Renaissance and Golden Age Essays In Honor of D.W. McPheeters (PDF)

Bernardim Ribeiro and the Tradition of Renaissance Pastoral (p. 27)

Bryant Laurence Creel

Bernardim Ribeiro`s literary personality argues forcefully for the view that what is recognized as genius in an author is that which is absolutely unlike anything else.

Ribeiro`s fame rests not on his cultivation of the eclogue, by which he introduced Renaissance pastoral in Portugal: successful as he is as a writer of eclogues, that form is highly conventional and admits of relatively little originality on the part of the individual artist.

Ribeiro`s masterpiece is his prose work, Menina e Moga, whose exceptional beauty has attracted yet also perplexed readers for centuries. Critics have had little success in fathoming the work`s mysteries, much of their effort having been spent just on debating the method of its classification.

I would describe Menina e Moqa as a unique blend of chivalric romance, the sentimental novel, and elegiac pastoral romance, the narrative assuming its vivid natural- ness by virtue of a delicately patient, gentle, and plebeian interest in familiar detail, seemingly for its own sake, similar to the descriptive and psychological realism developed much later along more naturalistic lines in the prose fiction of Ivan Turgenyev and Anton Chekov.

But what is there about Menina e Moga that is so "mysterious"? Most obvious is the elliptical character of its plot. Although the work was first known by another title (O Livro das Saudades), the fact remains that the character whom we expect to be the protagonist and who states that the book is to be of her making, Menina, is neither the protagonist nor the fictional narrator, in spite of the fact that the second chapter begins with the words "em que a donzela vai prosseguindo sua historia."

We never find out who Menina is or what happened to her, who her "amigo verdadeiro" was or what happened to him, but instead find the story abruptly transferred to a different narrator, to

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