Curran's Cordel Connection
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LITERATURA DE CORDEL
Chapter Two deals with Leandro Gomes de Barros the colorful popular
personage of Recife for twenty-five years until his death in 1918 who is still
recognized as the best of all cordelian poets.
His forte was satire and parody, and his poems have been imitated and
copied to the present day. He
provides a chronicle of the old Northeast with story-poems on a variety of
topics: daily life, religion, gambling, sugar cane rum and its virtures, women,
marriage, mothers-in-law, bandits, Father Cícero and commentary on the national
and international scene.
Chapter Three is comprised of written interviews with cordelian poets,
the first time this research technique regarding cordel appears in print.
Curran asked the poets how they “got” the gift of verse, how they
started in cordel and why. He also
asked whether the poets considered themselves to be representatives of the poor
masses and their reality and if they the poets were ever persecuted for writing.
Ariano Suassuna used some of the wonderful, candid remarks by the poets
in this chapter in his novel Romance da Pedra do Reino.
Chapter Four traced cordel’s influence on sophisticated
Brazilian culture as seen in our link “Value.”
It particularly treats the influence of the poetry on writers of the
Northeast with special attention to Jorge Amado and Ariano Suassuna.
The book concludes with a bibliography of major studies up to that time
on cordel.
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This
monograph represents part of Professor Curran’s Ph.D. thesis; it was the first
book published by a foreign scholar on the cordel in Northeast Brazil and
the first to use the term “literatura de cordel” as its title.