From “The Backlands and I”

"From “The Backlands and I”." Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, 49(1-2), pp. 104–105

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Notes on contributors

Patativa do Assaré

Patativa do Assaré is the pen name of Antônio Gonçalves da Silva (1909–2002), a poet and occasional singer from the interior of the state of Ceará. His fame as a verse-maker spread from his rural hometown over five productive decades. He is a legend of backlands poetry for the quantity and quality of his lyric and narrative verse. A semi-literate creator (“author”), his three books actually comprise transcriptions of oral compositions. He also issued many chapbooks (literatura de cordel) and published items in periodicals. His verse is always metrical and rhymed, and often singable. All is composed in rural dialect without the niceties of schoolbook grammar.

The selection below is the opening stanza (of fifteen) of “Eu e o sertão,” one of the signature poems of Cante lá que eu canto cá: filosofia de um trovador nordestino (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Vozes, Petrópolis, 1978; Sing There, I'll Sing Here, Philosophy of a Northeastern Troubador).