Episode Details

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Folk Tales of Venezuela opens with three traditions and legends of Mérida and the Venezuelan Andes, gathered by Tulio Febres Cordero in his Tradiciones y leyendas (Mérida, 1911) — traditions he collected, as he writes, from old chronicles, documents, and the living voices of the people. They are read here in a fresh English translation made for this shelf.

In A Fortunate Monkey, the whole bench of visiting bishops, with the dean and the chapter, hurries to a deathbed in the saintly Bishop Arias's house on the words "the cook is dying" — and finds that the dying one is the household's beloved pet monkey, who lived in the kitchen; the next day the university students paint his tomb with three mitres and an epitaph of their own. In Tobacco in Church, Dean Mendoza wages war on the canons' snuffboxes rattling through the Divine Office, and when a papal bull and the synodal constitutions have both failed, he lights a cigar in the choir himself: if it is allowed in powder, it must be allowed in smoke. One sentence of the tale recalls, as a historical reference only, a Muscovy statute of 1634 against snuff-takers; it is quoted, never enacted. In The Lake of Urao, a bard tells a traveller how the salt lake was formed from the tears of the petrified virgins of the Motatán, how it rose into the air like a cloud and travelled from resting place to resting place under the shelter of the Five White Eagles, and how an evil piache's secret held it fast at Lagunillas. The legend is presented complete, exactly as Febres Cordero wrote it in 1911.

Chapters

0:20 A Fortunate Monkey

4:15 Tobacco in Church

8:41 The Lake of Urao

From Tradiciones y leyendas (1911) by Tulio Febres Cordero — public domain. Music: gentle instrumental bed under the narration.

KacheliTV — world classics, read aloud.