Tale
Contos Tradicionais do Povo Português
Not translated into English
Teófilo Braga · 1883
Synopsis
Tales gathered from oral tradition in the Azores, the Algarve, the Minho and elsewhere, noted down from children, old women and men of the people, which the author arranges into mythical tales of dawn, sun and night, into anecdotes and jests, and into moral examples. The collection adds old stories taken from books, including those of Gonçalo Fernandes Trancoso stripped of their prefaces, and each tale is followed by notes that relate it to its European variants.
Context
The collection appeared in Porto in 1883, in two volumes, published by Magalhães & Moniz, four years after Adolfo Coelho's. Its author conceived it as one part of a vast inventory of Portuguese traditions, begun in 1867 with his collections of songs and romances and intended to feed his history of literature; national sentiment remains present in it, even when the inquiry claims to be scientific. It also absorbs the fables of a collection from the early seventeenth century, that of Manuel Mendes da Vidigueira. A second edition appeared in 1914. Braga himself had begun in fiction in 1865 with tales of his own invention, and his classification serves a much-contested theory, that of a Mozarabic stock peculiar to Portugal.
Who it is for
Short tales followed by comparative notes; the selection and arrangement serve the author's thesis on national identity.
Prizes and reception
Reissued in 1914, then in the collection Portugal de Perto; it is recommended reading today in the seventh year of Portuguese schools.
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