CosmopolitanimpressionsofRio

During the Republican period, Brazil remained a country that people from all over the world watched closely. This happened for different reasons, since visitors ranged from literary writers to anthropologists, essayists, and philosophers. Still seen as an exotic spot in the tropics, yet increasingly integrated into the world's geopolitical and economic movements, Rio de Janeiro was a common destination for those who came to explore the main cities of the Americas.

Image description: This is a black-and-white photograph of a city with mountains in the background. On the left side, we see a tall building with many windows. In the center, there is a large architectural complex with sloped roofs and arches. On the right, the city continues with several smaller buildings. On the horizon, the mountains are covered with vegetation and houses scattered across them. In the upper right corner, there is a logo with the text "ARQUIVO GERAL DA CIDADE DO RIO DE JANEIRO."

During this period, Rio de Janeiro occupied, even unexpectedly, the imagination of names such as James Joyce – who included the city's name in portmanteau words like "Rijanviera" and "Rivera in januero" in his final book Finnegans Wake (1937), despite never having set foot in Brazil. More common, however, were visitors who, following tradition, recorded their impressions of daily life in Rio during their travels and longer stays.

Some writers, whether for work or on a leisure trip, ended up living in the city for longer periods, such as the Austrian best-seller author Stefan Zweig, the North American poet Elisabeth Bishop, or the Argentine novelist and columnist Roberto Arlt. The Argentine wrote a series of chronicles about the city between April and May 1930, initially praising what he saw, only to soon after strongly criticize its provincialism and its excessively tropical climate. Among those who passed through the city and described their different versions of it, we have the politicized verses of Pier Paolo Pasolini, the “organism city” described in 1961 by the Swiss semiologist Max Bense, or the terse diary of Albert Camus.

Image description: This is a black and white photograph of a city. On the left side, we see a tall building with many windows. In the background, there are several other buildings of different sizes and shapes. In the center of the image, there is a large square with trees along the sides. On the right, there is a park with a lake and trees. In the lower right, there is a monument centered in the square.

The city's context was no longer as bucolic as that portrayed by visitors of the 18th or 19th centuries. Rio de Janeiro was gradually becoming a vertical city with an evident concentration of income and urban resources. Favelas emerged in the landscape as a constituent element of a separate reality within the cosmopolitan scene the city experienced in the 20th century. Such a transformation did not go unnoticed by authors from other countries, and, just as slavery and its horrors had been highlighted in previous centuries, they also noted, in different ways, the terrible living conditions faced by part of the population.

The final sentence of Brazil, Stefan Zweig's work, is direct about Rio de Janeiro: "There is no more enchanting city on Earth." The book, from 1941, written as an essay during the Austrian writer's first visit to the country (it was on his third and final visit that he would take his own life in Petrópolis, in 1942), became an official discourse of national patriotism during the Getúlio Vargas period. Its jingoistic bias did not please local critics, but that did not stop it from being a bestseller. The Brazil – and Rio de Janeiro in particular – that Zweig described kept the city within a narrative of pure, exotic paradise – even in a country going through a dictatorial regime. He dedicated a chapter to extolling Rio in a style close to that of classical texts. He opened the book with the famous adjectives about Guanabara Bay and the view all the way to the city's port. In this spirit of utter wonder, he moved on to the city's other spaces, from the "nature that became a city" to the "city that gives the impression of nature."

But Zweig broadened the range of views of Rio that earlier travelers could not have had: everything looks more beautiful seen from above, from a plane flying over the hills and seas. In a way, the writer captured a city that would become the keynote for many chroniclers who would emerge in this period. His Rio was a bucolic city, a space for strolling, with a pleasant atmosphere somewhere between village and megalopolis, with a small population, a low cost of living, and greater closeness between classes – to the point that the author claimed that “it is easier to be poor here than in another big city.” When speaking of the favelas, for example, he embraced the idea of the picturesque, downplaying the poverty of their residents and viewing them in a positive light within the urban landscape. The irony of this passage is that Zweig believed (and lamented!) that they might disappear as the city progressed.

Zweig was a visitor who wanted to stay in the country and highlighted positive details of this carioca life – it's curious the part where he spoke about the four-month summer in an era when “everyone wears linen suits, the whole city dresses in white, and from November onward, Rio becomes a seaside resort”.

Yet another European who came to Brazil shortly after the Austrian writer did not have the same attitude. The Algerian Albert Camus arrived in the city at night, and all he saw were outlines and the city lights. In his dry, melancholic and direct style, he described the sunrise seen from the ship with Rio in the background and the speed with which the colors changed until the landscape became a "postcard." Unlike Zweig and many others, for Camus, the brief moment of wonder was captured in the cutting phrase "nature has a horror of miracles that go on too long."

Image description: This is a black-and-white photograph of an urban scene. On the left side, we see a cliff with vegetation. In the center, workers are in a construction area, stacking stones. On the right, there is a damaged wall with a sign reading "OBRAS DA PREFEITURA." In the background, several tall, modern buildings are visible. The image is signed "ARQUIVO GERAL DA CIDADE DO RIO DE JANEIRO" in the bottom right corner.

It is in this spirit that the Algerian writer observed daily life in the then capital of the republic. Being famous at the time, he took part (always reluctantly) in dinners, receptions and meetings with authorities that tormented him. Camus is sharp in observing the favelas – which, contrary to what Zweig had imagined, only kept growing. For Camus, "never have luxury and misery seemed to me so insolently mixed together." He criticized the speed of drivers, and recounted an expedition to an umbanda terreiro in Caxias (a macumba, according to the writer) alongside Abdias do Nascimento – who also took him to a samba in the suburbs.

This more taciturn and less sunny side of Rio was also material for poets who had very different relationships with the city. The American Elizabeth Bishop lived in Rio de Janeiro for twenty years, between 1951 and 1971. Alongside her partner, the architect Lota Macedo Soares, Bishop had a difficult relationship with Brazil in general and with Rio in particular. Living almost all the time in Petrópolis, she dedicated few poems to the city. One of them, perhaps the most famous, is "Pink Dog." The subject, hard to stomach for the time, intertwined the abandonment of a stray dog with news of the murders of beggars in the Guarda river, in Itaguaí. In a "Rio that sweats," the poet asks the dog of the title:

Didn't you know? It was in the newspaper: to solve the social problem, they're throwing the beggars into a canal.

And beggars aren't the only ones cast into the river of the Guarda: idiots, cripples, vagrants, alcoholics, addicts.

In the same year that Bishop left the country she had lived in for so long, another poet, this time Italian, got to know Rio in passing, on his way back from a film festival in Mar del Plata. Pier Paolo Pasolini spent only a few nights on the streets of Rio and wrote a harsh, reflective poem titled "Hierarchy." With a tone that was at once political and erotic, Pasolini described his climb up into a favela alongside a young man he had met on the beach in Copacabana. His sexual interest was gradually replaced by a growing awareness, when he discovered that the young man called himself a "subversive." Pasolini's Rio de Janeiro was dark, poor, with no trace of nature or sea. In one passage of the poem, he summed up this point of view, when "one looks at Rio from within, in an aspect of eternity":

A noite de chuva que não traz frescor E molha as ruas miseráveis e os destroços E as últimas cornijas art noveau dos portugueses pobres Milagres sublime!

Zweig, Camus, Bishop, and Pasolini are just a few examples of foreign writers from different parts of the world who felt moved by the carioca city in their inspirations and sharp visions of a space radically different from their home countries. Unlike the travelers of past centuries, they were already writing at a time when cariocas had their own mythology created by local authors – mainly their chroniclers, in newspapers and magazines. Even so, they wrote works and poems that expanded our ability to see the city and its inhabitants.