Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

The verse «que los yerros por amores | dignos son de perdonar» is a constant presence in the Portuguese literature of the 16th century, more or less recreated from a discursive and semantic point of view, and there is still evidence of its use in the 17th century alluding to «Media noche era por filo». However, in cases where this expression appears separated from other elements of the ballad that stars Conde Claros, in works such as Comédia Eufrosina or Comédia Ulissipo by Jorge Ferreira de Vasconcelos or even Comédia dos Estrangeiros by Francisco Sá de Miranda, we might be in the presence of the proverb collected by Gonzalo Correas in the Vocabulario de refranes y frases proverbiales. This study seeks to determine the autonomous circulation of this expression in Portugal, also in the light of new data published here for the first time.

The water element has a symbolic, ancestral value in all cultures, and it is possible to trace, throughout human history, the importance that water had and still has for different cultures and the symbolic values ​​that have been attributed to it. From an object of worship to a symbol of life, water is also associated with different cultural practices. To this extent, we find references to water in literature or painting and we find that, in these expressions, the symbolic values ​​that each community attributes to the water element are evidenced. Thus, based on the importance and symbolic values ​​of the water element in different cultures, in different cultural practices and in different expressions, we revisit the symbolic constructs associated with the water element in literature, particularly in an oral genre: spanish balads. In a very particular way, we intend to analyze the linguistic options of the lexical field of water in novels of the modern Iberian oral tradition, trying to verify to what extent the linguistic forms present in the texts contribute to the incorporation of metaphorical values ​​of the water element and in what measure those are the underpinning of a symbolic construct.

After having analysed in previous studies the most representative variants of the ballad of La bastarda y el segador in Pan-Hispanic tradition, this article aims to compare exhaustively the differences and similarities existing between the Portuguese oral tradition, which is very rich in this ballad, and the Spanish one. For this purpose, to the corpus of almost a hundred versions previously compiled, which only included twelve Portuguese recitations, we have added on this occasion all the romance files available in the romanceiro.pt database, which amount to a total of seventy-eight. In short, the proposed extensive analysis, which will focus specifically on each of the discursive segments into which the romance can be subdivided, will show the close dialogue existing between these two romance traditions and how, in spite of this, each of them offers independent and original variants of the text.

In the years 1916-1917 the American anthropologist Elsie Clews Parsons recorded in communities of Cape Verdean immigrants established on the east coast of the United States an important collection of folk tales, which she published in 1923. Among these tales are prose versions of several Hispanic romances: Gerineldo, La doncella guerrera, El Cid y el conde Lozano, El Cid pide parias al rey moro, Gaiferos, Carlomagno y sus doce pares, El conde Alarcos and Bela Infanta. In this article several of these romances-stories are presented and analyzed.

This study reviews the ethnographic perspective on the feature film Silvestre by João César Monteiro (1981) that was created utilizing traditional compositions (Doncella guerrera, for example) and with the purpose of using them in the sense of an approximation to Portuguese ethos. In addition, besides discovering in the film a very well-known ballad in the space of the Iberian languages (Veneno de Moriana), this study finds in the traditions subordinated to the script the touchstone of the meaning of Silvestre, that is, the materialization of the concept of being Portuguese with peninsular contours and the basis for the filmmaker's reflection on his own creative gesture.

The interest in the romancero began in Portugal in the 19th century with Almeida Garrett (1799-1854), as part of his Romantic nationalist agenda. His aim was to prove the existence of a Portuguese national poetry with medieval origins. However, considering the lack of Portuguese romancero sources during the previous centuries, Garrett was left with no choice but to draw on the Spanish romancero, which seems rather a contradiction since, at the time, the goal was to search for and affirm the substance of the Portuguese popular poetry against the Spanish one. This study examines this and other founding paradoxes of the Portuguese romancero. In particular, it seeks to clarify what solutions, departing from the Garrettian Romanticism, were outlined in order to create a Portuguese poetic history through the romancero. If, apparently, it would make sense to think that Garrett's nationalism rejected everything that would imply a Spanish origin and that his folkballads collection would have been formed by looking exclusively towards non-Iberian European models, the study of autographic materials (some of them unpublished) shows that, on the contrary, the broad domain of the Castilian language and Castilian bibliography from the 16th to 18th centuries became one of the most prolific methodological keys for the creation of the Portuguese popular poetic imaginary.

Portuguese crypto-Jews preserve five biblical ballads. Although 1. O Sacrifício de Isaac (á-o) is current in Spain and among Moroccan Sephardim, it is exclusively crypto-Jewish in Portugal, and incorporates extra-biblical elements derived from the Midrash. The strophic character of 2. Jonas and 3. Daniel na Cova dos Leões suggest proximity to more modern broadsides, but there are reasons to think that they may go far back in time. 4. A Passagem do Mar Vermelho (á-o), survives only among the Sephardim of the Eastern Mediterranean. Although based on the Book of Exodus, the ballad also includes folkloric details in common with the Midrash. 5. A Pedra Mara (á-a), exists only in Portugal, and condenses two episodes about the lack of water during the pilgrimage of the Jewish People in the desert. The “pedra” recalls the water that Moses causes to flow from a rock in Horeb, and Mara refers to the bitter waters that the prophet makes drinkable in a place with the same name. The last crypto-Jewish poem, 6. No Céu Está um Castelo (í-a), dechristianizes a Christian ballad.

Texto con los créditos y preliminares del volumen