ASU Research E-Magazine: Poetry of Strings

Literatura de Cordel is a form of grassroots narrative poetry used to chronicle everyday life in Brazil for nearly a century. Mark Curran knows it well.

Mark Curran was born and raised on a Kansas wheat farm. If not for the facts that he was totally non-mechanical and wanted to see the world, he just might have stayed there. Instead, he parlayed an Irish-Catholic heritage, a Jesuit college education, and a spinster teacher’s love of languages into a Ph.D.

Today, Curran is a professor of languages and literatures at Arizona State University. He is a specialist on the Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish languages and their respective cultures. He is also one of the world’s foremost authorities on the Brazilian Literatura de Cordel, a form of grassroots narrative poetry that has chronicled everyday life in Brazil for nearly a century.

Lest one think that the journey from Great Plains farm boy to full professor and continuous travel to a country nearly half a world away seems somewhat incongruous, consider this: Mark Curran is a man with his roots firmly planted in tradition.

“I am, above all things, the product of a humble farm background," Curran says. That means a farmer’s commitment to hard work and simple, no nonsense values that are rooted in the land; an understanding of how faith and morality shape everyday life; and a commitment to family and mankind.

Despite his Irish-Catholic background, Curran earned much of his education in public schools. He went to school during a time when Latin and other languages were part of the college prep curriculum, as well as a subject in and of themselves. However, Curran’s high school Latin and Spanish teacher was one of those old-fashioned school marms who simply lived for languages.

“She provided the structure, discipline, and the desire to learn languages,” Curran says. “She planted the seed.”

Still, he chose Spanish as a minor rather than a major field at Missouri’s Rockhurst College. Majors in language were not available at that time. He chose business management instead and earned an undergraduate degree.

“I saw language as a tool for business,” he recalls. “Originally, I really wanted to work for a firm in Latin America.”

Two factors eventually combined with that seed planted by Curran’s high school teacher to lure him into languages.

“Rockhurst was a small Jesuit college. Like all Jesuit colleges of that era, it attracted large numbers of Latin American students whose usually elite parents wanted them to get both the strong education and serious academic discipline Jesuits were famous for worldwide. Learning English was essential as well. Many became my friends,” Curran says. “That was when I began to really learn to speak Spanish.”

When Russia’s Sputnik satellite rocketed into orbit in 1957, ushering in the Space Race, it also helped create an entirely new view of language education for Americans. The government established the National Defense Education Act and new doctoral programs. The programs were designed to train people in language and area studies that were deemed critical for national defense.

Young, patriotic Americans with language proficiencies were strongly encouraged to enter such programs. Despite already having a job offer in Guatemala, Curran’s roots were too firmly planted in all that was America to overlook the calling. He entered a doctoral language program, and the rest, as they say, is history.

A 30-year member of the ASU faculty, Curran is a full professor of Spanish and Portuguese in the Department of Languages and Literature. As such, he divides his time fairly equally between three professional passions: teaching introductory language courses, teaching upper division and graduate courses, and studying the Brazilian folk-popular poetry called the Literatura de Cordel.

“First and foremost, I consider myself a classroom teacher, then a scholar,” Curran says. “I’ve never aspired to administration, although I’ve had opportunities. There’s just something I like about getting the first crack at a student who is just beginning to learn a language. It’s exciting.”

One cannot help thinking that Mark Curran is the sum total of his roots: the simple farm boy with a strong appreciation for the common man and a solid Catholic faith. All seem to permeate both his teaching and research.

Curran displays his collection of cordel

Curran’s scholarship of 30 years has focused on the Literatura de Cordel, a type of poor man’s poetry with Portuguese and Spanish roots. The writing itself is considered the “newspaper of the poor” from economically disadvantaged northeastern Brazil.

Cordel actually translates to string. Traditionally, vendors sold the cordels, or pamphlets, by hanging them from strings, much like laundry hung out to dry in the sun.

Cordel originated in Brazil’s northeast interior and became important in such major cities as Recife and Salvador da Bahia. It was written by poor poets and then printed as rough eight to 32-page booklets by local print shops.

A typical print run of any one story might be 5,000 to 10,000 copies. But sales of “classics” could climb as high as one million copies. Those stories told of love, tragedy, adventure and, of course, important happenings.

“Recife was the urban center of the Northeast at that time, one of the poorest areas of Brazil,” Curran explains. “Originally, the area was a semi-feudal agricultural region where sugar cane and tobacco were grown primarily using slave labor. Cordel began toward the end of the 19th century. It was the major communication medium for its humble practitioners. They had almost no access to telephones, radios, or other means of mass communication until the 1960s.”

Cordel filled the gap. The writing form matured just before the turn of the 20th century. It served both as literary entertainment and as a type of newspaper in verse for the poor.

“I was in Brazil in 1969 when the United States landed men on the moon,” Curran recalls. “Within hours there were cordel stories about the landing selling like hotcakes on the streets. The same thing happened during the more recent Gulf War. Every story had a definite moralistic, good-versus-evil, and local point of view.”

Curran has studied and collected cordel since 1966. He was the first North American scholar to study and write about it. During his ASU career, Curran has made more than 15 research trips to the region, each lasting from one month to a full year. He says that growing up in Abilene, Kansas, with its folk history of cowboys, cattle drives, and country music, coupled with a farm and Irish-Catholic background, has helped him understand and appreciate the basic artistic, religious, and moral underpinnings of cordel.

The ASU scholar thinks that published cordel booklets are an absolute essential source document for historians.

“Had the local custom been strictly oral rather than oral and written news transmission, much of the humble class’ view of regional and national events would have certainly been lost,” he explains. “Instead, cordel provides the folk-popular point of view for nearly every major regional and national event that occurred in Brazil during the 20th century.”

Understanding that perspective, he says that cordel must be blended with more traditional “official” documents to truly capture different views on what really happened in Brazil throughout the century.

Curran espoused that view in his most recent book, Historia do Brasil em Cordel. The book was widely acclaimed by Brazilian daily newspapers, Veja, the national magazine equivalent to Time, and by literary critics.

“I think my work got favorable reviews because I related that folk-popular heritage to some of Brazil’s most important current and historic events. And to literary and cultural figures who borrowed from cordel to produce their own sophisticated, nationally known works,” Curran explains.

“Another reason is that cordel is dying out as Brazil becomes an increasingly modern, industrial leader among third-world nations. Since cordel documents the cultural roots of the Northeast, an area which best represents the colonial foundations of Brazil, there is some fear that the folk-popular heritage could be lost.”

All is not bleak. There is good news about cordel, Curran says. Cordel still exists in several major archives. For example, the U.S. Library of Congress has a respectable collection—as does Curran himself. And, in what Curran views as the ultimate irony, a modified version of cordel has begun appearing on the Internet.—Lindsey Michaels