Cordel Sobre O Auto Da Compadecida

What cordel sobre o auto da compadecida actually looks like in practice

I spent about three weeks trying to adapt Suassuna's play into cordel format back in 2019. The result was roughly eighty pages of sextilha and heptasilaba verses, and honestly, the first draft was a mess. The main problem I ran into is that cordel has very strict rhythmic rules, and Suassuna's original dialogue is wildly free-form. Mixing the two meant either breaking the meter or losing the spirit of the scenes. The most useful approach I found was to work scene by scene and translate the stage directions into narrative verse rather than trying to preserve the original dialogue. It cuts your adaptation time down significantly. Trying to keep every line of Suassuna intact usually just makes the cordel feel stiff and overcrowded.

Where to find cordel sobre o auto da compadecida

There isn't one single definitive version. I know because I spent months looking for one before giving up and writing my own. Several independent authors have published their own cordéis, and a few can be found on sites like Clube de Autores or Scribd. Search for "cordel auto da compadecida" and you'll find PDFs floating around. Some are free, some cost between R$10 and R$25. The quality ranges from decent to amateur, so read a few pages before buying. If you're looking for the specific cordel by Jandira Vasconcelos, that one tends to be the most referenced. It's available through several online bookstores. No official digital archive exists, which is its own problem if you need a clean text for study purposes.

The structure you actually need to know

Cordel poetry uses two main verse structures: sextilha (six-line stanzas with rhyme scheme ABABCB or AABBCC) and redondilha (seven-syllable lines, usually in tercets). Suassuna's Auto da Compadecida doesn't follow a strict meter, which is why adapting it requires decisions at every step. The key decision is whether you're doing a narrative retelling or a stanza-by-stanza transcription. Narrative retelling works better for cordel. You condense events into flowing story verses. Transcription tries to match every scene beat-for-beat and usually collapses under its own weight. My second draft failed completely because I attempted direct transcription. It took eight months to finish half the play and I abandoned it.

Common mistakes people make with cordel sobre o auto da compadecida

The biggest mistake is assuming the religious or comic elements translate easily into the cordel tradition. They don't, not without serious reworking. Suassuna blends Northeastern folklore, Catholic imagery, and satire in a way that's already layered. Cordel does something similar, but the balance points differ. When I read my first drafts aloud, I kept noticing that the comic timing was off. The humor in the original play comes from the dialogue and the characters' timing. In cordel, humor has to carry the weight of the verse itself, not the performance. Another mistake is overloading the text with character names. Cordel readers expect to follow a story, not a cast list. Use descriptive epithets instead. "O padim Cicero" works better than repeating his full name constantly. It saves syllables and reads more naturally.

What the format actually demands from you

Every line must fit the meter. That sounds obvious but it's where most people get stuck. The septosyllabic line in Portuguese works differently than in English. Portuguese has natural stress patterns that line up differently with syllable counts. You have to count lyrical syllables, not literal ones. Elisions and synalepas change everything. For example, the phrase "São João" counts as two syllables when sung, not three. This matters when you're hitting the seven-syllable target. If you count strictly phonemically, you'll consistently overshoot and the rhythm breaks. I used a simple manual counting method: write the line, read it slowly, mark where the natural stresses fall, then adjust words until the stresses land on syllables 2, 4, and 6.

It takes time. The first version of my adaptation had maybe forty percent of lines fitting the meter correctly. By the fifth draft, I was at about ninety-two percent. The remaining eight percent I left alone because fixing them would have ruined the sense. Readers won't always notice a slightly off beat, especially in longer poems. They will notice when the meaning gets twisted to fit the rhyme.

Technical note on rhyme

Cordel doesn't require perfect end rhymes on every stanza. AABBCC or ABABCB patterns are standard, but many modern cordelistas mix them within a single work. Suassuna's Auto actually has rhyming sections built in, which helps. The scenes with Joana and the devil have built-in musicality that transfers reasonably well to sextilha form. The more philosophical scenes, like the ones involving the Judge or Death, resist this treatment. They're meant to be spoken, not sung. I handled those sections by switching to free hendecasyllabic verse in places where the content demanded it. Not all traditionalists will approve, but it kept the poem readable. A rigid form applied everywhere creates a different kind of problem: the reader stops caring about the story and starts counting syllables instead. That defeats the whole purpose.

If you're trying to write your own version

Start by picking one central thread. The original has multiple simultaneous actions. A cordel can't sustain all of them without becoming exhausted. Choose either João Grilo's survival arc or Chicó's downfall. Don't try to give equal weight to both. The best cordéis I've read on this subject pick a lane and commit to it. Another practical tip: record yourself reading the original play aloud before writing a single line. You'll hear where the natural rhythm already exists. Those passages are your anchors. Everything else is translation work.

One final note about availability: most cordéis on the Auto are self-published and out of print within a year or two. If you find one you like, download it immediately. Physical copies don't survive well in the cordel market. Digital piracy is rampant, which ironically makes finding text easier, but it also means quality control is nonexistent. Verify any claims about the author or publisher against independent sources.