Cordel Auto Da Compadecida

Writing Cordel Adaptations of Auto da Compadecida

Adapting Ariano Suassuna's Auto da Compadecida into cordel form is a straightforward process once you understand the structure, but there are some practical snags that people don't usually talk about.

What is cordel auto da compadecida

Cordel auto da compedecida refers to the tradition of rewriting Suassuna's 1955 play into the decasyllabic septenarius form typical of Brazilian northeastern literature. The original text was written for the stage with dialogue, stage directions, and musical cues. Cordel version strips all of that down to ten-line stanzas (dezilhas) following an ABBAABBCC rhyme scheme. That's the standard structure. It works well for narrative passages but it chokes on things like the dialogue between João Grilo and Chicó when they're arguing quickly. I ran into this exact problem when I was adapting the marketplace scene where they haggle over the fake miracle relics. The rapid back-and-forth doesn't compress naturally into twelve-syllable lines. My workaround was to merge two characters' lines into a single narrator observation instead of trying to preserve both voices in dialogue format. It costs you something in dramatic tension but it keeps the meter intact and the story moving. You lose the comedic timing of the original exchange but you gain readability, which is what matters in cordel.

The mechanical process

Here's how it actually goes. First, you read through the entire play and identify which scenes carry the most narrative weight. The miracle of the three dead women, the trial in heaven, the escape from the grave, and the final judgment with the devil losing his balance on the scale — those are the core beats. Everything else is embellishment you can trim. Next you write each selected scene as free verse first. Don't worry about meter. Just get the story down in your own words, roughly matching the emotional tone of each passage. This step takes longer than people expect because Suassuna's language is dense with Northeastern dialect and religious satire, and you need to decide what to preserve and what to simplify. The dialect words like "parang," "xexelé," and "cumpadi" should stay. They anchor the piece in its cultural context and readers expect them. What you can drop is most of the secondary character dialogue — Father Julian, the priest at the church, the minor townspeople. Their functions in the plot are small enough that merging their lines into narration doesn't lose anything meaningful.

After the free verse draft, you rewrite it line by line into decasyllabers. Count syllables manually at first. Use the rule of euphonic synalepha: when a word ending in a vowel meets a word starting with a vowel, they count as one syllable together. This is where most beginners mess up. They count strictly by written syllables instead of by how the line sounds when read aloud. The result reads fine on paper but falls apart when performed, and cordel is meant to be sung or chanted. The rhyme scheme settles itself if you keep the middle and end rhymes consistent. Don't force rhymes that don't belong in the vocabulary of the scene. I've seen amateur adapters use "coração/oração" as a crutch because both words end the same way, but stacking those every few stanzas makes the piece sound lazy. Pick a wider range of rhyme sounds and vary them. Use assonant rhyme on less important lines and consonant rhyme on the key narrative turning points.

What people usually get wrong

The biggest mistake is treating the original play as a script to translate rather than as source material to rewrite. Cordel has its own conventions — the narrator commentaries, the direct address to the reader, the occasional humorous aside — that don't exist in Suassuna's text. Adding those in is what separates a competent adaptation from a padded summary. You should inject at least a couple of narrator interjections per scene, ideally ones that wink at the audience or foreshadow what's coming. These moments are what give cordel its distinctive voice and they make the piece feel like cordel rather than like prose chopped into lines. Another pitfall is ignoring the musical dimension. The septenarius rhythm has a natural lilt that comes from the seven-syllable feel within each ten-syllable line. If you read your draft aloud and it sounds flat, the rhythm is wrong. You can fix it by adjusting which stressed syllables fall in positions 2, 4, 6, and 8 of the line. Move the stress words around until the line has that characteristic cadence without changing the meaning.

Length and distribution

A complete adaptation of Auto da Compadecida in cordel form typically runs between 300 and 500 lines depending on how much of the play you include. That translates to roughly 30 to 50 dezilhas. A printed folheto of that size fits on a single sheet folded into eight pages. Anything shorter than 200 lines feels incomplete — you've skipped too many key moments. Anything over 600 lines is too long for the format and readers will abandon it before finishing. If you're looking for existing published versions, you'll find them through the Biblioteca Nacional's cordel catalog, through the Instituto do Cordel in Recife, or on sites like FolheteriaOnline and CordelVive. Some authors also self-publish through Shopee and Mercado Livre using print-on-demand services, which has become common for regional titles that don't get wide distribution.

When this approach breaks down

Cordel adaptation of Auto da Compadecida works best for readers who already know the play and want a condensed literary version. It does not work if the goal is to introduce the story to someone who has never encountered it — the compressed narrative skips too many dramatic beats and the cultural references assume prior familiarity. In that case, a prose synopsis with annotations is more useful. The verse form also struggles with the theological satire in the final judgment scene, where Suassuna builds a sustained argument about justice and mercy. Condensing that into dezilhas loses the philosophical depth, so those sections come out thinner than the rest of the piece no matter how careful you are.