Isolde Pio

Isolde Pio (Gohangukian Pyo I-seul [표이슬 hanja 表--] - born 1780, Caracol, DS, died 1839, Cerro y Casa, DO) was an Ardispherian poet who is most noted for having composed the epic poem El Vaquero de Gojangú.

Pio was born to Gohangukian immigrant parents shortly after their arrival in Caracol amid the first wave of Gohangukian immigration in the late 1700s. Pio's father ran a small mercantile shop in colonial Caracol. She attended the Colegio San Bruno (later renamed the Universidad Autónoma Miscatónica) with the intention of becoming a school teacher. However, during the 1803 "coffee riots" (which prefigured the 1814 war for independence) her family fled Caracol (at that time the largest city in the colony and its center of commerce) for the interior. There she met and subsequently married the landowner Domingo Bloemfontein (their son, Casimiro Bloemfontein Pio, later became the noted politician of the so-called "loyalist opposition" during the Civil War), and during the 1800s and 1810s she adapted to life as a "mujer de rancho," setting aside her ambitions as a school teacher. She nevertheless took an almost scholarly interest in the culture and dialect of the many ranch workers, and her poetic work is considered the most masterful adaptation of the traditional songs and poetry of the costense culture. She apparently did not consider her writing particularly notable, as she made no effort to have it published.

During the war of independence her husband was killed, and Pio subsequently departed rancho life and married a Nipponese merchantman named Eliandro Murata in Cerro y Casa (then still called Santa Fe del Río). She worked as a school teacher for more than 10 years in the booming river port town and seemed to abandon her proto-anthropological and poetic interests, as she focused on raising her family and teaching. Most of her work was only published as she neared her death, when her sister found the manuscripts and realized their value. Although the epic poem and a few shorter works were all that were published, because of the huge cultural impact that the poem had after publication - especially the mythic proportions taken on by the protagonist of that work, FA:Che Kim, in the Ardispherian popular imagination - Pio is sometimes ranked as the Ardisphere's greatest writer.