Bidspirit auction | REDOL (Alves). CANCIONEIRO do Ribatejo.

REDOL (Alves). CANCIONEIRO do Ribatejo. Lisboa. 1950. - REDOL (Alves) CANCIONEIRO do Ribatejo . Organização e prefácio de Alves Redol. Lisboa: Centro Bibliográfico, 1950. 200 pp.; 220 mm. This ethnographic work, subtitled ”The Life of the People Sung by the People, ” was organized and prefaced by Alves Redol. The collection took fourteen years to complete and involved the collaboration of a dozen local contributors from the Ribatejo region. The stated starting point is a phrase by Almeida Garrett about popular literature as ”the true national literature, the popular one, the vanquished one, the tyrannized one.” Redol, who had already deepened his knowledge of Ribatejo folklore in *Glória, uma Aldeia do Ribatejo* , defined the material gathered here as ”a collective poem that an illiterate people bequeathed to the future, to recount their hopes and their bitterness, in a wealth of suggestions and affirmations that no one will be able to deny.” The two hundred pages of the volume contain hundreds of quatrains organized by themes: trades and professions, life and death, poverty, festivals, passion, the floods of the Tagus River. The collection fits into the vast interest of Portuguese neorealism in popular culture as a repository of social memory and resistance, and is complementary to Redol's work as a fiction writer from the same region. Rare. ⚑ Auto-translated via Google Translate