First voices
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The Urutáu Bird
“I am the daughter of disgrace,” said Ñeambiú, the daughter of the chief, when her father forebade her love for a man from an enemy community.
She said that and then ran off.
With time, they encountered her once more, in the mountains of Iguazú. They found a statue. Ñeambiú looked without seeing; her mouth was mute and her heart slept.
The chief sent out a call for whomever could decipher mysteries and cure sicknesses. The entire community gathered about to witness the resurrection.
The shaman asked the advice of yerba mate and of casava wine. He approached Ñeambiú and lied into her ear: “The man you loved just died.”
Ñeambiú’s outcry turned all the Indigenous into weeping willows. She flew away, now a bird.
The shrieks of the urutáu bird, that in the middle of the night make even the mountains quiver, can be heard more than a half league away. It is difficult to see the urutáu. To hunt her down, impossible. No one can catch the phantom bird.
Translation ©2024. Terence Clarke. All rights reserved.
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Note: No Plagiarism Software, also known as Artificial Intelligence, was used in this translation.
About Eduardo Galeano? click here. For a selection of Galeano’s books, click here. For my recent Substack piece that tells of Galeano, click here.
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