Raul Bopp

Cobra Norato
a nheengatu from the left bank of Amazonas

I

One of these days
I’m gonna live in the land of the Unending

I keep walking walking
I’m shuffling myself into the belly of the woods biting roots

Now I’ll make a potion from a lagoon flower
and send for Cobra Norato

— I want to tell you a story
Let’s walk around on those lowcut islands, ok?
Make believe there’s moonlight

Night comes in tame
Stars talk together low
I’m making like I’ll wrap a ribbon round its neck
and strangle the Snake.

Alright
Now I’ll slip into stretchy silk skin
and go out in the world

I’m going to visit queen Luiza
I want to marry her daughter
— Then first you have to turn off your eyes
Sleep runs down heavy lids
A muddy ground steals the strength of my steps

II

Now the ciphered jungle begins

Shadow hid the trees
Thick-lipped toads peer out of the dark

Here a piece of jungle’s being punished
Baby trees are squatting in a puddle

A slow thread of water licks mud

— I want to see queen Luiza’s daughter!

Now rivers are drowned
drinking the way
Water stumbles through swamps
sinking sinking

Up ahead water
guarded the trail to queen Luiza’s island

— Yeah right now
I’ll see queen Luiza’s daughter

But first you have to go through seven doors
See seven women with depopulated wombs
guarded by a jacaré

— I just want to see queen Luiza’s daughter

You have to hand over your shadow to the Beast of the Deep
You have to cast a spell when the moon is full
You have to drink three drops of blood

— Ah only if it comes from queen Luiza’s daughter!

The immense jungle has insomnia

Sleepy trees yawn
Ai the night’s gone dry Riverwater ran out

I gotta get out of here

I vanish drifting in the depth of the woods
where old pregnant trees doze

Everywhere they call to me
— Where you goin Cobra Norato?
I have three young trees here They’re all yours

— I can’t
Today I’m gonna sleep with queen Luiza’s daughter

III

I keep going fast I’m bruising the sand
Beggar-tick scratched me
Fat stems play sink-in-the-mud
A crowd of creeks go “psst”

Let me by because I have far to go

Tiriricas clog the path

— Ai Forest-father!
Who put the evil eye on me
and turned my trail on the ground?

Now I’m walking with my eyes all wilted
from so much looking for queen Luiza’s daughter

The rest of the night curls around me

Now the bottom drops out of the land
A soft belly-button puddle swallows me

Where’ll I go
now that my blood’s aching
for queen Luiza’s daughter and her witchy ways?

IV

This is the bad-breath forest
giving birth to snakes

Scrawny rivers at forced labor
The rippled current
peels gooey banks

Toothless roots gum the muck

In a long hard waterlogged march
a puddle swallows creek-water

It stinks
The wind moved somewhere else

A hiss frightens the trees
Silence gets a bruise

Up ahead a piece of dry wood falls:
Pum

A scream crosses the jungle
Other voices come

The river got choked in a ravine

I’m being spied on by a frog frog
There’s people-smell here
— Who are you?

— I’m Cobra Norato
I’m going to get engaged to queen Luiza’s daughter

V

Here’s the school for trees
They’re studying geometry

— You are blind from birth You must obey the river

— Ai ai! We’re slaves of the river!

— You are sentenced to work forever and ever
Your task is to make leaves to cover the forest
— Ai ai! We’re slaves of the river!

— You have to drown man in shadow
The forest is man’s enemy
— Ai ai! We’re slaves of the river!

I push through thickets
I hear these little cries help-me-help-me
They’re punishing the birds

— If you don’t know your lesson you have to be trees

— Ai ai ai ai...

— What are you doing up there?

— I have to announce the moon
when it comes up behind the woods

— What about you?
— I have to wake up the stars
on St. John’s night

— You?
— My job’s telling time in the bottom of the forest

Tiúg... Tiúg... Tiúg...
Twi. Twi-twi.

VI

I’m going by the edges of a swamp
Viscous plasma comes unsewn
and overflows mud-hemmed banks

I go pushing through thick bendy walls
I fall into a bottom in the swollen
scared haunted forest

You can hear whistles and a whack-whack-whack
They’re soldering sawing sawing
Looks kind of like they’re manufacturing earth...
Ué! They are manufacturing earth

Big wide ebb-mudholes wheeze
The old rotten scaffolding melts
Mudflats are emended
Piled forest scatters on the ground

Jumbled voices run
They bellow: You can’t!
— They talking to me?

I go under leafy arcades
Incognito bushes ask:
— Is it really day already?
Light splotches open holes in high treetops

Gossip trees
spent the night weaving leaves in secret

Little windy-wind blew tickles through the branches
Took apart undeciphered writings

•—•—•—•—•

In Portuguese, cobra simply means snake.

Nheengatu. From Tupi nheega’tu “good language”; lingua franca developed out of Tupinambá and spoken throughout Amazonia (Houaiss Dictionary of the Portuguese Language); by extension, an artifact of that language.

Jacaré. From Tupi yaka’re; common name for crocodilian reptiles.

Tiririca. Cyperus rotundus.

First 6 of 33 sections of the undisputed masterpiece of poesia antropofágica. A kind of anthem to brasilidade, based on tales of the anaconda.

One of the major difficulties in translating Cobra Norato lies in its diminutives (e.g., “estarzinho”: to-be-conditionally-for-a-little-while), which often gives the poem a sweet, childlike tenderness (Bopp began the poem as a children’s book). Another is Bopp’s constant shifting between the colloquial and the “poetic”.

Cover of the first edition (1931) by the great polymath, Flávio de Carvalho.

After Câmara Cascudo:

Near the village of Cachoeirí on the banks of a little river called the Claro that runs between the Amazon and the Trombeta rivers, a young woman became pregnant while she was bathing and gave birth to twin black snakes. A Tapuya woman baptized them Honorato and Maria, and let them wriggle away into the river because she knew they couldn’t live on land.

They grew up free, twisting their black bodies in the sun, diving through the rippling waters, hissing and huffing while they played. The people called them Cobra Norato and Maria Caninana.

Cobra Norato was strong and good. He never hurt anyone. Sometimes he visited the old Tapuya woman in her thatched hut in Cachoeirí. He would swim to the steep bank and wait for night to fall. When the stars came out and the aracuã stopped singing, Honorato dragged his enormous body over the rustling sand.

He came gliding to the surface, and slithered up the bank. He shook himself all over and made his scales glitter in the moonlight. He shed the monstrous snakeskin. He became a handsome young man dressed in white. He went to eat dinner and sleep in the thatched hut that belonged to the Tapuya woman who raised him as her own. The snake body stayed behind, stretched out on the riverbank. Right at dawn, just before the last rooster crows, he wriggled into the motionless snake body. He shook himself, and the snake dove into the river.

He saved many people from drowning. He helped people find their way home when they got lost in their canoes. He fought off big, fierce fish. Because of him, the big catfish from the river Trombetas had to leave after a fight that lasted three days and three nights.

Maria Caninana was mean and violent. She overturned canoes and killed people who fell overboard. She attacked people while they were looking for mussels. She hurt the little fish. She never even looked for the old Tapuya woman who lived in Cachoeirí.

In the port city of Obidos, in the state of Pará, there lived an enchanted serpent who slept, hidden in the earth, with its head under the altar to Saint Anna, in the church that belongs to Our Lady. The serpent’s tail is at the bottom of the river. If the serpent ever awakes, the Church will fall down. Maria Caninana bit the serpent because she wanted to see it happen. The serpent didn’t wake up, but it did twitch. The earth shook, from the marketplace all the way to Obidos Cathedral. Finally, Cobra Norato killed Maria Caninana because she was so mean and evil. And he went on alone, swimming through quiet rivers.

When all the people gathered together to make cassava meal, which is an important food for all the people of Brazil, Cobra Norato came out of the snakeskin when the aracuã stopped singing. He stood up, all dressed in white, and went to dance and flirt with the young women, talk with the young men and sit with the old people, who loved him for his courtesy and kindness. Everybody had a wonderful time. Afterwards, they heard the sound of a huge snake diving. It was dawn. Cobra Norato had gone back to follow his destiny.

Once a year, Cobra Norato invited a friend, male or female, to remove his enchantment. His friend would go to the edge of the river and find the snake fast asleep on a sandy bank, with its mouth open and its big, sharp fangs gleaming like silver in the dark. If Norato’s friend poured three drops of mother’s milk into the snake’s mouth and cut the snake’s head with virgin steel, the snake would shut its mouth and the wound would ooze three drops of blood and Honorato would become a man for the rest of his life. The snake body would be burnt.

Nobody would be hurt. Someone just needed to be brave enough to do it. Everybody loved Honorato, and they felt sorry for him, so a lot of people went to him with virgin steel and little containers of mother’s milk. But when they saw the snake sleeping on the bank, it was so big and so ugly that they were frightened, even though it was fast asleep. Even the old Tapuya woman from Cachoeirí went, but she was too afraid. Cobra Norato kept swimming and hissing through the big water, from the Amazonas to the Trombetas, coming and going, always hoping that one day he would be released from his enchantment.

Once, at the time of year when the people gather together to make cassava meal, Cobra Norato swam up the river Tocantins. He came out of the water at Cametá. He left the body on the riverbank and went to dance, drink and talk with his friends.

He met a soldier, and asked him to take away the enchantment. The soldier went with a little jar of mother’s milk and an axe that had never cut wood. He saw the snake stretched out, fast asleep with it’s mouth wide open. He dropped the milk into the snake’s mouth, and hit it with the ax, right on top of its head. The blood welled up. The snake shook a few times, and then was still. Honorato wriggled out of the snake and gave a weary sigh. He burned the snake he’d lived in for so many years. The ashes rose into the air. Honorato stayed a man until he died, so many years later, in the city of Cametá, in Pará.

All along this river and all through the state of Pará and even all over Brazil, everybody knows the story of Cobra Norato. People in canoes are always pulling up their oars, pointing to a little cove, or a place on the banks, and they say, “Cobra Norato used to hang out right there, every day...”