A Portrait of Brazil in the Twentieth Century
The Universe of the "Literatura de Cordel"
by
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This book is a portrait of a people and a country via the “cordel.” It is a portrait analogous to the photographic rather than the painted, that is, a series of snapshots making an album (a chapter), the sum total of ten albums being a portrait of a large portion of Brazil and its people. The snapshots will be the cordelian booklets of verse themselves. What they tell us is in essence the basic religious beliefs the poets and public of “cordel” hold, their consequential moral behavior, their heroic models for living, the problems they have traditionally faced and their solutions to them, their distractions and entertainments, their views on the major current events and political leaders of their country and of the world, the new challenges they faced at the end of the millennium, and finally, their hopes and aspirations. All the above in one sense expresses their world view, a way of life as they see it. In the end it is Brazil seen from the vast universe of “cordel.” As one of the most famous of the poets once said, and he was not alone, "To do a poem all I need is a title." Titles will be the labels to the snapshots that make up the ten chapter-albums of Portrait. The titles in effect will introduce us to the booklets in verse which in turn will lead us to the Brazilians who write, listen to, read and believe in “cordel.” They will show us what the participants in “cordel” think, what they believe, what is relevant and important to them, and how they deal with the challenges in life itself. So, once again, titles are keys to this portrait; they will indicate the most common denominators of the snapshots of Portrait: who, what, when, and where. It is the job of the author, and perhaps more importantly, the reader, to add the "why," each according to his own curiosity and satisfaction. As the eyes are the windows of the soul, so the titles of the story-poems [folhetos] are the windows to the portrait. We modestly suggest that even they alone will provide insight into the vast universe of “cordel” in this portrait of Brazil and the Brazilians. Since the aim of Portrait is to tell a story - to retell what “cordel” (a folk-popular medium) says about Brazilians and Brazil, this book is not theoretical in its approach but rather, descriptive and above all informative. Any terminology it may use is limited to that necessary to help make clear what the poets and poetry is saying (for instance the term “cordel” itself). Portuguese terms are included in brackets after the English translation of the same. The language of Portrait is that common to an everyday description of life. Even the worn clichés we use much of the time to get us through life can be useful in the telling of the story. So, Portrait has a very specific flavor - that of the language and "wisdom of the masses" [sabiduria popular] as the folklorists call it in Brazil. This book takes a prompt from the best known of Brazilian novelists, Jorge Amado, when he admitted his cultural and artistic debt to the humble masses of his native state of Bahia during the commemoration of his fifty years as a writer in 1981 in Salvador da Bahia. If there is anything of value in Portrait, it is the creation of the cordelian poets themselves.
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About the Book
A Portrait of Brazil in the Twentieth Century: The Universe of the “Literatura de Cordel” is Curran’s most recent project. The book, in effect, is the English version of a major work published in Brazil in Portuguese in 2011, Retrato do Brasil em Cordel. Curran returns to Portrait for several reasons: primary is his strong feeling that the amazingly broad view of Brazil in the twentieth century seen in the thousands of booklets in verse from the Cordel represents a major aspect of Brazilian culture in that century. Second, because there are many important bodies of folk-popular verse in the Western tradition, all distant relatives of the Greek and Roman epic traditions, and because Brazil’s folk-popular poetry is one among them. And because a very large reading public interested in such things does not know Portuguese, this volume in English strives to make the tradition available to such readers. Finally, the book in two volumes represents the cumulative efforts of research and writing of Professor Curran in a career of forty-three years of scholarly research and teaching. It reveals a unique portrait of Brazil and its people, informative, instructive, and mainly, entertaining.
About the Author
Mark Curran is a retired professor from Arizona State University where he taught Spanish and Portuguese languages and their respective cultures from 1968 to 2011. His research specialty was Brazil, and he made more than twenty trips to that country to collect Brazil’s folk-popular poetry, the “Literatura de Cordel,” and study its relationship to Brazilian erudite literature and history. Some twenty-five articles in research journals and eleven books published in Brazil, the United States, and Spain are the results of this endeavor. In retirement since 2011, Curran has written and published eight volumes of memory books from The Farm, growing up in Abilene, Kansas, and Coming of Age with the Jesuits, years of undergraduate and graduate education with the Jesuits, to books recounting travel and study in Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala, and Mexico—the latter treating topics he taught at ASU. This book is the latest in the series.