O Romanceiro Português e Brasileiro: Índice Temático e Bibliográfico (review)

284ReviewsLa corónica 29.2, 2001 Fontes, Manuel Costa da. 0 Romanceiro Portugués e Brasileño: índice Temático e Bibliográfico. 2 vols., com urna bibliografia pan-hispânica e resumos de cada romance em inglés. Selecçâo e Comentario das Transcriçôes Musicais de Israel J. Katz. Correlaçâo Pan-Europeia de Samuel G. Armistead. Madison: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies -Hispanic Society ofAmerica, 1997. 697 pp. ISBN 1-56954-063-2 Oral ballad scholars, ethnomusicologists, and students ofPan-Iberian and Pan-European folk literature are among the obvious beneficiaries of this indispensable , largely bilingual publication in a research area that has witnessed an unprecedented flurry of activity in the last two decades. The work provides an invaluable overview of an entire field of investigation, a classified index ofnarratives and melodies, and the bibliographic tools and cross-references to facilitate and direct future research. The first volume includes maps of the relevant geographic areas, portraits and photographs of a number of those responsible for documenting much of the ballad tradition in the Portuguese-speaking world, a twenty-five page introduction (first in Portuguese, then in English), and the 314 entries that constitute the actual catalog of text-types (51-395). Volume II is devoted to the musical selections (399-517: introduction, transcriptions, and accompanying tables), a glossary, a key to the abbreviations used throughout the publication, an extensive bibliography (537-588) and seventeen indices. In a succinct, lucid introduction, Fontes thoroughly contextualizes the wealth of primary and secondary data he has made readily accessible in this long-awaited, two-volume thematic and bibliographic index ofPortuguese and Brazilian Balladry. After retracing the history of ballad collecting since the early efforts of Almeida Garrett in the second decade of the nineteenth century , Fontes describes the relationship Portuguese ballads bear to the earlier Castilian tradition, identifyingwhich were translated, which have been accepted and recreated without translation, and which are original to the Luso-Brazilian tradition. Even more interesting is his discussion ofthe characteristics and unique features of this lateral tradition. Most notable among these is its conservativism, seen to account for the preservation ofa good number ofballads in Portuguese that have been altogether forgotten, only rarely documented , or which survive elsewhere only in less complete and/or less archaic form. The abundance of religious ballads, the astonishing preservation of a Crypto-Jewish ballad tradition, as well as the prevalence of strophism and the La corónica 29.2 (Spring, 2001): 284-293 Reviews285 unique parallelism ofthe romances dobrados are additional salient features that Fontes carefully weaves into his characterization of this branch of modern balladry. The author recognizes three categories ofballads roughly corresponding to three periods of composition: romances velhos, documented in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, romances vulgares, which he restricts to seventeenth and eighteenth-century assonantal rhyming compositions in a plebeian style imported from Spain, and romances de cordel, which he reserves for strophic compositions of probable Luso-Brazilian origin composed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To these standard but somewhat uniquely defined categories, Fontes adds a fourth, comprised of "ballads that cannot easily be placed into any of these three categories" (43). His catalog includes a representative text of all ballads in the first two categories, but only a small sampling of the vast body of romances de cordel chosen either for their relative antiquity , their origin in popular tales which links them to Pan-European folk literature, or their sheer popularity. The quality of the version and representation of all collections and geographic areas of the Luso-Brazilian modern tradition are the principle criteria informing Fontes's selection ofsample texts. In cases where the narrative or poetic structure of a ballad diverges significantly in different areas, the author has included two (in one instance three) representative versions. It should be noted that a single theme or text-type is assigned a different number for each different rhyme scheme in which it is sung, regardless of the degree of narrative affinity the metrically different versions may exhibit. More difficult to justify in my estimation is the inclusion of a number of ballad texts written by nineteenth-century Romantic writers in imitation of traditional ballads. The...