The Ballad on the String

About this book

Cordel is the poetry of the Brazilian backlands: ballads printed cheap in little chapbooks, illustrated with woodcuts, hung by clothespins on a string in the market, and sold for coins, and for a long time in the dry interior they were the news, the history, and the memory of towns that the newspapers of the coast never reached. The old cordelistas were the reporters of the sertão, and they wrote what happened, in rhyme, and hung it on the string, and the string remembered what the powerful would rather forget.