A Iara — a Brazilian legend in easy Portuguese

The Iara is the woman of the river: long hair, green eyes, a song at dusk that nobody who hears it can leave behind. Her other name is Mãe-d'Água, the Mother of the Water. In the sources she is a woman in the water, not a fish-tailed mermaid; the tail is a later European mixture. Whoever follows her song is taken under the river and does not come back. She is not evil, exactly. She is the river's pull, and the legend's ending is as melancholy as the river at sunset.

The name is Tupi: y-iara, the lady of the water. The legend belongs to the Amazon first and then to the whole of Brazil. Couto de Magalhães, in O Selvagem (1876), records the river spirit of the Pará people, whose lakes light up on moonlit nights with the songs of her feasts. The fullest telling is Afonso Arinos's "A Yara, lenda amazônica, versão de Manaus", in Lendas e tradições brasileiras (1917): Jaguarari, the chief's son and the best young hunter and fisherman of his people, starts going out alone in his canoe at dusk and coming back silent; his mother warns him that her song is death; he goes anyway, and the people see his canoe heading into the sunset with a figure of golden hair beside him.

This telling keeps that shape: the song at dusk, the hair and the green eyes, the mother's warning, his going anyway, and the two voices singing on the river at night. It leaves out Arinos's literary ornament and tells the ending gently. A few phrases to notice: "O que você tem?" is how Brazilians ask what's wrong; "Não vai!" is the spoken form of the negative command (grammar books say não vá); and "quem segue … não volta" has the shape of a proverb.