Cadela Carioca: Bishop’s “Pink Dog” in its Brasilian Cultural Context

Down the hill from Samambaia, Elizabeth Bishop’s first Brasilian home an hour away from Rio de Janeiro in the mountain town of Petrópolis, lies the Instituto Samambaia de Ciência e Ecoturismo (Samambaia Institute of Science and Ecotourism [ISCA]). Its mission is to raise the environmental awareness of school children in particular; they come to stay on its extensive grounds and to participate in a series of outdoor workshops. The grounds include a main house that dates back to the late eighteenth century, a century before the official founding of the town. The house once belonged to the parents of Lota de Macedo Soares, Bishop’s companion during her Brasil years. In November 2011, its interior included the “Elizabeth Bishop bedroom” where Bishop slept on occasion, as well as a local art exhibition on the ground floor in honor of the hundredth anniversary of her birth (1911).¹

The small exhibit contained few works that referenced Bishop directly, with the exception of a simple oil painting that opened the exhibition. It portrayed Bishop in profile from the chest up, a pose copied from a well-known photograph. To her right on a raised sidewalk was a garish hot pink dog, also in profile, panting. A hot pink mask lay in front of it on the sidewalk; between it and Bishop rested an empty green glass bottle. Bishop’s face appeared much more angular and rigid here than in the photograph that must have inspired it; in fact, for viewers who know this photograph, the painted face is a mask that must be removed to reveal the customary softer curves of her face. Perhaps this is her own Carnival mask (or máscara), something from the culture that allows her to withstand the realities of Rio from a separate stance. After the more pristine rural mountaintop setting of Samambaia, Bishop was challenged by the poverty and incessant buzzing activity of the city. Yet the mask also allows her to participate in the cultural life of the Cariocans, those Brasilians from the city of Rio (as opposed to the state of the same name.) In a larger context, she could wear it in her mind’s eye years later in her apartment on Lewis Wharf in Boston, as she finally finished what she started in her late Brasil poem “Pink Dog.” As Lloyd Schwartz has said so succinctly, “Having given up Brazil, she could finally become a Brazilian.”² While in Brasil, however, despite Bishop’s very measurable acculturation as traced chronologically through poems like “Arrival at Santos,” “The Riverman,” and “Under the Window: Ouro Preto,” she never fully “went native.” As the speaker in “Pink Dog,” Bishop occupies a liminal position: she separates herself from the Cariocan culture in her keen observations of an animal off the street and in her desire to find a place for it, yet in her final conclusion, fueled by the carpe diem of Carnival as “cover” for the dog, she employs a wholly Brasilian solution in an attempt to find a survivable context for it.

Bishop (1911–1979), who won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Award, and multiple Guggenheim Fellowships during her lifetime and whose reputation has only risen since her death, spent her most enjoyable years living and writing in Brasil out of the American literary mainstream. During those seventeen-odd years she composed the poetry collection Questions of Travel, stand-alone poems, and fragments; she also co-edited An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Brazilian Poetry, featuring first-time English translations of modern Brasilian poetry. American critics are only just now becoming more aware of the Brasilian critical reaction to Bishop’s Brasil-based poetry. Among this output, no poem has reached the pitch of enthusiasm from her Brasilian audience that “Pink Dog” has. This is Bishop’s direct route into not only Brasilian culture and attitudes at large, but specifically into the Carioca culture of Rio. “Pink Dog” was the last poem she completed before she died in 1979, although the original impetus for the poem had been brewing since Rio...