Folk Tales of Argentina continues with two folk tales and legends from Juan Bautista Ambrosetti's Supersticiones y leyendas (Buenos Aires, 1917), read here in a fresh English translation made for this shelf. Ambrosetti collected on both banks of the Paraná and Uruguay rivers, a border country, and the pieces are presented with his own regional framing: the Hill of the Monk stands on the Argentine bank of the Alto Uruguay in his geography, while the customs of the blessing and the godparent bond were observed by him chiefly across the Paraná borderlands, in Misiones and Paraguay.
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
In The Hill of the Monk, an Italian monk who took refuge on a palm-crowned hill above the Alto Uruguay in 1852 digs to plant a cross, and miraculous water springs from the hole — a fountain in the centre of a great stone, which the sick still visit, asking "Give me a little water, for the love of God," and which draws hundreds of pilgrims in Holy Week to the little chapel, with its saint already wearing some ten wedding dresses, one over another. In The Blessing, the Godparent Bond, and the Legend of the Mboi-Tatá, Ambrosetti describes the asking of the blessing — and his own mishap of giving it once with the left hand — and the compadrazgo, the sacred bond between godparents and parents, whose arithmetic can give one child twenty-four godparents, and whose authority can end a drunken fight that no other means could touch. Attached to the bond he prints, complete and exactly as he wrote it, its provident legend: compadres who break the bond's faith are changed by night into Mboi-Tatá, great serpents or birds with a flame for a head, fighting and burning one another until dawn, night after night, even after death. One further section of the volume, "La piedra de Itá-Cuá," is held from this episode for a ruling and is not included.
Chapters
0:21 The Hill of the Monk
4:45 The Blessing, the Godparent Bond, and the Legend of the Mboi-Tatá
From Supersticiones y leyendas (1917) by Juan Bautista Ambrosetti — public domain. Music: gentle instrumental bed under the narration.
KacheliTV — world classics, read aloud.
Argentine folk tales, Argentine folk tales audiobook, Argentine folklore, Juan Bautista Ambrosetti, Adán Quiroga, Latin American folk tales, world folk tales, free audiobook
