Episode Details
Back to Episodes
Folk Tales of Uruguay — Part 1 (Ñeambiú and Cuimbaé — The Origin of the Urutaú · The Paraguayan Woman and the Urutaú That Could Not Be Caught)
Description
Folk Tales of Uruguay opens with two tales of the urutaú — the ghost-bird of the Río de la Plata — recorded in Uruguay by Daniel Granada in his Reseña histórico-descriptiva de antiguas y modernas supersticiones del Río de la Plata (Montevideo, 1896), and read here in a fresh English translation from Granada's Spanish. Granada lived for more than fifteen years in Salto, Uruguay, and wrote the book there. The urutaú's lore belongs to the Guaraní tradition of the whole Río de la Plata: Paraguayans, Misioneros, Correntinos, Entre-Ríanos, Orientales — that is, Uruguayans — and Brazilians all keep its Guaraní name, as Granada himself records; it is told here from one of its Uruguayan homes, not as Uruguay's alone.
In Ñeambiú and Cuimbaé — The Origin of the Urutaú, the cacique's daughter and the Tupí prisoner who loves her are kept apart by her parents, and grief takes her voice and her feeling; neither her friends nor the diviner Aguará-Payé can call her back, until one word does — and the tale tells how the urutaú came to be, whose cry is a woman's lament ending in dying moans. In The Paraguayan Woman and the Urutaú That Could Not Be Caught, a mother and her little son set out for the stream bank twenty-one days running to snare the marvellous bird, and twenty-one times forget the one thing they went for, while the urutaú sits undisturbed on the same branch.
Granada's book is a study of the folk beliefs of the Río de la Plata, and this shelf reads its tales only: the book's chapters on the lobizón, on la luz mala, on haunted places, on the salamanca, and on omens of death stand excluded by name in our shelf register and are not read here or anywhere on this shelf. One belief-line Granada quotes from Azara — that breaking the bird's wing and leg bones leaves it whole again by morning — is omitted from the reading, and a coarse word in a footnote about Don Quixote is never read.
Chapters
0:32 Ñeambiú and Cuimbaé — The Origin of the Urutaú
11:36 The Paraguayan Woman and the Urutaú That Could Not Be Caught
From Reseña histórico-descriptiva de antiguas y modernas supersticiones del Río de la Plata (1896) by Daniel Granada — public domain. Music: gentle instrumental bed under the narration.
KacheliTV — world classics, read aloud.