Episode Details

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Folk Tales of Argentina opens with five folk tales and legends of the Misiones region and the Alto Paraná, from Juan Bautista Ambrosetti's Supersticiones y leyendas (Buenos Aires, 1917), together with a tale of the Calchaquí valleys from Adán Quiroga's Folklore calchaquí (1929). They are read here in a fresh English translation made for this shelf. Ambrosetti collected on both banks of the Paraná, a border river, and the legends are presented with his own regional framing: the Suindá-Cuá cliff stands on the Paraguayan bank in his geography, the Santo Pipó stream on the Argentine bank, and Quiroga's tale is billed as he bills it — a tale of Catamarca.

In The Fox and the Lion, a Catamarca trickster tale told in dialogue, the fox, caught in the open by the lion, pretends that a furious storm is coming, and talks the lion into being tied fast to a tala tree with chaguar fibre. Quiroga gives the moral himself: how the weak defeats the powerful. In The Legend of the Suindá-Cuá, all the cattle of the Jesuit reductions of Jesús and Trinidad vanish in a day, taken away by a saint as a lesson to those who cared for them badly, and their hoofprints remain stamped in the rock of the Owl's Cave. In The Stone Itá-Guaimí, a disobedient girl, sent grumbling to the river to fetch water, is changed into stone by Tupã at the bank, and travellers still lower their voices as they pass her; the legend is presented complete, exactly as Ambrosetti wrote it. In The Stones of Santo Pi-Pó, Saint Thomas, passing the stream on the Argentine bank, leaves the prints of his hands and feet in the rock. And in The Town of Emboré, the lost Jesuit treasure town stands hidden in the selva, its houses without doors or windows, entered by secret tunnels, while expedition after expedition searches for it in vain — a story Ambrosetti tells with open, affectionate scepticism; the legend's own furniture says the Indians who built the town and carried the treasure "disappeared", a vanishing the tale never explains and never depicts.

Chapters

0:32 The Fox and the Lion

3:31 The Legend of the Suindá-Cuá

4:33 The Stone Itá-Guaimí

7:13 The Stones of Santo Pi-Pó

8:08 The Town of Emboré

From Supersticiones y leyendas (1917) by Juan Bautista Ambrosetti and Folklore calchaquí (1929) by Adán Quiroga — public domain. Music: gentle instrumental bed under the narration.

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