatterings of poetry in Rio Grande do Norte, Piaui, Alagoas and Sergipe.

It has been a long and wonderful journey; now in 2022 I am still interested in and occasionally write on the topic. There is a lot of water under the bridge, the dissertation in 1968, eight books in the academic career, seven in Brazil and one in Spain. And now in retirement I’ve lost count but perhaps fourteen books dealing with cordel or my travels in Brazil over almost fifty years to collect it and study it. And now four more in fiction based on those times. I humbly inform I know a lot more about it now than I did then. Ha! (Or … kkkkkk … as they write in Brazil).

If you can believe it, I forgot the actual title of my dissertation at Saint Louis University in 1968, surmising it was Brazil’s ‘Literatura de Cordel’ or the like. I pulled out that old dusty, hard – bound University of Michigan Microfilm document the other day and was surprised it was Leandro Gomes de Barros and the ‘Literatura de Cordel’ of Northeast Brazil. Curious, I perused it, but leisurely, and discovered the reason. The poet.

I was a rookie in those days, knew so little and was criticized for such a short dissertation, some 160 pages. My defense: I did not have anything more to say. So today after perhaps 5000 pages of text, that has all changed, for the better, I hope.

I never forgot Leandro, published two or three seminal and important articles on him in Brazilian publications at the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco and the Casa de Rui Barbosa in Rio de Janeiro, and translated two of his story – poems in an English – Portuguese Anthology by Trafford in 2010. There were other fish to fry, one can just check out the web site www.currancordelconnection.com .

A major event of our technological times brought me back to Leandro - the digitalization in recent years of his collected works from the old worn, torn broadsides extant at the library of the Fundação Casa de Rui Barbosa in the 1960s. I took notes on all those old originals in 1967, on 3 by 5 note cards.

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A second event has to do with Brazilian copyright law. Leandro was born on November 11, 1865, in Pombal, Paraíba, and died on March 4, 1918, in Recife, Pernambuco. Brazilian law states that seventy years after the death of a writer his works become public domain. Leandro’s extant works are now all online and in complete form on the FCRB website. You can see where I’m heading: I can do a project dreamed of at least ten years ago, and now feasible - An English – Portuguese Anthology of Select Works of Leandro Gomes de Barros. However, a small disclaimer: I will still refer to those old notecards upon occasion.

There was never any doubt Leandro was the best writer of all cordel, to be sure sharing its best moments with at least a dozen other poets in his times or shortly thereafter. He was also the first to write and publish widely using the small typographies in the city of Recife and adjacent suburbs and developing an amazing sales network throughout the Northeast. One of my first mentors, the renowned folklorist Luís de Câmara Cascudo, estimated his total output at 1,000 story poems. That figure was debated and still is, but it cannot be far from the truth. For sure, many of the major topics or themes of later cordel began with Leandro and his contemporaries.¹

I was in the right place and at the right time. In the mid – 1960s there was very little academic interest in the folhetos and romances of the Literatura de Cordel, considered at best a poor man’s literature and at worst a literature of little value. I heard for fifty years at diverse times and places from respected Brazilian university professors that they could not dare to research or write of cordel in the academy. Only some esoteric folklorists even talked about it, Leonardo Mota, Gustavo Barroso and of course Luís da Câmara Cascudo. But then the Frenchman came to town, Professor Raymund Cantel of the Sorbonne, this in 1964. (It turned out, like a lot of intellectual accidents in Brazil, that he was on the rebound, originally wanting to do research on the Mexican corrido when he heard about cordel in Brazil.) Interest perked up some, but it was the foreigners who led the way, Cantel in 1964, yours truly in 1966, Ronald Daus shortly thereafter and Candace Slater circa 1968. Forward fifty years: Cordel today is here to stay, to be sure in a totally different milieu than what I researched in 1966, a whole other story. Its fame, however, has been bolstered in recent years; I cite just one instance: the 100 Anos de Cordel Exposition at the SESC – POMPÉIA in São Paulo in 2001. Literally hundreds of thousands of paulistanos and other Brazilians came to see, learn, and wax enthusiastic over cordel. It’s just one case; I’m not here to write one hundred pages on cordel’s odyssey in Brazil.

Back to the Future. I quickly learned in 1966 and 1967 that Leandro Gomes de Barros was not only the first to widely write story – poems of cordel, but extremely gifted at his chosen trade. And I discovered that his venture as a writer and publisher was sold upon his death to an even more ambitious empresário do cordel, João Martins de Atayde in 1921. And, in the late 1940s the whole shebang was sold to a just some – time – poet in Juazeiro do Norte in Ceará State, José Bernardo da Silva. I chronicled it all over the years, and I’m back to phase one – the pleasure of reading a cordel master and bringing a smattering of his works to an English-speaking public via Trafford Publishing.

Out of necessity I must limit this anthology to around 250 pages, so I will present Leandro’s works of folk - popular poetry in ten chapters according to theme. Each chapter will have an introduction placing the theme and the times in a vibrant young Republican Brazil.

I think, in addition, it is a good thing to reproduce here the introduction in English to that first anthology of cordel published by Trafford Publishing of Bloomington, Indiana, twelve years ago. It explains in brief form the phenomenon of the Literatura de Cordel in its heyday of the 1960s, the product in no small way of pioneers like Leandro Gomes de Barros.

THE "LITERATURA DE

CORDEL" REVISITED

Author’s Note

The world of Leandro Gomes de Barros was that of the late19th and early 20th centuries. His major role as a pioneering poet and publisher of Brazil’s literatura popular em verso or literatura de cordel up to 1918 is undisputable and the essence of this book. Yet today if one reads his many story – poems there can be no doubt of his amazing talent. We believe the reader of this new anthology in English and Portuguese may profit in addition from the perspective of the literatura de cordel as it existed in the 1960s when we did our initial research. Indeed, the cordel in 1966 was an evolved form of that of Leandro’s days, but in many ways, not so different. To say the least, it owes its existence and role in Brazil to Leandro and colleagues of his times. The cordel of the twenty – first century today in Brazil, so different yet so much the same, proves this folk – popular poetry is here to stay. Here is the Introduction from,

"Brazil’s Folk – Popular Poetry –

A Literatura de Cordel

A Bilingual Anthology in English and Portuguese

Mark J. Curran

Trafford Publishing, 2010

Introduction1

The folk-popular poetry, or so-called string literature [literatura de cordel] of northeastern Brazil, is basically a hybrid literature of both popular and folkloric forms. The poetry is popular in the strict sense because the author is generally known and his name generally appears on the cover and first page of the booklet of verse [folheto, romance], and the poetry is printed in booklets on inexpensive paper, originally a modest quality of newsprint, and sold in the plazas, markets and street corners of many towns and cities of Brazil.2 On the other hand, the roots of cordel are from the folk tradition: many of its themes, metrical forms, and its performance come from the oral tradition of Brazil’s northeast. Thus, the cordelian poet [o poeta popular de feira] has a lot in common with the northeastern troubadour or poet-singer [o cantador] who improvises and sings the poetry. The latter either sings or declaims improvised poetry in the markets or fairs in a poetic duel, accompanied by a partner or rival, the duel being an extremely ancient phenomenon from the western poetic tradition.

There was a type of poetic tradition akin to cordel that existed in Brazil on a small scale as early as the 16th and 17th centuries, but it took a different form than cordel in its heyday in the 19th and 20th centuries. This earlier tradition was probably first seen in single pages of printed verse, a sort of poetic flyer [volante] brought to Brazil and enjoyed by the Portuguese colonizers. However, cordel’s definitive Brazilian form dates from the end of the 19th century in the northeastern part of the country.

Among the first known booklets of verse [folhetos de feira] were those based on broadsides imported to Brazil from Portugal by the Garnier Bookstore in Rio de Janeiro at the end of the 19th century. The principal themes were from the Charlemagne legends – The Story of Charlemagne and the Twelve Knights of France perhaps the first, and the romances of love and religion. The popular stories contained in these booklets were brought to the Northeast where they took root, grew, and were eventually converted into what would become a vibrant northeastern and Brazilian tradition. The evolution of this folk-popular poetry is a long and complicated matter; in this book our goal is to simply provide the basics of that story. The original booklets imported by Garnier were in prose; the poets of the Northeast transcribed the stories in prose to verse, generally in strophes of six or seven lines with eight syllables in each line, coincidentally the length of the most famous metric form in Spain and Portugal - the romance [romance]. Rhyme schemes were therefore either abcbdb or ababccb with both vowels and consonants rhyming from the last accented syllable.

The body of subject matter, themes and stories comes from popular Iberian tradition, principally Portuguese, but also Spanish, and other European and even Mid -Eastern sources. This corpus was adapted and recreated and would eventually be replaced by what was no less than a portrait of life and reality in northeastern Brazil. The beauty and charm of the Brazilian cordel is that even today, the beginnings of the 21st century, its traditional themes continue alive in Brazil,3 this in spite of all the pressures of modern life, although its form and content have changed to adapt to the times. 4

The term literatura de cordel or string literature is relatively new in Brazil and is the result of scholars writing about it and basing the term on the tradition and terminology of an ancestral phenomenon in Portugal. Luís da Câmara Cascudo, the dean of Brazilian folklorists, traces the name to the Portuguese literatura de cordel which was sold with the booklet draped over a string or wire in the market stall. The literature was also known as blind men’s literature due to the fact that blind men were common sellers of the verse.5 The booklets in verse were known in Brazil throughout the 20th century by various other names by the people that composed, printed, sold and read them: folhetos, folhetes, folhetos de feira, histórias, ABCs, and in the Golden Age of cordel, arrecifes or reefs - a term which refers to the production of story-poems in the city of Recife, Pernambuco, located on the ocean on the Atlantic coast, by the poet and publisher João Martins de Atayde from the 1930s to the late 1950s.

It is an extremely difficult task to identify the definitive European origins of the original body or corpus of cordel. There are many studies from the masters which treat the matter: once again, Câmara Cascudo’s work in the 1950s, our own in brief fashion in 1973, and more recently, Candace Slater.6 What is certain is that the roots of Brazilian cordel are much more closely related to written, popular literature in Iberia than the oral or even written tradition of the Iberian poetic romances [romances]. However, Ariano Suassuna, fan and one of the masters of the matter in Brazil, likes to use the term romanceiro popular nordestino when referring to the cordel.7 Thus it helps to be familiar with the tradition of the chapbooks or broadsides in England, the littérature de colportage in France, the pliegos sueltos and literatura de cordel in Spain, and, finally, blind man’s literature [a literatura dos cegos] of the 16th and 17th centuries in Portugal. All these popular literatures, until recently little appreciated in Western erudite tradition, have their differences and their similarities, and variations of them were brought to the New World where they existed isolated from each other from the end of one continent to the end of the other until folklorists in the 20th century began to create interest in the phenomenon.8

Brazilian cordel, specifically, has survived in spectacular and important form in Brazilian cultural life. Without doubt, those readers familiar with the Argentine poetic duel [la payada argentina], the Mexican song-ballads [los corridos mexicanos], and especially the corpus of folk stories from various countries that deal with fairies, princes, monsters, saints and events or beings never seen before, will appreciate this tradition so rooted in the popular life of a neighboring country.

No one knows for certain who wrote the first booklet of cordel native to Brazil, but there are sporadic verses printed in booklets about the War of Canudos in 1896.9 A little later, the Paraiban poet Silvino Pirauá Lima published his oral poetry in the cordelian format. But the first great name of Brazilian cordel and still of greatest renown today is Leandro Gomes de Barros who wrote and published his works on the outskirts of the northeastern city of Recife, Pernambuco, from the end of the 19th century