Elizabeth Bishop's translation of “Pink Dog” to the contemporary Bahian context of slam poetry: a process of recreation

Abstract

"Pink Dog" by Elizabeth Bishop is a denunciation poem about a marginalized social type hidden behind the beauty of Rio de Janeiro’s carnival in the 1960s. This article comments and justifies a domesticated translation of this poem for the city of Salvador, Bahia, in the end of 2010s. The domestication process happened through linguistic-cultural choices into the Bahia-Salvador variety of Brazilian Portuguese. Some elements have been largely preserved, such as form and tone. Regarding the tone of denunciation, playfulness and aggressiveness were kept but also aggravated by the style. The translation can be characterized as poetry slam for its most violent and popular "beat". Thus, by contextualizing the source and target texts and with the support of Robert Bly’s (1986) poetry translation methodology, this article presents strategies and decisions that were made during the recreation process (BRITTO, 2002). The domestication is justified by the constant urgency to denounce and update the abuses of violence in Bahia through poetry similarly masked by the social importance of carnival as in Rio de Janeiro.