Primary Oral Features in Romance Chapbooks of Northeastern Brazil

In Stories on a String, Candace Slater says that the so-called Literatura de Cordel – which can be roughly translated as “string literature” – is believed to be an heir to European popular literature, such as the Portuguese Literatura de Cego, the British Chapbooks, the French Littérature de Colportage, and the Spanish Pliegos Sueltos (56). Mark J. Curran reminds us that the word cordel had not been used to refer to these small books until the 1960s, when a new generation of scholars borrowed that name from the European tradition. It derived from the fact that sometimes these booklets were displayed, in small-town markets, hanging on horizontal strings. However, the term largely employed by early twentieth-century Brazilian folklorists, poets and their audience was folheto, which could mean either “booklet” or “pamphlet.” Actually, the folhetos are brochures that typically contain eight, sixteen or thirty-two pages measuring 16×10 centimeters. Every set of eight pages in a booklet results from folding a regular sheet of paper (folha) in half twice, in a way that the total number of pages is generally a multiple of eight.

The folhetos are always written in verse. They comprise mostly the sextilha, which is a stanza composed of six lines, with XBXBXB rhymes, in which X stands for blank verses; and the décima, stanza that consists of ten lines, with several rhyme-patterns, the most common of which is ABBAACCDDC. Both types of stanza are believed to be of Iberian origin, and the sextilha is the most frequent one. Each page of a folheto contains either five sextilhas, or three décimas. As for the metrical pattern of the verses, the most common types are those containing either seven or ten syllables.

There have been several attempts to classify the folhetos by grouping them according to their themes, but there are folhetos about almost everything. As a result of such a great variety of themes, some scholars – such as Ana Maria de O. Galvão, in Brazil, and Candace Slater, in the United States – have come up with different approaches to classification. In Cordel, Galvão seeks to identify a relation between the number of pages in a chapbook and its subject matter. Therefore, she adopts the term folheto to describe either 8-or 16-page booklets, which narrate faits-divers, stories or cases in the news that are of human interest; and the word romance to define 24- to 64-page booklets that present versions of stories previously existing in the oral tradition or stories of enchantment. Braulio Tavares asserts that fantasy certainly is a trait that plays an important role in this genre, since it draws the romance closer to the universe of traditional European folktales. It is no surprise to recognize in their plots medieval settings with castles, kings, princesses, witches, dragons, talking animals, or the quest for something invaluable. On the other hand, such an environment also contains a number of elements that are typical of the Brazilian reality such as food, plants, animals, toponyms, clothes, and especially dialects.

I will also adopt, as did Galvão, the word romance to refer to this genre of booklet that is one of the few means through which the nordestino man from the Sertão – or wilderness – of Brazil could express himself in a relatively recent past. More than a century ago, poor and illiterate people, most of whom were tenants living in sublet small stretches of land on farms or in modest hamlets, used to purchase those booklets and take them home. In the evenings, neighbors and friends got together to listen to the only person who could suitably read the story to a whole crowd. Sometimes, sponsored by landowners, the poets themselves would perform the readings or, out of so much repetition and technique, would recite their own verses by memory (Tavares).

There was nothing special about the bard. He looked like anyone else in the crowd, except for the fact that he distinguished himself in the way he delivered his own compositions. He usually did not simply utter the lines...