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Eduardo e Mônica — Legião Urbana · Verbomatico

Eduardo e Mônica

by Legião Urbana

Language: Portuguese
Released: 1986
Genre: rock
Level: B1-
Difficulty score: 686
Duration: 4:31

How to study this song

Learning “Eduardo e Mônica” means 142 entries at B1- — 66 Portuguese words, 12 adjectives and 64 verb forms, every one taken from what the song actually says. Begin with dia, razão and coisas: get those and most of the lines stop being guesswork. This one leans on its verbs: 64 distinct forms against 12 adjectives, so conjugation is where the effort goes. At this level part of the list will already be familiar; the rest is what closes the gap.

The words of this song, in six languages

Every word below is taken from this song and translated by us. Nothing here is the lyric itself — these are the individual words you need in order to follow it.

Vocabulary

PT	EN	ES	IT	FR	NL
dia	day	día	giorno	jour	dag
razão	reason	razón	ragione

Adjectives

PT	EN	ES	IT	FR	NL
deitado	lying down	tumbado	sdraiato	allongé	liggend
legal	cool, fine (informal)	guay, bien

Verb forms

PT	EN	ES	IT	FR	NL
eram	were (they)	eran	erano	étaient	waren
era	was	era	era

What this song teaches you

Level · B1-

Vocabulary words: 66
Adjectives: 12
Word combos: 8
Expressions: 19
Verb forms: 64
Quiz questions: 35

Background

About the song

«Eduardo e Mônica» is one of the best-loved story songs in Brazilian rock. It was written by Renato Russo, the singer and lyricist of Legião Urbana, the band he formed in Brasília in the early 1980s, and it appeared on the group’s second studio album, «Dois», released by EMI on 20 July 1986. The album was recorded between February and April of that year at the EMI-Odeon studios in Rio de Janeiro, with Mayrton Bahia as producer; on this particular track Renato Russo is credited as producer himself. The recording lasts four and a half minutes and is usually described as folk rock: acoustic guitars carry a melody that keeps moving forward, verse after verse, like a person telling a long anecdote to friends.

What makes the song unusual is its form. There is no chorus in the usual sense. Instead, the lyric is a chronicle that follows a couple from the day they meet until years later, when they are settled with a family. Eduardo is a sixteen-year-old boy who still lives in the world of school, television, soap operas and table football with his grandfather. Mônica is older, studies medicine, speaks German and talks about art, poetry, magic and meditation. The fun of the song lies in the list of their differences — the films, painters, poets and bands she admires against his teenage routine — and in the slow discovery that, despite all of it, they belong together.

The story moves through small, concrete scenes: a first meeting that happens by chance at a party, an awkward first date where each of them wants to go somewhere different, the moment when their friendship turns into a daily need to see each other. Then the timeline speeds up. Together they try out hobbies and courses, they travel, he grows up and finds work, she finishes her degree, and they celebrate and quarrel like any couple. By the last verses they have built a house, had twins and moved back to Brasília, where the ordinary worries of family life have taken the place of the adventures of youth.

Renato Russo based the characters on real people from his circle in Brasília: his friend Leonice de Araújo Coimbra and her husband Fernando Coimbra, a couple who lived in the Asa Norte district. Fernando, an anthropology student at the University of Brasília, had impressed Russo with the records he had brought back from Paris; Leonice discussed astrology, the I Ching and destiny with him, and he visited her often when she was ill. Russo also said that Eduardo was partly a portrait of himself — only, in his words, a little less foolish.

Did you know?

Renato Russo originally imagined «Dois» as a double album called «Mitologia e Intuição». The record company turned the idea down, and the twenty songs he had prepared were cut to twelve. «Eduardo e Mônica» survived the cut and became one of the five singles taken from the album, alongside «Tempo Perdido», «Índios», «Quase sem Querer» and «Acrilic on Canvas».

The song has been used in advertising more than once. In 2001 the mobile operator ATL, today part of Claro, used fragments of it in a campaign. In 2011, twenty-five years after the album came out, the operator Vivo produced a four-minute short film that retells the story of the couple on screen; it was published on YouTube on 7 June 2011, just before Brazil’s Valentine’s Day, the Dia dos Namorados, which is celebrated on 12 June.

In 2022 the song became a feature film, «Eduardo e Mônica», directed by René Sampaio, with Alice Braga as Mônica and Gabriel Leone as Eduardo. Sampaio had already adapted another long Legião Urbana narrative song, «Faroeste Caboclo», for the cinema in 2013. The film had its premiere at the Miami International Film Festival on 8 March 2020, but the pandemic delayed its release in Brazil until 20 January 2022. It won the award for best foreign film at the Edmonton International Film Festival in 2020, and the Rio de Janeiro film critics’ association named it the best Brazilian film of 2022.

The story has also reached the stage: a theatre adaptation written by Adolar Gangorra and directed by Samuel Rocha presents Eduardo as a boy overwhelmed by the pop culture that Mônica brings into his life.

For learners of Portuguese the lyric is a perfect lesson in the two past tenses. Single events that move the story forward are told in the pretérito perfeito, while descriptions, habits and background — what the two of them were like, what they used to do, what they liked — are in the pretérito imperfeito. The song is also full of spoken Brazilian Portuguese, from short forms of the verb «estar» to Brasília slang of the 1980s such as «camelo» for a bicycle.