Morte e Vida Severina

Morte e Vida Severina (literally, Severine Life and Death, but translated by Elizabeth Bishop as The Death and Life of a Severino) is a play in verse by Brazilian author João Cabral de Melo Neto, one of his most famous and frequently read works. Published in 1955 and written between 1954 and 1955, the play is divided into 18 sections and written in heptasyllabic meter, recalling the popular poetry of northeastern Brazil, where Melo Neto was born and lived for most of his life, the cordel.

Morte e Vida Severina is subtitled Auto de Natal Pernambucano (Auto of Pernambucan Christmas), in a reference to both the biblical perspective of the word and in a broader sense of a new, hopeful beginning for life at its entirety. The play accounts for the journey of a retirante, someone who, fleeing from the droughts that annually ravage the northeastern region of Brazil, proceed either to the city or to fertile lands, often in a repetitive cycle of flight and devastation.

The “retirantes” had also been the theme of the famous novel Vidas Secas by Graciliano Ramos, albeit under a very different point of view. This auto, which chronicles the journey of a single man, the eponymous Severino, down the Capibaribe river, evolves into a metaphysical account that parallels Nativity and reflects the possibility for a meaningful life amid the harshness of the sertão.

"– My name is Severino,

I have no Christian name.

There are lots of Severinos

(a saint of pilgrimage)

so they began to call me

Maria's Severino.

There are many Severinos

With mothers called Maria,

So I became Marias's

Of Zacarias, deceased."

-Morte e Vida Severina by João Cabral de Melo Neto (Translated by Elizabeth Bishop)

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