“Maravilla, maravilla. Mbaé motepá?”: The Paraguayan Riddles of Robert Lehmann-Nitsche

Abstract

During a train trip between the Paraguayan cities of Encarnación and Asunción in 1911, the German ethnologist Robert Lehmann-Nitsche collected a series of 17 riddles in Guarani and Spanish never published in his works. These materials, which to this day have remained in the form of handwritten notes, complement the texts already recorded in Adivinanzas rioplatenses (1911b), an essential work for the study of South American oral literature at the beginning of the 20th century. The aim of this paper is to analyze the repertoire of unpublished and handwritten Guarani riddles collected by the German ethnologist and to explore the ways in which these texts influenced the linguistic practices of the Guaraní-speaking population of Paraguay at the time. The importance of these texts lies in their particular rhetoric that combines the playful and the humorous and embodies a social discourse of the daily life of Paraguayan society at the beginning of the 20th century.