Elizabeth Bishop's Brazil 0813938538, 9780813938530

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Prologue
Samambaia and the Architecture of Class
Letters from the Road
Bishop’s Brazilian Translations
Bishop’s Brazilian Politics
Amazon Worlds
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazil

Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazil BETHANY HICOK

University of Virginia Press CHARLOTTESVILLE AND LONDON

University of Virginia Press © 2016 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper First published 2016 987654321 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hicok, Bethany, 1958– author. Title: Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazil / Bethany Hicok. Description: Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2015035911 | isbn 9780813938547 (cloth : acid-free paper) | isbn 9780813938530 (pbk. : acid-free paper) | isbn 9780813938554 (ebook) Subjects: lcsh: Bishop, Elizabeth, 1911–1979—Homes and haunts—Brazil. | Bishop, ­Elizabeth, 1911–1979—Criticism and interpretation. | Women poets, American— 20th century. | Literature and society—Brazil. | Women translators—Brazil. | Travel writing—Brazil. | Women intellectuals—United States—Biography. | Brazil— Intellectual life—20th century. Classification: lcc ps3503.i785 z695 2016 | ddc 811/.54—dc23 lc record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015035911

Cover art: Bishop swimming in the rock pool at Samambaia. (VC 100.25; Courtesy of Vassar College)

For Jonathan

More than anything else I wanted to stay awhile —Elizabeth Bishop, “Santarém”

Contents



Acknowledgments  xi List of Abbreviations  xiii



Prologue  1

One

Samambaia and the Architecture of Class  9

Two

Letters from the Road  38

Three Bishop’s Brazilian Translations  64 Four Bishop’s Brazilian Politics  97 Five

Amazon Worlds  121



Notes  147 Bibliography  163 Index  171

Acknowledgments

Travel has been a significant part of my research for Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazil, and so I have many people to thank for making these trips possible. First and foremost, I thank my fellow travelers to the Amazon—Thomas Travisano, Neil Besner, and Dave Hoak. I could not have invented more perfect traveling companions or ones who had a deeper knowledge of Bishop’s work. Dave, trip planner extraordinaire and devotee of all things Bishop, helped to make the moving parts of our Brazil travel run smoothly. Tom’s connections opened up Bishop’s Samambaia house to us, and Neil’s knowledge and background on Brazil and the Portuguese language has supported many aspects of this book and my understanding of Brazil, from cachaça tasting to translation. Neil also chaired our panel for the 2011 Global Studies Conference in Rio de Janeiro that kick-started my chapter on Bishop’s important Brazilian translations. A special thanks to Angus Cleghorn for organizing that panel and for his continued support of my work. All of these trips were made possible by the generous support of Westminster College, including a 2011 Watto Award and conference grant that allowed me to travel in Bishop’s footsteps in Brazil. Westminster also provided travel grants for my trips to Vassar College for archival research. Zuleika Torrealba, who now owns Samambaia, generously opened up the house and grounds to us when we traveled there from Rio. We spent several hours touring the property, wandering through the rooms, climbing the paths, and visiting Bishop’s study. Torrealba’s staff prepared coffee and home-

xii  Acknowledgments

made cakes that we ate in the dining room of the house overlooking the lush landscape Bishop loved so much and that was so important to her writing of the Brazil period. My chapter on Samambaia was deeply influenced by this visit. Early on in my research, David Foster gave me the opportunity to study Portuguese and Brazilian literature for a month in 2010 as part of his NEH summer seminar in São Paulo, Brazil. If not for that foundation in Brazilian literature, culture, and language, I would have found it difficult to begin the kind of cross-cultural analysis that Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazil involves and to continue my study of the language. Charles Berger, Thomas Travisano, Neil Besner, Jeffrey Gray, Dave Hoak, and Jacque Brogan have all read chapter drafts and provided invaluable feedback for revision. I would especially like to thank Dave for his careful reading of the final manuscript, and my student, Katherine Schaefer-St. Pierre, for her editorial assistance at the final revision stage. Eric Karpeles provided excellent help with photographs of Elizabeth Bishop, and Dean Rogers at Vassar provided support throughout the research process. My husband, Jonathan Miller, as always, supported me during every phase of this project and provided invaluable advice on library resources. Excerpts from unpublished accounts of some of Elizabeth Bishop’s time in Brazil, including a car trip from Rio de Janeiro to Samambaia; a boat trip on the Amazon titled “On the Lauro Sodré”; and “Remarks on Translation,” written by Elizabeth Bishop, are printed by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC on behalf of the Elizabeth Bishop Estate, copyright © 2016 by The Alice H. Methfessel Trust. Part of chapter 4, “Bishop’s Brazilian Politics,” was first published in Elizabeth Bishop in the Twenty-First Century © 2012 by the University of Virginia Press. A revised and expanded version is reprinted here.

Abbreviations

EAP

Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments

OA

One Art: Letters

P

Poems

PPL

Poems, Prose, and Letters

Pr

Prose

VC

Elizabeth Bishop Collection, Vassar College Library, Poughkeepsie, New York

WIA Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell

Figure 1. Map of Brazil. (Nat Case 2015)

Prologue

When Elizabeth Bishop first came to Brazil in 1951, she hadn’t planned to stay. But when the Brazilian aristocrat Lota de Macedo Soares offered her a home in Brazil, Bishop opened herself up to a person and a place in a way that she had never done before. She was forty years old. As Bishop committed herself to the country, Brazil began to inform the deep structure of the poet’s materials—in terms of not only the writing content but also the rhythm and meter. Brazilian samba informs “Pink Dog,” Brazilian folk balladry suffuses “The Burglar of Babylon,” and the rhythm and pace of life in the Southern Hemisphere provides a significant undercurrent to much of Bishop’s writing in Brazil. In short, Bishop reshaped and redefined her entire career around Brazil from the moment of her arrival in 1951, so much so that her mature work is inconceivable without Brazil. Bishop’s decision to stay quite literally transformed her career. Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazil tells the story of that transformation. Bishop’s life and work intersected with Brazil for more than two decades from 1951 to 1979. She lived permanently in the country from 1951 to 1966, and then continued to return to Brazil for extended visits until she sold her house in Ouro Prêto in 1974. But Brazil remained part of the poet’s imaginary, as it were, until the end of her life in 1979. Not only did Brazilian experience provide a further impetus for the exploration of a Nova Scotian childhood, a familiar enough story in Bishop Studies, but it did much more. Bishop played

2  Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazil

an important role as a public intellectual in the dialogue between America and Brazil at mid-century: she wrote a book on Brazil for Life World Library that made its way onto the coffee tables of millions of American households; Bishop’s translations of Brazilian writers from the Portuguese introduced a new American audience to a rich and important literary tradition; half the poems in Bishop’s 1965 poetry collection Questions of Travel focus on Brazilian themes; and, now, with the publications since 2006 of no less than six new volumes of Bishop’s poetry, prose, and correspondence,1 the general public enjoys access to an even larger body of Bishop’s Brazilian writing, including poems, fragments, letters, and finished travel writing. Here, I explore more thoroughly and in more detail than any previous study these cross-cultural “contact zones” of Bishop’s Brazilian life and writing in order to tell a new, more globally informed story of Bishop’s Brazil and how it transformed her writing, her career, and her life.2 At the center of this new story is the economically polarized world of Brazil that Bishop wrote about—its extremes of wealth and poverty; its ambitious building and development projects; its spectacular topography; its people, literature, language, culture, and politics. Because of her relationship with Macedo Soares, Bishop was uniquely placed to write about Brazilian life, culture, politics, and social issues. Macedo Soares was not just “the love of Bishop’s life,” as she has so often been called, but a member of Brazil’s elite class and so had ties through friendship and kinship to Brazil’s intellectual, political, and cultural power brokers. She owned an apartment on Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro, one of the most expensive tracts of real estate in the world, and a family farm forty miles north of Rio outside the winter resort town of Petrópolis where she was building one of Brazil’s celebrated modernist houses in its spectacular wild setting of granite rock and rainforest. This modern house became a focal point not only for Bishop’s private lived experience in Brazil, which she explored in many poems, but also for the blending of the public and private spheres of Bishop’s Brazilian life. The modern house that became Bishop’s home in Samambaia was a mecca for visiting dignitaries and architects. Bishop and Macedo Soares had servants— cooks, gardeners, and maids—to attend to their needs. Their busy household often included the children of many of these servants, as well as visitors from around the world. Here Bishop explored the dimensions of a shared life with her Brazilian partner—its intimacies but also its class conflicts, which were made ever more apparent through the shared intimacy of this domestic ar-

Prologue  3

rangement. She named this blended life “Foreign-Domestic” in one of her unpublished poems. Bishop’s relationship with Macedo Soares has inspired a number of creative projects as further testament to the intense interest in Bishop’s time in Brazil and her love affair with a Brazilian. These include a play, A Safe Harbour for Elizabeth Bishop, by the Brazilian playwright Marta Goés (translated by Daniel Hahn); a 2010 novel, The More I Owe You, by Michael Sledge; a 1995 hybrid novelized “dual biography” by another Brazilian, Carmen Oli­ veira, Flores raras e banalíssimas (translated as Rare and Commonplace Flowers by Neil Besner in 2002); and a 2014 film based on Oliveira’s book, Reaching for the Moon (Flores raras), by the well-known Brazilian filmmaker Bruno Barreto, which is particularly interesting culturally because of the way it has been marketed as a film of interest to the LGBT community. Wolfe Video, this country’s major distributor of lesbian and gay films, features the DVD of this film in its 2015 catalogue as one of their staff picks. Not since that other mid-century transcontinental relationship of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes has a writer’s love affair generated so much fascination and artistic energy. But in this book I maintain that this relationship is best understood in the larger context of Brazil’s class structure and how it influenced Bishop’s writing about Brazil. It was, after all, due to Macedo Soares’s connections and influence that the painfully shy Bishop became a public intellectual and an exporter of Brazilian culture into North America. Her book on Brazil for the Life World Library series is an important example of this role. Founded in 1961, these books, which drew on the resources of both Time and Life magazines, were marketed using direct mail and arrived in millions of American households in monthly installments. Bishop was commissioned to write the Brazil book and paid a large sum of money—$10,000—and travel expenses. As one would expect, given Time-Life’s status in the post–World War II period as an American culture machine, Bishop was unhappy with the results of this collaboration. To Lowell, she quoted Allen Ginsberg’s “America” (“Are you going to let your emotional life be run by Time Magazine?”) to indicate just what she thought of the whole enterprise, but she also allowed that “Brazil is very glad of any well-meant publicity at this point,” and that Rio’s governor “has ordered dozens of copies to give away” (WIA 399, 397). Her comments indicate the import-export nature of Bishop’s Brazil project. She exported Brazilian culture into North America (as long as it adhered to the anti-Communist

4  Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazil

political stance of the United States), and that message was then imported back into Brazil by politicians like Carlos Lacerda, then governor of greater Rio, who wanted to promote good relations with the United States. Whatever its particular slant, Bishop’s book on Brazil introduced a broad spectrum of American readers to Brazilian culture, politics, and economics. Moreover, the extensive research she conducted for the book informed the subject matter and historical perspectives of her subsequent poetry in significant ways. While Bishop’s foray into “hack” journalistic work3 is interesting and important to understanding her cultural moment in Brazil, her more lasting and significant contribution to cultural exchange comes in her translations of Brazilian writers from the Portuguese. During her nearly two decades in Brazil, Bishop translated a three-hundred-page adolescent memoir; the 1955 book Modern Brazilian Architecture with Henrique Mindlin; several stories by Clarice Lispector; and many poems written by such major Brazilian poets as Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Vinícius de Moraes, João Cabral de Melo Neto, and Manuel Bandeira, culminating in her final translation project, an anthology of twentieth-century Brazilian poetry, which she edited with Emanuel Brasil. First published in 1972 to enthusiastic reviews and still in print, this anthology was the first to introduce English-speaking audiences to Brazilian poetry and is still one of the few available. Despite her considerable commitment to translating Brazilian writers from the Portuguese, no critical study to date has examined this crucial output of Bishop’s Brazilian career as a whole. Here I consider Bishop’s translations as they extend throughout her Brazilian career and, for the first time, place them in the context of Bishop’s own evolving theory of translation, which she articulates in letters to Robert Lowell and in an important unpublished manuscript on the subject. It is clear in Bishop’s process of articulating a theory of translation that she is also well versed in what constituted the dominant theory of translation at the time. Bishop’s translation work, like the research she did for her 1962 Life World Library book on Brazil, was a major influence on the developing themes of her poetry—the ethical questions raised by the traveler’s encounter with the “other”; race and poverty in America and Brazil; sympathy with cultural outsiders; irony used as social critique; and the role of the poet and intellectual in times of political crisis. Like many travelers before her, Bishop began her travels at least in part to find a better life, a desire she would treat ironically in her first Brazilian poem and one of her great travel poems, “Arrival at Santos.” The poem describes the arrival by ship of a North American tourist at the port of Santos, Brazil,

Prologue  5

near São Paulo, and her “immodest demands for a different world, / ​and a better life, and complete comprehension” (P 87). Bishop herself wanted to leave behind some of the worst years of her life, a “miserably lonely” time in New York, as she put it in a 1953 letter to Robert Lowell, and a “dismal year in Washington and that dismaler winter at Yaddo,” when she was drinking heavily (WIA 143). Yet there is nothing self-pitying about her letter to Lowell written onboard ship. Instead the letter provides enthusiastic and precise detail of the freighter SS Bowplate and Bishop’s fellow passengers. Already the contour of a narrative that includes Brazil begins to take shape not only in the details of the letter but also in its somewhat mysterious heading, for Bishop has written across the top of the letter the following phrase: “Somewhere off the coast of Brazil” (WIA 129). This combination of precise detail—­ situating boat and passengers in a specific place and time—with an openness to ­mystery—to a play of time, flux, possibility—characterizes much of Bishop’s most successful writing throughout her career. But it forms a particularly powerful gestalt in her Brazilian writing. My own approach to this subject began six years ago when I researched the Brazilian politics of Bishop’s time in Brazil for a book chapter on Bishop and the political dimensions of her poetry and prose.4 At that stage, I realized the need for a deeper, more cross-cultural understanding of Brazil in order to document this phase of Bishop’s career. So in 2010 I embarked on my own series of approaches to Brazil when I participated in a month-long NEH Summer Seminar to study Brazilian literature and the Portuguese language in São Paulo, Brazil. Since then, I have logged some six thousand miles studying and traveling in Brazil: in 2011, after delivering a paper on Bishop’s Brazilian translations at the Global Studies Conference in Rio de Janeiro, I traveled with several Bishop colleagues in Bishop’s footsteps in Brazil from Rio to Samambaia to Ouro Prêto5 to the Amazon. I have spent time in most of the key spaces where Bishop lived, including her house and studio in Samambaia and in the colonial house she bought and restored in Ouro Prêto. Like Bishop, in order to see the country, I have traveled by car, plane, bus, and boat. From Ouro Prêto, we traveled by bus to Belo Horizonte, then flew through Brasília to Manaus in the Amazon. After visiting the famed opera house in Manaus that Bishop described in letters to Lowell, we then traveled five hundred miles on the Amazon River to Santarém in a river boat much like the one Bishop had taken and described in letters when she made this same journey in 1960. These travels helped me to gain insight into the places that Bishop lived,

6  Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazil

worked, and visited during her long stay in Brazil and have informed this book in countless ways. Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazil offers a series of approaches and cross-cultural encounters informed by my travels in Brazil; my studies of Brazilian literature, language, history, and culture; and many years of reading and writing about the dimensions of Bishop’s life and work, not the least of which was her long sojourn in Brazil. In order to place Bishop’s Brazilian writing career in the context of the historical and cultural events that so influenced her poetic development, I draw on Bishop’s letters, newly published material, unpublished manuscripts and letters from the archives, Bishop’s recently catalogued library of Brazilian sources at Vassar, and histories of Brazil. I also read Brazilian literature, Brazilian sources in Portuguese, and a broad range of sources in anthropology, architectural history, and philosophy. Bishop read widely in many subject areas. She and Macedo Soares had amassed a large library of more than three thousand books between them in Samambaia. When Bishop was working on her Brazil book for Life, she read a great deal in both English and Portuguese about the history, culture, and geography of Brazil. Attending to the interplay between Bishop’s work and Brazilian sources, I establish a series of cross-cultural moments, which draw on the relevant work of such cultural theorists as Mary Louise Pratt, James Clifford, Homi Bhabha, and others. These moments are rich with cultural meaning and exchange, as in the portrait of “The Armadillo,” informed as it is by Brazilian cultural practices, and explorer narratives set in Brazil, such as Teddy Roosevelt’s account of his expedition to Brazil in the early part of the twentieth century. Or consider the signifier “footwear” in Bishop’s 1956 poem “Questions of Travel,” which provides a portal into a whole constellation of Brazilian cultural references to the history of colonization and immigration. Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazil focuses throughout on points of contact to highlight cross-cultural exchange. In order to understand the shape and development of Bishop’s career in a Brazilian context, each chapter traces the full arc of an idea (such as what it means to dwell at the boundaries of cross-​­cultural difference), theme (politics and poverty, traveling and the mid-​­twentieth-​ century “road trip,” race and class, and the search for home), or location (Samambaia, Rio, Ouro Prêto, the Amazon), and how these play out across the years that Bishop wrote about these ideas or was engaged in a particular activity, such as translation. For instance, the chapter on Bishop’s Brazilian translations provides a thorough discussion of her attitudes about race as they

Prologue  7

inform not only her translation of The Diary of “Helena Morley” but also her other writing in Brazil as she struggled (and often failed) to make the fraught subject of race “legible” to a North American audience. Bishop’s search for home, “wherever that may be,” informs every chapter and was a feature of her entire career. Her own background as a kind of orphan without a place to officially call home dictated her exploration of our very desire as humans to have a home, a dwelling place that we can return to, even as we travel out into the world. In Brazil, Bishop found a home for a time that made her happier than she had ever been before in her life. The finding of a home, for Bishop, enriched her explorations of what home meant against the tumultuous backdrop of Brazilian politics and class in the middle of the twentieth century. The finding of a home would make the losing of one an even more powerful source of poetic inspiration, deepening her insight on the subject of home, love, and loss. Even at the end of her life, Brazil continued to structure Bishop’s poetic imaginary both in terms of her search for and longing for home and in terms of her deeply felt desire for social justice. Indeed, two of Bishop’s great Brazilian poems, “Santarém” and “Pink Dog” (the latter, one of the great political satires of the twentieth century), are among Bishop’s final quartet poems published in 1978 and 1979 and represent her last meditations on home and culture. They prove, too, that Bishop literally could not get Brazil out of her mind: “More than anything else I wanted to stay awhile,” Bishop wrote in the magisterial second stanza of “Santarém,” “in that conflux of two great rivers, Tapajós, Amazon, / ​grandly, silently flowing, flowing east” (P 207). Even here, Bishop emphasizes “conflux,” seeing this locale along the Amazon as a meeting point of cultures, histories, and even waters that characterize this river town, the Amazon itself, and Brazil—all of which make up the “dazzling dialectic” of Bishop’s long, long conversation with Brazil. Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazil ends here in the Brazilian Amazon because this is the place Bishop chose to dwell imaginatively at the end of her life. Her “dazzling dialectic” with Brazil ends at the meeting of the waters, where the boundaries of cultures converge, as Bishop bridges the distance between the present and the remembered past, Northern and Southern Hemispheres, dwelling and traveling. As Bishop did before me, I count my own trip to the Amazon as one of the great travel experiences of my life; it is where I came to understand what Bishop meant when she found in Santarém a place to dwell for “awhile” and her regret upon having to leave it. In 1953, writing to

8  Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazil

her editor at Houghton Mifflin, Bishop identified “a new departure” in her career as a result of her then fairly new experience of living in Brazil (OA 253). Bishop ended up staying in Brazil far longer than she ever thought was possible. I have dwelt a long time in Bishop’s writing about Brazil, and in that dwelling, I have come to understand how profound a “new departure” this would become for the poet and for us, her readers.

One

Samambaia and the Architecture of Class

Yet as soon as man gives thought to his homelessness, it is a misery no longer. Rightly considered and kept well in mind, it is the sole summons that calls mortals into their dwelling. —Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking” Throughout most of the twentieth century, architecture in Brazil could not be easily separated from the architecture of class. —Alan Hess, Casa Modernista

Located on her family’s fazenda or estate, named Samambaia after the giant fern native to the area, Lota de Macedo Soares’s modernist house is a small piece of an important history of Brazilian architecture, revealing a story of class and privilege in Brazil that also tells us something of Bishop’s life there and what it contributed to her art. Finished in 1953 and designed by one of Brazil’s leading architects, Sérgio Bernardes, the house has been featured in a number of publications on Brazilian architecture, including the influential 1956 book by the architect Henrique Mindlin, Modern Architecture in Brazil, which “helped to define Brazilian Modernism for later generations.”1 Bishop worked intensively with Mindlin on a translation of that book into English during her early years at Samambaia. Most recently, Macedo Soares’s house,

10  Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazil

located near the winter resort town of Petrópolis2 about forty miles north of Rio de Janeiro, appeared in the 2010 coffee-table book produced by Rizzoli, Casa Modernista: A History of the Brazil Modern House. Bishop published a number of poems during her first decade in Brazil that use the landscape and the architecture of the house to examine her “marriage” to a Brazilian woman and the home they made in the country (“The Shampoo,” “Song for the Rainy Season,” “Electrical Storm,” “Foreign-​­Domestic”); the class privilege that made such a life possible but that depended on a class hierarchy that Bishop observed around her every day (“Squatter’s Children,” “Manuelzinho,” “Gypsophilia”); and, finally, the relationship between art, politics, and Bishop’s “home” in Brazil (“The Armadillo”). Bishop returned to these spaces and class issues in a draft elegy she began to write after Macedo Soares’s suicide in 1967. Bishop’s Brazilian career begins here at home in Brazil where the house itself—its design, setting, and class implications—­ provides the framework for Bishop’s exploration of home, country, identity, relationships, love, loss, and cross-cultural communication in her writing about a house and its inhabitants. The story of modern architecture in Brazil reflects a story of class privilege and power. The rise of Brazilian modern architecture emerges out of the nationalism of the 1930s under the regime of Getúlio Vargas, whose suicide in 1954 while he was in office became the impetus for Bishop’s first overtly political poem, “Suicide of a Moderate Dictator.” As Alan Hess notes in Casa Modernista, “The Brazilian economy in the 1930s, stoked by the progressive government of Vargas, encouraged progressive architecture as a symbol of economic and social progress—‘Order and Progress’ read the celestial globe on the nation’s flag.”3 Like Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin, Vargas saw architecture as good political propaganda, a way to “advance his nation’s reputation” throughout the world.4 Vargas’s invitation to France’s most famous architect, Le Corbusier, “to design the much-celebrated Ministry of Education and Culture building in Rio in 1936” (with the help of a team of Brazilian architects), serves as a symbol of Vargas’s efforts to be seen as a “promoter of national culture and . . . ​unity.”5 To underscore the role of architecture as propaganda, Le Corbusier arrived dramatically in Rio de Janeiro in a zeppelin. Macedo Soares was actually involved in this project. She had studied with the well-known Brazilian painter Candido Portinari and had assisted him on the frescoes for the building.6 By the early 1940s, the Museum of Modern Art had “put its stamp of approval on Brazil’s [architectural] success in the landmark 1943

Samambaia and the Architecture of Class  11

Brazil Builds exhibit,” which helped “strengthen[] ties between the United States and Brazil.”7 By the 1950s, when Macedo Soares built her house and Oscar Niemeyer and Lúcio Costa planned and designed Brasília, the world was coming to Brazil as a model for modern architecture.8 In 1951, the same year that Bishop arrived in Brazil, São Paulo was host to an Architecture Biennial that “brought Walter Gropius, Max Bill, and other influential European architects to witness, among other buildings, Nie­ meyer’s new house with the astonishing amoeba-shaped roof.”9 Photographs of Niemeyer’s house, as well as those of his Brasília buildings, appeared in Bishop’s 1962 Brazil for Life World Library; she discussed his architecture in an unpublished travel piece she wrote in 1958 about a trip she took with ­Aldous Huxley to Brasília; and she and Macedo Soares stayed in the new hotel he designed when they visited Ouro Prêto for the first time in 1960. Although houses such as Macedo Soares’s were not as well-known as the monumental structures of Brasília, architects took advantage of the smaller scale of private residences in order to experiment with designs they would later use on a larger scale—all of which involved vast amounts of wealth. As Hess argues, “Throughout most of the twentieth century, architecture in Brazil could not be easily separated from the architecture of class.”10 Social class in Brazil was highly stratified with the landholding elite at the top and the poor at the bottom and a very small middle class, which “was just too small to support a thriving experimental architecture.”11 Therefore, Hess argues, the modern houses presented in Casa Modernista belong mostly to the upper class; they were “commissioned by an educated and moneyed class that had the taste and interest to allow Warchavchik, Rino Levi, Artigas, Sérgio Bernardes, Ohtake, Niemeyer, and others to stretch their ideas.”12 This was the class to which Macedo Soares belonged, and her house in Samambaia is a testament to the kind of life that education, money, and good taste could buy. Bernardes’s design for Lota’s house works with the natural world as part of the design, a common element of Brazilian modern architecture. As Hess writes, “The simple geometry of the house allows it to adjust to the site’s irregular topography.”13 Long wings of glass (the glass was installed in 1959) flow seamlessly into the terraces and take in the views—the mountains in the distance and the forest canopy (fig. 2). Howler monkeys call to each other in the trees and birds dip and swoop across the landscape. The house drew regular visits from architects from around the world during Bishop’s time there. As Bishop wrote in an October 1960 letter to Lowell,

12  Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazil Just before we went away [to Cabo Frio] we had 28 or so German architects arrive by bus—with half an hour’s warning and the servants given the afternoon off—to see this house. Their bus driver mutinied at our mountain road and Lota made trip after trip—but a good many of them came up on foot, straight up, for about a mile, and arrived panting and red and bowing and heel-clicking and hand-kissing—fascinating long hair-dos—about 3 female architects among them—I lost track in the hubbub. . . . ​We asked in one German neighbor, to help, and German, English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, a little Italian, were spoken . . . ​. One asked me what Lota’s best and biggest Calder was and had never heard of Calder (who’s had lots of shows in Germany, etc.). Next week we’re expecting an American group. (WIA 344–45)

Bishop’s letter reveals an interesting snapshot of cross-cultural exchange. Deploying a series of stereotypes that clearly establish the hierarchy of Samambaia, Bishop nevertheless challenges some received ideas about European versus Latin American culture. So the servants in this portrait, whether missing (“given the afternoon off”) or present, always cause a “hubbub,” but

Figure 2. View of Lota de Macedo Soares’s modern house at Samambaia. (Author photo 2011)

Samambaia and the Architecture of Class  13

the only Europeans (the “heel-clicking” and ignorant Germans) are not the expected bearers of culture but come to pay homage to the Brazilians. The developing country (with its poor infrastructure, that is, bad roads) comes through as progressive, new, and modern through the Europeanized but very Brazilian Lota (and her witty North American companion) who become ambassadors of the new order. Bishop had championed Brazil’s rejection of ­European influences in her discussion of architecture in the Life Brazil book when she noted that landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx was the first to design native gardens in Brazil rather than ones that imitated European design, those “inappropriate, sun-yellowed imitation[s] of the Tuileries” (Pr 220). Burle Marx, Bishop writes, used “the wealth of native plants and trees in all their exotic colors, shapes, and textures; pools, cascades or falling sheets of water; and real rocks, instead of insipid or melodramatic statuary” (Pr 220). In short, these architects were creating something new and Brazilian in Brazil, not imitations of European style. The same could be said for Bishop. Brazilian landscape and architecture and particularly Macedo Soares’s modernist house and the life they built there opened up new poetic vistas in Bishop’s work. Macedo Soares was a woman who had the power to provide the material conditions for an exceptional life for Bishop in Brazil, so much so that she used her influence to fly in supplies of Antabuse for the control of Bishop’s alcoholism when supplies were low in Brazil.14 Because Macedo Soares was lively, talented, and a member of the Brazilian elite, daughter of a well-​ ­connected family of journalists, politicians, and diplomats, the domestic life that the two women built in Samambaia was bolstered by a strong intellectual life of books, visiting artists, architects, writers, journalists, and politicians. Macedo Soares’s social status also provided a degree of protection from too much scrutiny over her sexual preferences. As a Pulitzer Prize–winning poet, Bishop acted as an important cultural ambassador from her home in Brazil, hosting many a writer from the United States on travel fellowships that were prevalent in the 1950s and 1960s in order to foster relations, including cultural ones, between the United States and Brazil. These visits were often arranged through the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), which we now know was covertly funded by the CIA as part of its anti-Communist, pro-American, Cold War cultural propaganda campaign from 1950 to 1967, according to Frances Stonor Saunders.15 The active period of the CCF almost exactly corresponds to Bishop’s permanent

14  Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazil

residency years in Brazil. The CCF backed Robert Lowell’s visit to Brazil in 1962, paying “traveling expenses and a per diem of $40” (WIA 395). Bishop played an active part in these negotiations. In April 1962, she met with Keith Botsford, the CCF’s representative in South America, to discuss the details of Lowell’s trip. Her letter to Lowell reporting on that trip suggests that she, like most writers, did not know at that time of the CIA’s involvement, but she may have been suspicious, since she asks, “WHO pays for the Congress of Cultural Freedom, anyway?” (WIA 398). How Bishop arrived at the decision to stay in Brazil is now a well-known story. It is a classic rescue narrative, one of a number in Bishop’s life, but this one had a staying power that transformed Bishop’s life and career. As the story goes, Bishop became violently ill from cachu poisoning shortly after arriving in Brazil. Macedo Soares nursed her back to health and then asked Bishop to stay. When Macedo Soares offered to build her a writing studio behind the house, Bishop was overwhelmed with gratitude. As she told James Merrill years later, “Never in my life had anyone made that kind of gesture toward me, and it just meant everything.”16 Many of Bishop’s letters during her early years in Brazil describe the studio and her view from her writing desk. Like the house itself, the studio makes use of the region’s spectacular landscape. A set of brick steps winds up a steep hill in back of the main house to the studio tucked into the hillside over a waterfall. The black granite rock that is a feature in the region looms up behind the little studio (fig. 3). Windows face out over the wild landscape behind to take in the rock and the waterfall. From her studio and from the house, Bishop was literally perched on top of the world with a nearly 360-degree view of the landscape and the people who moved in it—a perfect place for observation and contemplation. From the long gallery of the main house,17 Bishop could look out over the mountains, a scene she describes in a 1955 letter to Lowell: “I get up in the freezing dawns here and begin with all the confidence in the world. The mountains look exactly as if floating in vin rose then, with a white bowl of milk below us” (WIA 166). Bishop would reuse this maternal image years later in a draft elegy for Lota. She also used it for a simile in the draft poem “New Year’s Letter as Auden Says—”: “the valley below / ​is like a bowlful of milk” (EAP 115). This warm, nurturing, maternal image is a long way from the cold and rocky one at the end of her magisterial Northern poem “At the Fishhouses,” published in the New Yorker in 1947, where knowledge is “drawn from the cold hard

Samambaia and the Architecture of Class  15

Figure 3. Elizabeth Bishop’s studio at Samambaia. (Author photo 2011)

mouth / ​of the world, derived from the rocky breasts” (P 64). In the Southern Hemisphere, the (maternal) source is warmer, a sustaining promised land of milk and wine. But the source of Bishop’s art lies at both poles of this north– south axis, and in Brazil, she brought the two together.18 Bishop also loved to swim in the rock pool that Macedo Soares created on the property, which she described in a letter to Robert Lowell as a “small neck-deep pool” where the “icy cold” water comes straight down the mountainside . . . ​[from] a steep cascade of a mile or so” (WIA 191). When Macedo Soares was building it, Bishop explained, she had told “the man who was

16  Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazil

cementing the rocks to make it look as if God had made it” (WIA 191) (fig. 4). In another letter to Lowell, Bishop described the place as “magnificent and wild” (WIA 134). Macedo Soares, she told Lowell, is building an ultramodern house up on the side of a black granite mountain, with a waterfall at one end, clouds coming into the living room in the middle of the conversation, etc. The house is unfinished and we are using oil-lamps, no floors—just cement covered with dogs’ footprints. The ‘family’ has consisted of another American girl, also a N.Y. friend of mine, 2 Polish counts for a while, the architect over week-ends etc., all a strange tri- or quadri-lingual hodgepodge that I like very much. (WIA 134)

Here is Bishop living at the boundary of cross-cultural exchange and reveling in its possibilities. She is arguably also living in the kind of Brazilian extended household that she wrote about in her Brazil book for Life World Library: “Home and family are very important in Brazil,” Bishop wrote in her original manuscript (Pr 170). “But because there is no divorce,19 strange

Figure 4. Bishop swimming in the rock pool at Samambaia. She wrote the following inscription on the back of the photograph: “I don’t know whose legs those are.” (VC 100.25; Courtesy of Vassar College)

Samambaia and the Architecture of Class  17

situations arise: second and third ‘marriages,’ unrecognized legally but socially accepted, in which there are oddly mixed sets of children,” all of which, Bishop notes, “merely give the Brazilians a chance to exercise their unique talent for kindly tolerance” (Pr 170). Bishop could as easily have been talking about her own living arrangements. Mary Morse (that “American girl”) was, after all, Macedo Soares’s partner before Bishop, and Morse built her own house on Macedo Soares’s land, adopted a child, and continued to be very much a part of the household.20 When Lota died, she left her property to both women,21 the Samambaia house to Morse and the Rio apartment and block of offices to Bishop (so that she could sell them for the income). For all intents and purposes, Macedo Soares was the paternalistic Brazilian landowner, the patroa (patrão is the male version of the term), surrounded by her large and continually growing extended family. Thomas Skidmore has argued that the highly stratified social hierarchy in Brazil in the middle of the twentieth century “retained much of the flavor of Brazil’s colonial era.”22 Within this hierarchy, “the way to survive was to find a powerful patrão (patron) to act as one’s protector. Collective action was not a rational option within this world.”23 The household at Samambaia also included Kylso, the son of the local garage mechanic whom Macedo Soares had adopted in an attempt to give him a better life,24 and Bishop’s “namesake,” the cook’s daughter (WIA 255). Macedo Soares had inherited the land from her mother and sold off sections of it to friends, including Carlos Lacerda, the journalist and politician, who would later feature large in their lives. Like Lota’s house, Lacerda’s was designed by Bernardes.25 From her earliest poems set at Samambaia, Bishop creates a concept of poetic dwelling out of the materials of the landscape, the house, and even the intimate Brazilian custom of cafuné, or head-rubbing. Bishop marked a passage on the custom in her copy of Gilberto Freyre’s The Mansions and the Shanties, one of the habits that originated in slave culture and passed up through the classes. Freyre describes it as a “transformation of the habit of delousing, which was common among slaves and poor, into the voluptuous custom of cafuné—head-rubbing—among the ladies and even the gentlemen of the rural gentry” (271).26 The shampooing of the lover’s hair in Bishop’s earliest Samambaia poem “The Shampoo” (1955) can be seen as a variation on this custom, establishing its Brazilian context and setting. Yet the poem’s intricate

18  Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazil

metaphorical conceit, which describes love through astrological imagery—as if Bishop were a twentieth-century reincarnation of John Donne just landed in the Brazilian countryside—creates an experience of intricacy and surprise in this poem that speaks to Bishop’s skill at merging cultures and experiences in a way that seems perfectly natural. Bishop loved the metaphysical poets; George Herbert was a particular favorite.27 She was also undoubtedly quite aware of what T. S. Eliot had said of the metaphysical poets when he admired their ability to fuse reason with intensity.28 Through her elaborate conceit, Bishop fuses reason with passion, perfecting an image of dwelling that is domestically contained and simultaneously erotically charged. The poem is organized around the binary “slow/fast”: the lichens’ growth is slow; it has not changed “within our memories”; time is “amenable,” too; the “heavens will attend” on the couple as long as it takes the lichens to grow to the moon, it seems. On the other hand, the slow growth of lichens on the rocks is fused with an electrical current in the poem’s opening lines, creating a charged erotic image: “The still explosions on the rocks, / ​ the lichens, grow / ​by spreading, gray, concentric shocks” (P 82). In the third and final stanza, the speaker compares her lover’s gray hair to “shooting stars in your black hair,” speeding off, “so straight, so soon?” (P 82). Order and sudden violence come together in each of the three stanzas, suggesting control and passion in this domestic arrangement. The concentric shocks of the lichens in the first stanza “have arranged / ​to meet the rings around the moon” (P 82). In the third and final stanza, the violence (or creative spark?) of these gray hairs, which are here described as “shooting stars,” are also orderly, as they appear in “bright formation” and “flocking.” In the middle stanza, the lover’s personality embodies the binary. The poet fuses speed and violence, as well as order, in this description of her “dear friend” as both “precipitate and pragmatical” (P 82). She is the spark that ignites the world of the poem and the speaker’s new world in Brazil. The word “precipitate” speaks to not only the rash nature of new love but also the elements of the speaker’s decision to stay—one could argue her decision was both precipitate and pragmatical. The poem’s final image draws together earth and sky, day and night, completing the universe of the poem with a metaphor of the gray streaks in the lover’s dark hair as stars against the black canvas of night: The shooting stars in your black hair in bright formation are flocking where,

Samambaia and the Architecture of Class  19 so straight, so soon? —Come, let me wash it in this big tin basin, battered and shiny like the moon. (P 82)

The entire cosmic orbit of the poem is condensed into this final calming, homely domestic image of the “big tin basin,” which is both a symbol of domesticity and very Brazilian. In a letter to her friend Pearl Kazin, Bishop mentions the “tin basins, all sizes” that are “so much a part of life here” (OA 241). Now the speaker controls the situation through the intricacies of the poem and the final image. Written in the early halcyon days of her life there, “The Shampoo” creates a world of artistic dwelling and intimacy. Perhaps tellingly, the New Yorker rejected the poem in 1953 as too personal.29 The intimacy of a shared life also suffuses a draft poem titled “Foreign-​ Domestic,” recently published in Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box. Here Bishop describes an interior scene of ordinary domestic life, but the poem’s title speaks to the fact that cultural differences mediate experience. The context of “Foreign-Domestic,” gathered helpfully by Alice Quinn in the notes, is particularly useful. Bishop, an accomplished musician herself, had bought a record player, a hi-fi, with the money she had won from a $2,700 fellowship from Partisan Review in 1956. She also won the Pulitzer Prize that year (EAP 318). In a letter to Marianne Moore, dated January 13, 1958, she wrote, “Lota has designed a very handsome cabinet for my hi-fi (eee-fee as they say here) and the whole thing is almost ready to install” (EAP 318). In letters and drafts dating from this period quoted by Quinn, we can see that Bishop was trying to capture some of the delight she experienced in Lota’s misuse and “strange” pronunciations of English idiomatic expressions. For instance, in a reference to Anne Sexton’s work, she quotes Lota, “I think she must have been in what Lota called the other day the ‘Luna Bin,’ ” and then adds, “(You should really cultivate some foreign friends who can startle you like that several times every day . . . ​& just now I was asked for a ‘blanket check’)” (EAP 318). Bishop’s letters are full of these unintentional witticisms from Lota. In a 1958 letter to Lowell, she suggests that the hi-fi (and its cabinet designed by Lota) completed her life in Samambaia: “I’m thinking in musical terms because last week we finally got the ee-fee, as we call it here, installed. It still has to be adjusted a bit, a little more sponge rubber here, felt there, and some more ground wires—but to me it sounds absolutely superb and now I seem to have everything I want here, except for a few friends I’d like to see more often” (EAP 319).

20  Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazil

The set-up of the poem is peacefully domestic. The speaker listens “to the sweet ‘eye-fee,’ ” while the speaker’s partner “across the hallway” in her own room, lies on the bed. But as always in these poems, Bishop reminds us of the fragility of such moments, which are often colored by potential loss. All the speaker can see as she looks across the hallway is “just two bare feet upon the bed / ​arranged as if someone were dead, / ​—a non-crusader on a tomb” (EAP 117). The speaker gets up to “take a further look. / ​You’re reading a ‘detective book.’ // So that’s all right. I settle back” (EAP 117). All is well, and the speaker sits back to listen to the music. But the music itself speaks to the tensions and anxieties alluded to in the poem: The needle to its destined track stands true, and from the daedal plate [an oboe starts to celebrate escaping from the violin’s traps, —a bit too easily, perhaps, for the twentieth-century taste,—but then Vivaldi pulls him down again.]30 (EAP 117)

At the end of the poem, Bishop quotes the well-known lines from William Blake’s “Human Abstract”: “(Said Blake, ‘And mutual fear brings peace, / ​Till the selfish loves increase . . .’)” (EAP 117). But “the violin’s traps” also allude to the other lines from Blake’s four-line stanza: “Then Cruelty knits a snare, / ​ And spreads his baits with care.” It is possible that with more time, this poem would have successfully gathered together the dualisms of Blake’s poem to comment on the tensions of modern domestic life, one of settled dislocation, implied in the dualism of the title: “Foreign-Domestic.” Two later poems set at Samambaia, “Electrical Storm” and “Song for the Rainy Season,” both published in the New Yorker in 1960, also draw the contours of a lived relationship, but with a difference. Bishop’s focus in these two poems is on both the protection that this home provides and its fragility and impermanence. These poems are less peacefully domestic and tend to register a note of what Homi Bhahba, in his cultural reinterpretation of Freud’s “unheimlich,” has called “unhomeliness,” which he defines as “the estranging sense of the relocation of the home and the world . . . ​that is the condition of extra-territorial and cross-cultural initiations.”31 Bhabha insists that “to be unhomed is not to be homeless,” but rather to find that moment of estrangement within “the recesses of the domestic space.”32 These domestic spaces,

Samambaia and the Architecture of Class  21

then, “become sites for history’s most intricate invasions,” Bhabha argues, and “in [this] displacement, the borders between home and world become confused; and, uncannily, the private and the public become part of each other, forcing upon us a vision that is as divided as it is disorienting.”33 Bishop’s “Song for the Rainy Season” focuses our attention more on moments of estrangement within domestic space and seems to capture a sense of invading history and confused boundaries where the “shadowy / ​life” of the (lesbian) couple at the center of the poem is afforded some protection by the house and the rain, but one that is subject to the fear of discovery in a world hostile to such relationships. More than any other poem that Bishop set at Samambaia, “Song for the Rainy Season” uses the house’s open and modern architecture as a structural framework for thinking about dwelling and difference: Hidden, oh hidden in the high fog the house we live in, beneath the magnetic rock, rain-, rainbow-ridden, where blood-black bromelias, lichens, owls, and the lint of the waterfalls cling, familiar, unbidden. (P 99)

House and garden become continuous with each other. That rhyme—­ “hidden”/​ “unbidden”—anchors this first stanza and folds us into the poem’s atmosphere and magic, perhaps suggesting one more rhyme, “forbidden.” We enter another age, a “dim age / ​of water” where “the brook sings loud / ​from a rib cage / ​of giant fern,” and the “vapor” is “holding them both, / ​house and rock, / ​in a private cloud,” concealing the hidden lovers (P 99). The house has its own energy field, since it is located “beneath the magnetic rock.” Life-​ ­giving water dominates the first five stanzas of this six-stanza poem, creating an alternative dwelling place. Paradoxically, the lovers are hidden because the house is open (“House, open house”) to the fog and the clouds and the sounds of the night, the owl, and the “fat frogs that, / ​shrilling for love, / ​clamber and mount” (P 99). Bishop described in an August 1960 letter to Katherine White at the New Yorker how the frogs were using the dining room “as a sort of honeymoon

22  Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazil

hotel,” gathering in “couples” in a pool of water.34 The house opens to an odd assortment of creatures, images, and potentially destructive forces (at least where houses and books are concerned): “frogs,” “white dew,” “the milkwhite sunrise,” “silver fish,” “mouse,” “bookworms,” “big moths,” and, finally, “mildew’s / ​ignorant map,” forming on the wall. Bishop identifies all these as part of a “membership,” further emphasizing the idea that the house protects and harbors its own little society of special and disparate creatures. The lovers’ breathing is also life-giving water, transforming “mildew’s . . . ​map” into an alternate geographical point of possibility: darkened and tarnished by the warm touch of the warm breath, maculate, cherished, rejoice! For a later era will differ. (P 100)

Like the modern architecture of the house itself that speaks to the future, the lovers’ “warm touch” and “warm breath” also speak to a future era (a later one) where the “maculate”—rather than the immaculate—becomes something worth cherishing. But the present haunts the poem, for the next lines make clear why remaining hidden is important for these lovers: (O difference that kills, or intimidates, much of all our small shadowy life!) Without water (P 100)

The enjambed line reminds us of the present—the couple’s “small shadowy” existence—but also the future in the affirming, exclamatory “life!” The apostrophe creates a kind of “presencing,” as Bhabha, drawing on Heidegger, has called it, an utterance at the boundaries of difference, naming the anxiety at the center of the poem—the “difference that kills,” the threat of exposure. Another enjambment follows, reminding us once again of the dangers of the present and “Life without water,” as the line might be read. And life without water leads to the final reality of the last stanza. For “without water” the great rock will stare unmagnetized, bare, no longer wearing rainbows or rain,

Samambaia and the Architecture of Class  23 the forgiving air and the high fog gone; the owls will move on and the several waterfalls shrivel in the steady sun. (P 100)

Rain protects. Sun reveals. What makes this poem so powerful is not only its imagery but its acknowledgment of the fragility of this small utopia. In Bishop’s poem “Electrical Storm,” the weather is a disruptive and destructive menace rather than something that shields the lives of the people who live in the house. The poem repeats the word “death” three times. In the first line, the “dawn [is] an unsympathetic yellow”; lightning strikes; the cat’s fur stands on end; and a “pink flash,” the poem’s central image, brings hail that resembles “artificial pearls.” Bishop describes them in these striking lines as “Dead-white, wax-white, cold— / ​diplomats’ wives’ favors / ​from an old moon party” (P 98). A mise en abyme of literary allusions to Shakespeare’s Tempest and Eliot’s Waste Land enhance this poem’s consideration of death and life, or death in life. When the couple climbs out of bed, they find the “wiring fused, / ​no lights, a smell of saltpetre, / ​and the telephone dead” (P 98). The final two lines pick up on those pearls once again: “The Lent trees had shed all their petals: / ​wet, stuck, purple, among the dead-eye pearls” (P 98). Here politics seems to encroach on the carefully constructed life that the couple has built. By this time the political situation had worsened in Brazil, and Macedo Soares would soon be enmeshed in it. That threat is evident here, made starker in contrast to an earlier poem set in Key West that explores the same subject—a forbidden love affair—through the atmospheric effects of an electrical storm, but in that well-known poem, “It is marvellous to wake up together,” the storm is cause for celebrating the love affair rather than for alarm. There the couple in bed are protected in a “bird-cage of lightening,” which is “quite delightful rather than frightening” (P 283). In “Electrical Storm,” the wiring is fused and therefore rendered unusable for channeling the currents of desire.35 Bishop’s Samambaia poems are intimate portraits of the couple’s life together on their mountain, as well as an exploration of the fragility and impermanence of that life. The fragility of home takes on a new dimension in Bishop’s powerful 1957 poem “The Armadillo.” Set effectively during the celebratory occasion of St. John’s Day in Brazil, the poem considers a much greater threat to one’s home

24  Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazil

and community: environmental disaster. St. John’s Day, held on June 24 as a festival in honor of the birth of John the Baptist, is celebrated all over the world, but Brazil has the largest festival with its carnival atmosphere of feasting, bonfires, and fire balloons, which can last an entire week in cities and towns all over Brazil. It dates back to Portuguese colonial times. “The Armadillo” is surely one of Bishop’s great Brazilian poems. Its ten, four-line rhymed stanzas are perfectly balanced. The first five stanzas set the scene, describing the “illegal” fire balloons that “appear” “almost every night” at this “time of year” (P 101). Apart from the adjective “illegal,” there is no indication to the reader that these balloons are anything other than beautiful: Climbing the mountain height, rising toward a saint still honored in these parts, the paper chambers flush and fill with light that comes and goes, like hearts. (P 101)

They even seem celestial, since they are hard to tell apart from the stars or even the planets, and they seem to join the constellations, as the wind takes them and “they steer between / ​the kite sticks of the Southern Cross” (P 101). In nearly every Samambaia poem, including this one, Bishop draws on celestial imagery that makes these poems a powerful statement joining Bishop’s idea of home in Brazil to ideas of heaven. As she wrote in an early letter to Ilse and Kit Barker of her new home, “I like it so much that I keep thinking I have died and gone to heaven, completely undeservedly” (OA 249). The fire balloons stand in metonymically for desire throughout this poem (they are compared to beating hearts), a desire in which we, as readers, are also invested, until the end when it becomes clear how this mimicry has led us astray and caused us to take delight in what turns out to be an environmental disaster. The whole effect of the first four stanzas of “The Armadillo” is to create a sense of childlike wonder as we watch. It is only in the fifth stanza that we begin to understand the danger of the fire balloons and why they are illegal: “receding, dwindling, solemnly / ​and steadily forsaking us, / ​or, in the downdraft from a peak, / ​suddenly turning dangerous” (P 101). Bishop’s word choice—“forsaking”—freights the stanza with emotion, personifies the fire balloons, and, once they have abandoned human agency, they wreak their havoc. We stand, abandoned children, watching in horror as the next stanza unfolds, as if we have been playing with matches. Everything is threatened. A big fire balloon falls “splattered like an egg of fire / ​against the cliff behind the

Samambaia and the Architecture of Class  25

house. / ​The flame ran down,” and “we saw the pair // of owls who nest there flying up / ​and up, their whirling black-and-white / ​stained bright pink underneath, until / ​they shrieked up out of sight” (P 101). We learn that “the ancient owls’ nest must have burned,” and then “a glistening armadillo left the scene” its armor “rose-flecked,” “a baby rabbit jumped out, / ​. . . / ​So soft!—a handful of intangible ash / ​with fixed, ignited eyes” (P 102). The final stanza, with its apostrophe to destruction, is a powerful reminder of mimicry’s seductions and dangers. The speaker began the poem by marveling at the beauty of the fire balloons, appreciated solely for their aesthetic pleasure without regard to their potential for destruction; but, as Bonnie Costello has argued, “a strong moral voice breaks in” with the italicized last lines, “to oppose the stance of transcendence and aesthetic mastery” raised at the beginning:36 Too pretty, dreamlike mimicry! O falling fire and piercing cry and panic, and a weak mailed fist clenched ignorant against the sky!” (P 102)

The “weak mailed fist” reminds us again of the fleeing armadillo, as it mimics the armored animal curling itself into a ball. This image is an important cross-cultural reference readers have missed that links this ending to an early example of cross-cultural exchange. In 1912 Theodore Roosevelt traveled to the Brazilian Amazon with his son, Kermit, and the Brazilian explorer Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon on a joint scientific expedition funded by the Brazilian government. As Bishop writes in her manuscript for the Life Brazil book, Rondon had a reputation for a better “standard of behavior” toward the indigenous people of the region, and “he tried never to interfere with the Indians’ way of life” (Pr 233), although he also reflected typical nineteenth-century attitudes toward indigenous peoples. He thought that the “Indians should and could be ‘pacified,’ ” for instance, as Bishop wrote (Pr 233). Roosevelt’s account of his trip with Rondon, Through the Brazilian Wilderness, as Bishop noted, “probably brought Brazil to the attention of the average American for the first time since Dom Pedro II’s visit to the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition” (Pr 233). Roosevelt’s book featured the kind of detailed observation of Amazon flora and fauna that Bishop greatly admired, and one of those descriptions involved a delightful account of the behavior of the armadillo. Roosevelt was amazed at their speed when fleeing the scene of danger: “I had always sup-

26  Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazil

posed that armadillos merely shuffled along, and curled up for protection when menaced,” he wrote; but, he observed, “evidently this species of armadillo only curls up as a last resort”37—in short, when all is probably lost. Roosevelt’s observation provides important context for reading the “weak mailed fist” formed by the terrified armadillo as a last stand against disaster. It is raised against the sky in militaristic salute but “weak”; it is literally “clenched ignorant.” For George Monteiro, the English word “ignorant” conjures the Portuguese word ignorado, which doesn’t mean ignorant but rather unknown or unrecognized, signaling a point of “inter-cultural change on a single word.”38 This double meaning calls our attention to the fact that the armadillo’s plight is unknown and unrecognized, except through Bishop’s own poem. Her apostrophe “O falling fire and piercing cry” gives voice to this plight (P 102). Suddenly, we find ourselves at the threshold of a terror that goes beyond the level of environmental catastrophe. The power of this poem lies in the fact that what is threatened is our home on a very personal and visceral level. Bishop also turned her sharp observer’s eye to consider the class structure supporting the couple’s life together. Macedo Soares’s household reflects the deep stratification of the Brazilian economic and class system in the middle of the twentieth century. As Thomas Skidmore has argued, “Brazilian society has proved to be varied yet remarkably integrated, not on egalitarian but on hierarchical terms.”39 Skidmore argues that “the culture inculcates a sense of intimacy along with a sense of distance, thus allowing the elite to dominate society with little fear of challenge.”40 Bishop writes a lot in her letters about the comings and goings of Macedo Soares’s household and its “servants”—the gardener, the cooks, the workmen who were building the house and blasting through the granite cliffs to do so. She was fascinated and obsessed by Manuelzinho Alves’s family whose “little hut” had been on the land before Lota developed it, one of the many “poor people in little houses around who would take animals and vegetables to the fair to sell,” according to Morse.41 But Manuelzinho was a favorite. As Morse noted, “Lota liked him as a person, so she let him stay on a piece of land right near her house. He didn’t work for Lota. He worked for himself, and he was just on a piece of her land, hoping he wouldn’t be put off.”42 As a squatter, he and his family had a tenuous hold on the land they occupied, and Bishop captures this precarious existence in poems about them, including “Manuel­ zinho,” “Squatter’s Children,” and the unpublished drafts of “Gypsophilia.”

Samambaia and the Architecture of Class  27

Bishop accurately represents the household’s hierarchy (and its intimacy and distance) in her 1956 “Manuelzinho,” as she explores the relationship between the wealthy landowner and her inept gardener, “the world’s worst gardener since Cain” (P 94). Bishop clearly identifies that this is Brazil and “a friend of the writer is speaking” before the poem’s opening lines. The speaker’s approach and attitude toward Manuelzinho is paternalistic, an attitude that is symbolized by the use of the diminutive form of Manuel’s name. Brazilians often use the diminutive with people, animals, and things, as Bishop noted in a letter to White, where she said that “ ‘zinho’ this and that is so much a part of things here.”43 But its usage with servants underscores the prevailing attitude of the elite class toward the people who serve them—the mixture of tenderness and intimacy that reinforces the system. Manuelzinho is, as he is identified in the poem’s opening line, “half squatter, half tenant (no rent)— / ​a sort of inheritance” (P 94). These lines are spoken by the “friend,” and we know right away that this gardener is part of a long line of tenant farmers and servants who have worked the property over the years, representing generations of workers who are trapped in a system that offers little mobility: I watch you through the rain, trotting, light, on bare feet, up the steep paths you have made— or your father and grandfather made— all over my property. (P 94)

This speaker (a sort of fusion of poet and patroa) expresses a sense of proprietary ownership of the land and the people who move across it. Throughout the poem, the speaker’s attitude toward Manuel is that of a sometimes indulgent parent toward a disobedient child: And once I yelled at you so loud to hurry up and fetch me those potatoes your holey hat flew off, you jumped out of your clogs, leaving three objects arranged in a triangle at my feet, as if you’d been a gardener in a fairy tale all this time. (P 95)

28  Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazil

She gives him money for his father’s funeral, and he spends it on a “bus / ​for the delighted mourners,” so that she has “to hand over some more” (P 95). Later, Manuelzinho comes to her “sniffing and shivering, / ​hat in hand, with that wistful / ​face, like a child’s fistful / ​of bluets or white violets, / ​improvident as the dawn,” causing the speaker to “once more . . . ​provide / ​for a shot of penicillin / ​down at the pharmacy, or / ​one more bottle of Electrical Baby Syrup” (P 95–96). Manuelzinho is ignorant, uneducated, and ultimately unwittingly cruel to his family: “You steal my telephone wires, / ​or someone does. You starve / ​your horse and yourself / ​and your dogs and family” (P 94– 95). When he arrives to “settle / ​what we call our ‘accounts,’ ” he brings “two old copybooks, / ​one with flowers on the cover, / ​the other with a camel,” as if he is reusing old school notebooks, his ignorance evident in the “confusion” of numbers: “Your columns stagger, / ​honeycombed with zeros,” documenting Manuel’s ignorance as well as the country’s runaway inflation (P 96). The speaker has no interest in questioning the status quo; she reads Manuelzinho’s copybooks not as “Account books” but as “Dream Books,” and ­gently mocks his ambitions: “In the kitchen we dream together / ​how the meek shall inherit the earth— / ​or several acres of mine” (P 96). What Man­ uelzinho has inherited is his and his family’s servitude, not the land under his feet. The system described here is feudal. Bishop was to write about this relationship in her Life book. And while she tended to praise the “complete ease of manner on both sides” of the relationship between master and servant, she also recognized its drawbacks and wrote that “sometimes Brazilians seem to confuse familiarity with democracy, although the attitude seems rather to be a holdover from slavery days, or feudalism” (Pr 170). In Bishop’s poem, Manuelzinho is as much a part of the landscape as are the house, the mountains, the fog, as he appears in rain and “twined in wisps of fog” (P 96). There is no indication that Bishop is making a judgment about this class arrangement that makes possible their life on the mountain; the poem is effective, not for its critical judgment, but in its faithful rendering of this particular relationship. Bishop’s responses to the New Yorker about the poem show the value she placed on accuracy in recording what she observed. Even as she revised the poem for publication, she observed fresh incidents, which guided her in matters of tense and timing. She changed the “you steal my telephone wires” line to present tense, because, as she told Howard Moss, who became Bishop’s editor at the New Yorker after White, “It just happened again, and I think the present tense adds to the tone of exasperation.”44 Bishop’s meticulous attention to detail and accuracy result in a poem that speaks

Samambaia and the Architecture of Class  29

throughout to the kind of intimacy that Skidmore has suggested keeps the hierarchy in place, clinched in its final lines: You helpless, foolish man, I love you all I can, I think. Or do I? I take off my hat, unpainted and figurative, to you. Again I promise to try. (P 97)

Bishop faithfully records in poetry the relationship she witnessed daily and thereby exposes a Brazilian class system from which she herself benefited. She, however, is not entirely in the picture. By identifying her speaker as a friend of the author, she does, effectively, skirt her involvement. While Bishop captures the interaction of Brazilian landowners and their servants in “Manuelzinho,” her narrative may have also struck a chord with New Yorker readers. According to Fiona Green, readers of the magazine at mid-century may have identified with this “comedy surrounding domestic servants who are just a little too much part of the family.”45 Green cites Mary Corey, whose study of representations of domestic staff in the mid-century New Yorker uncovered a pattern of “entitlement, identification, compassion, paternalism, and love” that are all “curiously intermingled” in the New Yorker’s pages.46 While Green acknowledges that “the economic relationship between a Brazilian aristocrat and her tenant farmer differs from that between a suburban housewife and her hired help,”47 her essay demonstrates to some extent how one culture becomes legible to another through the mediation of New Yorker style and readership. “Squatter’s Children,” first published in Portuguese in the São Paulo journal Anhembi in 1956 48 and then in the New Yorker in 1957, also focuses on Manuelzinho’s family, but this time on the children, expressing great sympathy for their true lack of inheritance. Critics have often identified this poem as being set in a favela.49 The reason for the poem’s association with the favela may have something to do with the fact that the editors of Anhembi identified it as a favela poem in their note to the poem.50 However, the setting is nothing like Bishop’s major favela poem, “The Burglar of Babylon,” which is set in a Rio favela, and Bishop clearly states in a letter to Lowell that she had been unprepared to take on the issue of the favela until the early 1960s after “Squatter’s Children” had already been published (WIA 379). The setting is most certainly the countryside, not the city, and while Manuelzinho’s family

30  Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazil

is not identified in this poem, its date of composition and its placement just before “Manuelzinho” in Questions of Travel suggests that it is part of this series of poems that meditate on issues of property and inheritance that is so much a part of the landowning elite in Brazil. Bishop thought it would be “too grim” for the New Yorker 51 when she initially submitted it in May 1955. But the magazine accepted it immediately, sending her a check in June,52 although it was not published until a year and a half later, since, as White wrote in a fabulous example of New Yorker understatement, the magazine tended to “space [Bishop’s poems] out in their scheduling, knowing that you are not a poet who produces prolifically.”53 Again, the house and landscape are part of the fabric of the poem and remain continuous with the people moving through it. The children appear tiny in the landscape, “specklike,” as is their house, also “specklike.” The “sun’s suspended eye” watches over them and “blinks casually” as they play with their “pup,” who “attends them,” appearing as “a dancing yellow spot” (P 93). The children ignore the coming storm: “Clouds are piling up; // a storm piles up behind the house” (P 93). Parental figures in these children’s lives appear metonymically through the objects associated with them—objects that prove to be ineffective: the children dig in the hard ground unsuccessfully with their father’s broken digging tool, “a mattock with a broken haft”; the mother’s voice that “keeps calling them to come in” out of the storm sounds “ugly as sin” (P 93). By contrast, “the rain’s reply / ​consists of echolalia” (P 93). This poem demonstrates metonymically the ineffectiveness of the parents to provide for the children and to keep them safe, and through this device expresses Bishop’s philosophy about the protection of childhood. She expressed strong opinions on this subject in letters and unpublished and published prose and poetry and in her Life book. Like Lota, she felt that the poor in Brazil ­really didn’t know how to look after their children. In contrast to the parental ­neglect represented in this poem, the children’s own laughter provides the radiance edging the storm; it “spreads / ​effulgence in the thunderheads”; the children are trying to build something out of the hard earth and the rain, an ineffective dwelling, “their little, soluble, / ​unwarrantable ark” (P 93). The poem considers in its final movement where indeed these children have a right to dwell: Children, the threshold of the storm has slid beneath your muddy shoes; wet and beguiled, you stand among

Samambaia and the Architecture of Class  31 the mansions you may choose out of a bigger house than yours, whose lawfulness endures. Its soggy documents retain your rights in rooms of falling rain. (P 93)

The poem’s brilliant Lockean (and Blakean) twist at the end shows the deception. Nature may provide larger “mansions” from which to choose, but the only rights these children have to property is to “rooms of falling rain,” retained in documents that are as soluble as the ark in the previous passage. These children are, in a sense, homeless, a condition that was deeply resonant with Bishop’s own experience and one she explored even as she herself was finding a real home for the first time in her life. “Squatter’s Children” seems to tap into some deep seam of Bishop’s own childhood experience and demonstrates her real compassion for the disenfranchised children of Brazil. Bishop’s unpublished54 and unfinished “Gypsophilia” also features Manuelzinho’s family and meditates on the class differences that balance and support the structure of Bishop’s home in Brazil. It is difficult to know exactly where Bishop was headed with this poem, but it contains some wonderful lines and offers another example of Bishop reflecting on her place in the household. The poem begins meditatively: “I like the few sad noises / ​left over in this smokey sunset,” but then shifts abruptly to a tone of irritation: “That idiot dog!—He barks in oblique barks, / ​chop-chopping at the mountains with a hatchet.” More loud noise interrupts the scene where, at the orchid nursery, “somebody beats the hanging iron bar / ​until it sounds like farriers / ​down there, instead of flowers” (EAP 128). This racket is clearly not the same “beautiful sound” of Nate’s blacksmith’s hammer in Bishop’s Nova Scotian story “In the Village.” These noises bother the speaker in her aerie, “up here” where “the air is thinner” (EAP 128). Note the directional: up here, down there. As the daylight fades (“the blue / ​deteriorates all at once”), but the “we” of the poem are protected “in / ​some dark sub-stratum of dew” (EAP 128), as if in a nest or cave-like hiding place reminiscent of the fog safety of “Song for the Rainy Season,” but in that poem, there are no other people in the landscape. Here, the life of the mountain cannot be ignored. It keeps up an insistent chorus of sounds. Someone calls “Dinner” (it is “a child’s voice” that “rises, harsh and thin”). Bishop’s rhyme of “dinner” with “thinner” in the stanza’s opening line (“Up here the air is thinner”) seems appropriate, as it tells us that the couple cannot live solely on air. The whole system is inter-

32  Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazil

dependent. And, sure enough, coming just after the child’s voice, “Manuel­ zinho’s family” appears below. Bishop names them “Jovelina, / ​Nelson, Nina,” and “Jovelina bears” or “bends / ​a load of dead branches” (Bishop cannot decide which word she wants here, so she uses both in her draft). “Each child” comes “with an enormous sheaf / ​Of ‘Gypsophilia,’ ‘baby’s breath’ ” (EAP 129). Bishop gets the name wrong. Gypsophila (without the “i”) is the correct botanical name. Its common name is baby’s breath. Peggy Samuels has noted that Bishop named the poem after Alexander Calder’s series of mobiles55 made between 1949 and 1951, also called Gypsophila (without the “i”) and also inspired by the architectural look of baby’s breath with its spray of white flowers widely spaced on its stems. Undoubtedly, if Bishop had finished this poem and it had undergone the New Yorker’s meticulous editing, she would have caught the mistake and changed it, since she clearly meant Gypso­phila. At any rate, the Calder connection enhances the architectural dimensions of this particular Samambaia poem. Samuels describes how Calder’s mobiles, inspired by the movement of constellations and planets (or, in this case, flowers that resemble stars and planets), were also “illustrative of the intersecting trajectories and shifting relations between objects, motions, and events of lived realities.”56 Indeed, in her own watercolor of the interior of a room in Samambaia, as Samuels notes, “Bishop slips the [Calder] mobile into the environment in such a way that she reinforces Calder’s view that his mobiles captured the cross-rhythms and disparate shapes of parts of the environment.”57 In this poem, Bishop experiments with a Calder-like composition of words and images that place the lyric speaker, as Samuels rightly notes, “as one of the elements in a Calder hanging mobile,” and is thus “held and carried as a moving element among gently ascending, descending, and circling shape motifs.”58 These compositional elements also reveal something of the orbital dependency of those who inhabit this mountain, speaking further to the class issues inherent in these arrangements. Bishop’s drafts of this poem suggest she was moving in the direction of astral imagery, like “The Shampoo,” so that the spray of flowers, via Calder, metamorphoses into planetary bodies, a spray of stars. Bishop tried out several final stanzas that ask a philosophical question about their place in the universe: “Do we shine, too,” she asks in both. In one version, she worries that the couple’s life on the mountain is not “luminous,” but rather “condensed” into a “dead black seed,” and that they are “carried, carried / ​in those glimmering sprays about us” (EAP 327). Since Manuelzin-

Samambaia and the Architecture of Class  33

ho’s family carries the sprays of flowers, Bishop may be considering their interrelatedness or expressing anxiety over that relationship. Does the balance of their life depend on this family of servants and squatters? Most certainly it does, although Bishop does not say that here. The final stanza in the version that Quinn published in Edgar Allan Poe reads, We live aslant here on our iron mountain. Venus already’s set. Something I’m never sure of, even yet— do we shine, too? Is this world luminous? I try to recollect but can’t. (EAP 129)

Bishop seems to be trying to describe the arc of a life, exploring its dimensions and its architecture, and in her attempt to write these themes, she exposes the elements of the architecture of class forming the “sub-stratum” of where she lives. In 1964 Elizabeth Bishop “was a person with a home” in Brazil that “she had left to travel,” as her friend Ilse Barker put it, recalling Bishop’s visit to her in Sussex in May of that year.59 By January of 1967, Bishop was homeless again: “ ‘Out in half an hour,’ she wrote to the Barkers, ‘after fifteen years with a few dirty clothes in a busted suitcase, no home any more, no claim (legally) to anything here.’ ”60 To her New York doctor, Anny Baumann, Bishop also referred to her homelessness: “I haven’t a home any more—actually nothing but two suitcases and a box of old papers, all the wrong ones—and HOW to get the right ones out of the apt. is beyond me at the moment” (OA 457). Bishop’s love affair with Lota and Brazil did not end here. The two women got together again briefly in Samambaia; Bishop wrote a series of bizarre animal sketches during this period that reflect this troubled period;61 she traveled down the Rio São Francisco, a trip she had been meaning to take for many years; she wrote a travel account of the trip that she intended to sell, the unfinished draft of which is in the archives at Vassar. She began fixing up the colonial house she had bought in Ouro Prêto, hoping to make a life there. This Ouro Prêto house was, many critics note, Bishop’s last of three loved houses that “went” in Bishop’s 1976 villanelle, “One Art” (P 198); she traveled to the state of Washington to teach at the University; she had an affair. By the end of September 1967, however, Lota would be dead, having committed suicide in

34  Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazil

an apartment that Bishop was borrowing from friends in New York while she put her life back together and waited to learn whether Lota would recover from her illness enough for Bishop to return to her. In a rather comically grim letter written in June 1970, while she was living in the house she had bought in Ouro Prêto, Bishop wrote to Robert Lowell that she was “trying to do a small book of poems for [Lota], or about her—but it is still too painful” (WIA 677). In a Robinson Crusoe mood, she tells Lowell that she is “having a lovely time just being lonely. . . . ​I am so damned cheerful all the time I can’t believe it” (WIA 676). In a stroke of ironic epiphany, Bishop “realized last night as the lights failed in the kitchen and I fried myself an egg by the light of the oil lamp, that probably what I am really up to is recreating a sort of de luxe Nova Scotia all over again, in Brazil. And now I’m my own grandmother” (WIA 676). Indeed, Bishop was trying to recreate this “home” in Brazil through life and through art. But here the overall thrust is sad and self-pitying (“I often gave way to self-pity,” as Bishop’s alter ego Crusoe says in “Crusoe in England”). Oil lamps no longer represent the fun of camping out and the Proustian possibility of recaptured memory. In 1971 Bishop applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship (which she received) in order to write two books of poems, one called “Grandmother’s Glass Eye” and, as she wrote in her application, “one fairly long poem (partly written) tentatively called ‘Elegy.’ ”62 This planned elegy for Lota marks Bishop’s last imaginative return to Samambaia and the life they shared there. Archival evidence suggests that Bishop did begin drafting an elegy and other poems for her partner during this time: two pages of notes and two promising drafts of an elegy exist and have been published in Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box. Quinn published a five-stanza version of “Aubade and Elegy,” which she labels “Bishop’s first attempt at the poem” (EAP 149), in the main body of the text of Edgar Allan Poe, but she includes a longer, in some ways more complete but untitled, version in the appendix, along with a page of notes that Bishop took on Macedo Soares’s character and another page of possible lines for what appears to be a second poem about her. The second version of “Aubade and Elegy” is notable for Bishop’s more thorough attempts to link Macedo Soares to the natural world that both women loved and that defined the spaces of the much-loved modern house (probably Bishop’s second of three loved houses) that Bishop shared with her in Samambaia. Although she doesn’t put a title on this longer version, it is obviously the same poem, and we see more clearly why this is an aubade, as

Samambaia and the Architecture of Class  35

well as an elegy, giving it a poignancy that the shorter version does not have. While in a traditional aubade, the lovers would be awakened together by the dawn light, which signals their need to part, here the speaker awakes alone in the dawn and realizes that the parting has been permanent, and so the poem begins, Perhaps for the tenth time the tenth time . . . ​ and still early morning I wake . . . wake and go under the wave  the black wave of your death (EAP 220)

But in the second version, the second stanza shifts to a description of the natural world “outside your window” (my emphasis) in an attempt, perhaps, to awaken the dead lover: The beautiful light of morning touches the grasses the field of diamonded pink outside your window —the mato has started to turn  it will be red soon      little   and that tree-full of blue metallic birds who come to eat the bitter red fruits  they are there the[y]’re there the seven lines of mountains shouldering each other away from the sun gently away from the sun, one by one      white  like a bowl of milk (EAP 220)

This final, maternal image telescopes us back to the early years of Bishop’s sojourn in Brazil and her description of the valley appearing below her as a “white bowl of milk” (WIA 166). The draft of Bishop’s elegy for Macedo Soares retains this maternal image, derived from the view of the mountains in the distance, but is now tempered by the bitterness (“the bitter red fruits”) of this bitter period in Bishop’s life (she uses the word “bitter” in a letter to Lowell).63 All this is here, including the birds, but Lota is not: “Not there. And not there.” Images in this draft also reach back to the first poem Bishop wrote for Macedo Soares, “The Shampoo,” which also begins with a description of the natural world that surrounds the two women. There the lichens are a link between earth and heaven, becoming the “shooting stars” in the lover’s hair. In the elegy, Macedo Soares ­returns to the earth: “your life slowed then to that of the lichens / ​circles, then of the rocks,” which is followed by the conjuring of the living woman

36  Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazil

in a beautiful image that focuses on her small hands, planting in the earth: “I see only small hands in the dirt / ​transplanting Sweet Williams, tamping them down / ​dirt on the hands, the rings, no more than that / ​small” (EAP 220). Although this poem is clearly not complete, it offers great promise in the way that the images work to gather a portrait of Macedo Soares that draws on previous images and intertwines this very personal vision with the larger political and economic history of Brazil. Bishop links “the smell of the earth” with “the smell of the black-roasted coffee / ​as fine as fine humus as black,” followed by the haunting refrain, “No coffee can wake you no coffee can wake you no coffee can wake you / ​No coffee” (EAP 220). These lines speak volumes about not only the tragedy of losing Lota but also the bitter irony that even Brazil’s largest export cannot save her. Bishop noted in a letter to a Brazilian friend just after Lota’s death that she didn’t believe Lota had arrived in New York with a plan to kill herself, since she had brought so many things with her, including “12 kilo bags of coffee” (OA 471). The poem also speaks directly in the line “No revolution can catch your attention” to the terrible political situation in Brazil that had completely engulfed Macedo Soares at the end of her life. The reason I think Bishop might have been going somewhere with this poem is the complex network of connections she is beginning to build between Brazil’s natural world (the woman gardening, the lichens, the landscape); its major export (coffee); history and politics (both versions contain the line “No revolution can catch your attention”); and personal history—the speaker’s notice of the small details (Lota’s small hands, for instance) that she loves, the cats they share (mentioned in the second version), the domestic space, the sense of a shared life. These are all hallmarks of Bishop’s finest work in Brazil. The notes pages (arranged in verse form) for the elegy are also fascinating, and although class does not figure in the poetry drafts, it looms large in these more unformed notes, and it is worth dwelling a moment on the fragments of this portrait of a marriage. Lota’s aristocratic “snobbery & superiority,” “ruling class attitudes,” and status as “a landed aristocracy—(a bit Chekovian)” are as much a part of the portrait as her “style,” her “elegance,” her beautiful “gestures,” and her “courage” (EAP 219). What strikes me most of all, though, is where Bishop places herself in the scene in these verse notes. After one of Lota’s infamous temper tantrums, Bishop is with the cook, laughing, behind the door, like a servant or a misbehaving child: “the door slamming, ­plaster-​

Samambaia and the Architecture of Class  37

falling—the cook and I laughing helplessly / ​on the other side of the door” (EAP 219). Lota’s status as the powerful patroa really comes through in this portrait. The last line of these verse notes reads: “Regret and guilt, the nighttime horro[r]s”—with “Lorca” written in parentheses at the end (EAP 219). It is unclear whether these lines refer to Bishop herself, Lota, or both. What is clear is that all of Bishop’s Samambaia poems constitute deep meditations on what it means to dwell at the boundaries of cultural and class difference. Although Bishop clearly found a home in Brazil, it is a home that, as she was well aware, depended on a powerful patroa whose status as landowner and a member of a tiny elite class in Brazil provided the architecture for Bishop’s Brazilian career. One final anecdote from early in Bishop’s time in Brazil will serve to underscore Bishop’s sometimes skittish attitude about her borrowed membership in the Brazilian leisure class. Bishop bought her own car in 1953, an MG, and Lota owned a Jaguar and a Land Rover—all luxury cars not made in Brazil and beyond the means of most Brazilians. Meditating on this state of wealth on exhibit in her own yard, Bishop wrote wryly in an October 1953 letter to Ilse and Kit Barker, “You should see our ‘yard’ now—three English cars, all the finest, sitting in it, and why the workmen on the house don’t murder us all as dirty capitalists I don’t know” (OA 273). Bishop’s comment about cars and class constitute more than just a witty aside in this letter to friends. It marks but one instance of Bishop’s obsessional interest in the car and the open road, a significant but unexamined strand of Bishop’s travel writing and poetry that I will take up in my next chapter. What is significant about these “letters from the road,” as I call them, is that for the first time in Bishop’s work, there is a designated “home”—Samambaia—to which the traveler returns after her trips across the country.

Two

Letters from the Road

The road is life. —Jack Kerouac, On the Road We are driving to the interior. —Elizabeth Bishop, “Arrival at Santos”

During Elizabeth Bishop’s years in Brazil, the country, like the United States, was beginning to build its infrastructure around the car, a process that would accelerate from 1956 to 1961 under the leadership of president Juscelino Kubitschek, whose “ambitious economic program” for the country included relocating the capitol of Brazil more than five hundred miles into the interior from Rio de Janeiro to Brasília.1 Kubitschek’s was a “high-growth strategy whose aim,” according to Thomas Skidmore, “was to accelerate industrialization and the construction of the infrastructure necessary to sustain it.”2 While Kubitschek’s program contributed to Brazil’s serious debt problem, accelerating the runaway inflation that would plague the country for decades, it also meant that by the time Kubitschek left office, Brazil “had an integrated motor vehicle industry (created virtually from scratch) and was on the way to creating the many subsidiary industries vital to vehicle production.”3 There

Letters from the Road  39

were also “impressive gains in electricity generation and road building.”4 Popular culture followed suit. In one unpublished account that Bishop wrote of her trip up the São Francisco River by stern-wheeler in 1967, she quotes from Quatro Rodas (Four Wheels), then a new Brazilian touring magazine founded in 1960, which marked the mid-century love affair with the car and road travel.5 The discourse of Brazilian optimism over the promise of new roads and the reality of construction projects begun and then abandoned runs through Bishop’s experience of the road. After much anticipatory letter writing, for instance, Bishop and Macedo Soares finally embarked on their first trip to Ouro Prêto in April 1953, involving the most elaborate preparations that Bishop described in letters to friends, including the packing of “extra gasoline, spare parts, flashlights,” and “a revolver” among other things (OA 259), as if Bishop and Macedo Soares were Brazilian bandeirantes (the “exploring and slave-raiding groups of the colonial era”6), roaming the countryside. They had planned to go in the Land Rover, but Brazilian friends had told them the new road was finished, so they set out in the Jaguar. Bishop describes the arduous journey in a letter to Pearl Kazin with real relish. The new road only lasted about “10 kilometers,” Bishop explained, “and the old one was so incredibly bad that we drove 58 kilometers in 6 hours. The last hour it got dark and something scraped underneath . . . ​and we were both pretty scared, but we made it, and the scraping was only the exhaust pipe. The garageman said only one other Jaguar has ever been to Ouro Prêto and it broke its gasoline tank, so we were quite a sensation in the town” (OA 261). During her early years in Brazil, Bishop bought her first car with the proceeds from her New Yorker story “In the Village,” a black MG “with red leather” interior (WIA 147). She learned to drive (“something I never in the wide world thought I’d do” [OA 245]), remarked on her newfound independence (“I think it will be very good for me to stop being the passenger-type I’ve been all my life like a baby in a baby carriage” [OA 273]), and even indulged a romantic fantasy about her car to Robert Lowell: “it zooms up the mountain with the cut-out open, but really I only like speedy looking cars that I can drive very slowly” (WIA 147). She expressed mock horror when she realized that she seemed to be experiencing a second “adolescence” in Brazil like Cary Grant in Howard Hawks’s 1952 film Monkey Business, which she described in this same letter to Lowell as “an awful picture with Ginger Rogers and Cary Grant taking some kind of youth-elixir—and the first thing Cary G

40  Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazil

did after taking it was to rush out and buy a car exactly like mine to symbolize adolescence” (WIA 147). Much has been written on Bishop and travel, but very little has been said about her almost obsessional interest in the car and the road and the cross-cultural encounters that these “trips” offer to a keen observer like Bishop. “The road is life,” Jack Kerouac wrote in that quintessential American road novel. And so it was for Bishop. Bishop did, after all, provide her own road metaphor for Brazilian experience when she wrote the last line of her 1952 poem “Arrival at Santos”: “We are driving to the interior.” Bishop wrote a great deal about road travel that never found its way into print, and some of this writing is as stunning, if not more so, than any prose she published. A long typewritten account of the car ride from Rio back to Samambaia, dating from the mid-fifties, provides so much rich evocative detail that it is worth quoting at length. Bishop’s prose account also includes the beginnings of a poem, “Leaving Rio,” which follows the prose description, but the poem is far less interesting than the gorgeous atmospheric piece that precedes it. Bishop’s lengthy, unpublished account of the trip recaptures the experience in painterly detail as the two women—Macedo Soares and Bishop— speed through the deepening twilight in Lota’s Jaguar. The car moves from the city through the wasteland of the garbage dumps on its outskirts as Bishop notes the tragic human waste that skirts the city and takes note of the lives of those who are forced to pick through the rotting, smoking, burning trash to make a living: “We left Rio about five o’clock,” Bishop writes, and then paints a picture of the landscape rich in imagery that engages all our senses. I have kept most of Bishop’s misspellings and run-ons because they contribute to the overall painterly effects of this travel account: It had been a beautiful clear day—that long straight flat stretch from the docks through the marshes, until the Petropolis Road was very strange—the lower atmosphere hazy and blue with exhaust fumes from the trucks & busses burning old oil—it’s illegal but they all do it—blue and oily clouds. Then off the road to the right the bay a sweet pale blue little strings of pink cloud fl[o]ating over it, the palm trees very feathery, just like in the old paintings of Rio. Overhead the sky was a dark clear blue and suddenly the new—or maybe two days old— moon appeared to the right in the pink, changing to blue, part of the sky—very delicate and bright above all the rushing crashing smelling smoking traffic. But I thought, maybe she has long since been covered all over with waste and oxidizing metals—7

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Bishop writes that the surreal landscape with its predominance of pink and black reminded her of the “suburban” paintings of the French abstract expressionist Georges Rouault. The two women are open to taunts and ridicule from other drivers on the road. As Bishop writes, “The truck drivers and taxi drivers—almost any drivers, mostly being men, yell at us—2 women in a small open car being a rare sight here—sometimes witticism, sometimes ‘back to the Kitchen!—Vai levando!’ Being still the favorite—.”8 Then, as the car moves to the outskirts of the city, Bishop describes— again engaging all our senses—the marshes and the activity of the favela: From the marshes the dark horrible rotting-cheese smell, then further on where they are filling the darker stranger bitter smell of burnt and burning trash and garbage. Then that [favela]9 begins—hundreds of wooden shacks below the level of the road three or four feet—the road runs along with a ridge on ­either side—palings, tin cans flattened out, some painted pink, blue or green, but mostly not—some with many tins of plants—some with aerials. Square little windows, gates in the tiny yard of high palings—everything can be locked up. The people stroll along the high groun[d] by the roadside, going to the communal water spigots and coming back with oil cans of water. Then the lights go on—flat neon lights that stick out on either side of the road for about a yard—brilliant ­daylightish—about a mile of them, I suppose, almost perfectly straight—a strange effect in the now dark pink, gray, burnt oil smelling sky.10

There is a sense of community life and activity, centering on the collection of water. Bishop moves like a camera eye through this prose account, like a tracking shot in a road movie; readers might wonder how she could work out all this detail from a speeding car traveling through this landscape at dusk and then descending night. It is a technique that she would perfect in ­poetry a few years later with the traveling eye of “The Burglar of Babylon” that follows the thief up and down the hillsides through the favelas of Rio as the police track him down. These prose accounts seem to me a trial run for developing that technique, but it is also beautiful description in its own right, worth our attention for the way that it engages our senses and conveys the physical experience of travel in Brazil at mid-century. In the next section, Bishop focuses on the children picking through the trash in the dump, and on death and human waste: Children group themselves around each lamppost like moths. The worst part of the dump is towards the end—where until recently the buzzards squatted in

42  Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazil rows and rows and covered the mango swamp trees, bending them down, and flopped slowly and clumsily from spot to spot. Trucks unloaded rubbish here, right beside the road, and the people of the [favela] swarmed out to sca[venge]11 too—in the thick dust & stench and flapping hideous bald headed birds[,] families were bent over picking up fragments of garbage, clothing, paper, boxes, etc—throwing it over their shoulders or putting it in a sack—the confusion and smell and dust—particularly on a good hot day—were hellish.—But night before last I didn’t see any more of this—only the si[l]ent thron[g]ing12 people on the banks under the strange lights, the idiotically rushing traffic with its shouts and horns, oblivious to the onlookers, the dying pink sky and fading shiny blue water on the right—13

At this point in the narrative, Bishop’s camera eye takes a wide-angle view, spinning out to a mythic and then cosmic dimension. “On the left,” she writes, is the little church of the Penha14 stuck up on its rock like a toy, or a weather indicator house, completely unreal illusionary—and then the Yellow Fever Institute in Moorish style . . . ​with its mosque like towers and turrets and keyhole arches and cren[e]ll[a]tions—It was strange and beautiful and with the moon growing bigger and brighter like a threat all the time—one felt planetary—there you are; this is this planet, dying dying as fast as it possibly can too— Later on on the ascending part of the road it was very lovely—the moon appeared first on one side then the other as the road hairpins around and around—or in front—15

The tension between the alternating beauty and horror of the landscape and the images of death (the horrible flapping buzzards, the children like moths around a light), and the sense of threat (even in the moon), come together ominously in Bishop’s final few sentences: “A Rio-Petropolis bus pursued us all the way with its deep mouth-organ horns, like the Hound of Heaven, I told Lota.”16 Bishop refers to Francis Thompson’s grim 1893 Christian poem “The Hound of Heaven,” which imagines God as a hound, pursuing a sinner relentlessly through the years of his life until he finally embraces Christ at the end. Bishop quotes from it: “ ‘deliberate speed, majestic instancy . . . ​my mangled youth lies dead beneath the heap. . . . ​My days have crackled and gone up in smoke.’ ”17 Bishop blends this Victorian moral reminder of sin and guilt with a politicized accounting of human waste, suggesting her own guilt, perhaps, as a rich American traveling the countryside in an expensive car. Or maybe she is just worrying over her own wasted and

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“mangled youth.” This is “what I dreaded,” she writes. In the end, she is glad to be “home” again, “to sit down by lamplight and have coffee and milk and fried eggs and ham, both dead-tired,” a very cozy, domestic image after all the Sturm und Drang of this incredible, descriptive account. The contrast is striking, and it brings up an important point about Bishop’s travel writing in Brazil: that the traveler has a home to which she returns. A short finished travel piece set in the Amazon, “A Trip to Vigia,” published for the first time in 2008 in the Library of America edition of Bishop’s Poems, Prose, and Letters, also features a road trip in the Amazon from Belém to the town of Vigia, about one hundred kilometers inland, organized by the Brazilian poet Ruy Barata.18 Right from the beginning, Bishop calls our attention to a series of complex negotiations over culture, language, and class that dominate the narrative of this ill-fated trip. She worries about class issues: “The shy poet, so soiled, so poor, so polite, insisted on taking us in his own car. A friend would go along as mechanista. The car was on its last legs; it had broken down twice just getting us around Belém the day before. But what could we do? I couldn’t very well flaunt my dollars in his face and hire a better one” (Pr 110). Not only does the car serve as the main mode of transport, but it also stands in as a metaphor for other cultural exchanges, such as those involving language. Bishop, who was not fluent in spoken Portuguese, asks her companion, named only “M” in this piece, to let her know “when the mystic moment arrive[s] and she’d shift gears from addressing [the poet] as ‘Dr. Ruy’ to ‘you’ ” (Pr 110). As Bishop writes, “This use of the você or second person is always a delicate problem and I wanted to see how M., who has the nicest Brazilian manners, would solve it” (Pr 110). Indeed, Bishop marks the shift in mystical terms in this account. They have broken down again. M. talks “ever more gaily,” when “suddenly the rain came down hard, great white lashings. The bushes crouched and the gravel danced. M. nudged me, whispered ‘Now,’ and in her next sentence to Ruy used a noticeable você; the mystic moment was past” (Pr 111). Once again, road travel is hampered at every turn, not just by the state of Ruy’s car, but by the lack of paved roads. Bishop writes that they “passed under a fretwork arch, decorated with a long and faded banner” that “had been set up to celebrate the opening of the new highway to Bras[í]lia,” but “just beyond it, the paved road stopped for good” (Pr 110–11). Nevertheless, Bishop writes, just “the very thought of this new road to the capital had cheered up all of Belém considerably” (Pr 111).

44  Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazil

More than any other story of this period, Bishop’s “Trip to Vigia” offers a good example of what Mary Louise Pratt has called a “contact perspective.” Rather than focusing only on the story told by the “ ‘invader’ ” (or, in this case, the non-Brazilian, North American traveler), Pratt argues, the “ ‘contact perspective’ emphasizes how subjects get constituted in and by their relations to each other.”19 Bishop stages these moments in two key scenes in the story, the visit to the “manioc factory” and to the baroque church in Vigia, the ultimate object of the trip. Bishop describes the “manioc factory,” located behind the botequim (the local store), as an open-air affair of three thatched roofs on posts, one a round toadstool. A dozen women and girls sat on the ground, ripping the black skins off the long roots with knives. We were the funniest things they had seen in years. They tried not to laugh in our faces, but we “slayed” them. M. talked to them, but this did not increase their self-control. Zebus stood looking on, chewing their cuds. A motor with belts slanting up under the thatch, chugged away, grinding up the raw manioc. (Pr 112–13)

Here, in the Amazon, Bishop turns the camera around. Now, it is the people who live in the Amazon who are watching “strangers in a play / ​in this strangest of theatres.” These strangers are both American and upper-class Brazilians, as perceived by the people who live and work in the Amazon. At the church, Bishop stages another moment of encounter. She has climbed up on a stone wall, “the remains of another abandoned house, to get a photograph” (Pr 115). She takes the picture, but as she jumps down, she notices that “a dozen people had gathered to watch me, all looking scandalized” (Pr 115). She had “tripped, and tore [her] petticoat, which fell down below [her] skirt. The rain poured” (Pr 115). Again, Bishop turns the camera on herself in this estranging moment, making her the stranger in the play. In this movement, she is, as Jacques Lacan might have put it, “photo-graphed.”20 Bishop’s next encounter is one of high Shakespearean comedy and mock solemnity. When they all finally enter the church, “the sacristan, an old fisherman, appeared” (Pr 115). Bishop describes how “he went to a cupboard” and took out a skull, which he then handed to Bishop (Pr 115). She is subsequently left holding the skull for the duration of the sacristan’s long disquisition on the previous life of the priest, who turns out not to have been “some forgotten saint of the seventeenth century who had never been recognized,” as Bishop had originally thought, but some Father of the church who “had

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died only two years before” (Pr 115). Bishop writes, “I kept trying to hand the skull back,” but “he was too busy telling me about the final illness, his agonia, his death. It was the most wonderful thing in Vigia” (Pr 115). Whether “it” refers to the skull, the experience, the priest’s point of view or Bishop’s, the skull is returned at last from whence it came, to a “corner of the bare cupboard”—a most unexpected kind of curiosity cabinet in the Amazon. A reminder of death, but also of cultural dislocation and discomfort, the skull becomes a symbol of Bishop’s inability to fit into the picture that she frames for her readers. The final cultural exchange of the story takes place upon the travelers’ return to Belém in the “dingy” hotel café that “looks brilliant” in contrast to the dark through which they have just driven (Pr 116). Bishop explains that the poor poet again refuses anything from them (he had refused lunch earlier in the day) but a cafezinho, and pays for the coffees for everyone “behind [their] backs” (Pr 116). Bishop leaves us with the discomfort of the rich tourist who fails to negotiate even the most basic transactions; she is, quite literally, left holding the skull. Bishop also wrote a series of stories based on her travels and the movement of people around the country that have never been published but that provide a clear indication of her particular interest in these cross-cultural encounters. As her letters and notes indicate, Bishop was collecting these for a book of stories on Brazil. One of Bishop’s most complete but still unpublished short stories from the road focuses on migrant workers moving around the country. The workers in Bishop’s story “Farewell, Teresa”21 seem to be coming from the Northeast (perhaps Recife), heading to Rio in search of work. They are packed into the back of a truck, seventy-eight of them who have been traveling for eight days. Three of them have died already: an old man, whom they had buried a ways back, and two babies, one they had also buried, but the other “lay jouncing like a little stick on his mother[’]s knees.” The truck’s name (“Adiosinho, Teresa”) on the bumper is written with the s’s “the wrong way around and upside down,” a testament to the general illiteracy of the group, perhaps. Piled with suitcases, belongings, all dressed in rags, their clothes were “patched, and re-patched and re-re-patched until it seemed as if the clothes had each been made up of several different garments.” The group is mixed: “There were Negroes and whites and mulattoes; there was one Indian.” But everyone is so covered in dust from the long journey that they

46  Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazil

all look the same, “a sepia monotone.” Poverty becomes a great leveler. One teenage girl is very sick, and “she was expected to die soon.” This grim, Faulknerian story is promising in its sensitivity to the reality of migrant workers, but it lacks the critical eye made possible by Bishop’s presence as a tourist in the picture. In an unfinished account called “On the Way,”22 however, Bishop focuses again on cross-cultural encounters in her description of the people and cars that stop at a “new” filling station located “just where the ‘old’ road from Rio de Janeiro starts winding up the mountains to Petropolis.” Bishop reminds us of Brazilian optimism over the prospect of new roads (that have not yet been built) connecting remote regions of the country, for the sign says “hopefully” that the way leads “also to Brasília, San Salvador, and Recife”—the idea of driving to these places at this point being patently ridiculous. Bishop describes particularly “an enormous, black Buick, a ‘hard top’, [which] drove in a little too fast and stopped a little too suddenly in the reddish gravel.” In a wonderful image, Bishop writes that the car “swayed from stem to stern . . . ​ like a glittering pan of oscillating ink.” Class and race insert themselves into the picture. These are obviously rich people, and there is a “Negro” chauffeur, and an American voice speaking “excellent Portuguese rapidly and carelessly, but unaccented and monotonous.” The American wants coffee. The piece is undeveloped, but it contains some vivid imagery and reveals the meeting of cultures, classes, and races in filling stations along the road that Bishop obviously found fascinating. At the time Bishop was traveling, Brazil’s transportation system also reflected its highly stratified class system, so that when she traveled down the Amazon on a riverboat in 1960, richer passengers, such as Bishop, were housed in cabins in the upper decks, and the rest of the passengers strung up their hammocks on the decks below. The two did not tend to mix. Bishop also wrote of the “first-class buses” where they serve coffee at “a sort of kitchenette . . . ​ built right beside the driver and while the bus is swooping down the mountainside a boy in a white coat is busy pouring out little cups of coffee & handing them around along with little boxes of cookies labeled ‘An Offering’ ” (OA 232). Not surprisingly, Bishop develops her interest in the filling station as a locus for cross-cultural exchange in her poem called “Filling Station.” Since she placed it in the Elsewhere section of her 1965 poetry collection Questions of Travel, it is not often identified as a Brazilian poem, but Bishop indicates

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the poem’s setting in her 1955 correspondence with the New Yorker as a filling station on the road north from Rio. Howard Moss had questioned the title; he and the other New Yorker editors wanted to set the poem more obviously in Brazil; Bishop resisted these efforts: “About the title—I hadn’t thought of it being an especially Brazilian poem—couldn’t it be equally true of an out-ofthe-way filling station anywhere? The only difference is that here, of course, it’s on one of the 2 or 3 driveable roads in the country. . . . ​If you agree with me, I should think it could be called just ‘Filling Station’, if not, perhaps ‘Station #2, Rio to Bahia.’ (No one would ever dream of driving to Bahia, but that’s what the signs say.)”23 When I taught this poem recently, students found the speaker’s voice condescending compared to the speakers of Bishop’s other travel poems, such as “Arrival at Santos” or “Questions of Travel.” Perhaps that is why Bishop decided to place this poem in the Elsewhere section and not in the Brazil section. In one important detail, however, it is important to understand the poem’s Brazilian context. “Filling Station” begins with the line “Oh, but it is dirty!” and proceeds to describe the entire environment in these terms. Like some of Bishop’s prose accounts, the lives of humans become intertwined with the oil and gasoline of modern life, as well as animal life, but here the humans are diminished by the comparison, as in the following lines: Father wears a dirty, oil-soaked monkey suit that cuts him under the arms, and several quick and saucy and greasy sons assist him (it’s a family filling station), all quite thoroughly dirty. (P 125)

Then the speaker asks, “Do they live in the station?,” a question that further diminishes the family’s dignity. Finally, the speaker turns to consider some of the decorations in the station. Someone has tried to make the station seem homey. There is a “dim doily / ​draping a taboret” and a “big hirsute begonia,” testifying to a possibly motherly, domestic touch. The speaker’s questions here, unlike those of “Questions of Travel,” though, are condescending: “Why the extraneous plant? / ​Why the taboret? / ​Why, oh why, the doily?” (P 125). The poem’s ending offers a strange, generalized answer to these questions in its insistence on an unseen “somebody” who “embroidered the doily” and

48  Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazil

“waters the plant, / ​or oils it, maybe” (P 126). It is only in the final lines that Bishop reveals the more sinister (and Brazilian) dimension of this poem when this “somebody” arranges the rows of cans so that they softly say: ESSO—SO—SO—SO to high-strung automobiles. Somebody loves us all. (P 126)

When Bishop was traveling the country, the Esso brand, derived from the initials of Standard Oil, would have been ubiquitous in both the United States and Brazil (only replaced by the name Exxon in the 1970s). As George Monteiro has pointed out, Esso may remind us of “Standard Oil’s formidable presence in the Brazilian economy . . . ​and thus a considerable force to be taken into account in the country’s politics.”24 And the brand was connected closely to Brazil’s development during this period. As Monteiro notes, “The rallying cry for development in Brazil that emerged from the Aliança para o Progresso (Alliance for Progress) was soon parodied as ‘Aliança para o Progresso da Esso.’ ”25 Launched by the Kennedy administration in 1961, the Alliance for Progress was a massive, U.S. government-backed Marshall Plan to promote economic growth, capitalism, democracy, and social reform in Brazil and the rest of Latin America, with the promise of large infusions of cash from the United States. But as Thomas Skidmore and many other Latin American historians have noted, the Alliance for Progress “proved to be largely a tissue of illusions.”26 Bishop wrote about it in a letter to Katharine White at the New Yorker. Interestingly, she uses a grammatical construction in the letter that echoes her Esso—so—so—so line: “Brazil goes from bad to worse—to worse—to worse—until one doesn’t see what keeps things going at all. The government now seems to be trying to please the U.S.A. as well as the communists, however. One witty old journalist, retired now, was interviewed & asked what he thought about the Alliance for Progress. He said he thought it was a very nice idea—for all the Latin American countries to get together and help the United States to progress.”27 What does all this mean in terms of the poem’s stance? Monteiro reconstructs this dialogue about Progress and United States’ imperialism as a “hidden meaning of that now ‘historical’ progression of cans designed by, ironically, ‘somebody who loves us all.’ ”28 While Monteiro does not tease out the implications of such a reading, I would agree that, given Bishop’s corre-

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spondence with the New Yorker about the poem and the Brazilian situation, that discourse may very well be behind the poem, and it would be further supported by Bishop’s interest in these “contact zones” along the road. Read this way, the final lines, ending with “Somebody loves us all,” are sinister, suggesting the corporate takeover of the family and the country, poor and dirty and working for the Man. In such a reading, the gentle effect of the repeated Esso—so—so—so serves to re-create the stupefying effect of paternalistic companies that lull their workers into compliance. Compare this to the final lines of Robert Lowell’s 1964 “For the Union Dead”: “Everywhere, / ​giant finned cars nose forward like fish; / ​a savage servility / ​slides by on grease” (CP 378). But Bishop’s models for this corporate critique may be more Latin American at this point than North American. Pablo Neruda’s “Standard Oil,” “United Fruit Company,” and “Anaconda Copper” all come to mind when considering the presence of Esso in Brazil. Bishop spent a month with Neruda and his wife in Cuernavaca, Mexico, in 1942, and her own poem “Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore” was inspired by Neruda’s “Alberto Rojas Jiménez Comes Flying.” The final lines of Bishop’s “Filling Station,” then, place the poem powerfully in a Brazilian context, as well as in the broader context of the mid-century, anti-imperialist critique of corporate America that Latin American poets were making. This critique at least partially saves the poem from what seems an initially condescending attitude. One could argue that in the course of Bishop’s Brazilian career she moved from the position of the tourist to that of the traveler, even in the short space of five years, from 1951 when she arrived and wrote “Arrival at Santos” to 1956 when she published “Questions of Travel.” Bishop calls our attention in many of her travel poems to the often unreasonable demands and outsize expectations of the tourist in order, ultimately, to make a distinction between the tourist and the traveler, who is a wiser, more sensitive individual, more attuned to the culture that he or she is passing through than the tourist who just wants to collect souvenirs. In Bishop’s best poems about travel, the two registers (home/travel) are operating. And those terms mean different things for different kinds of travelers. So, in the first of Bishop’s multivoiced Brazil travel poems, “Arrival at Santos,” the voice at the beginning of the poem belongs to the tourist who judges everything against presumably where she comes from: “Here is a coast; here is a harbor; / ​here, after a meager diet of horizon, is some scenery” (P 87). The poem’s speaker is self-aware enough to reprimand this approach: “Oh, tourist, / ​is this how this country is going to

50  Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazil

answer you // and your immodest demands for a different world, and a better life, and complete comprehension” (P 87). But the poem’s lyric “I” is also this same tourist who wonders about whether the country has a flag, “and coins,” and “paper money,” and hopes that “the customs officials will speak English” (P 87–88). The later poem, “Questions of Travel,” also features these voices but, further, this poem adopts a critical mode of questioning in order to get at what ideas of travel and home might mean. At the end of the poem, Bishop quotes Pascal, the seventeenth-century mathematician and philosopher, who wrote in Pensées, “I have often said that man’s unhappiness arises from one thing alone: that he cannot remain quietly in his room. A man who has enough to live on would not go to sea or lay a siege, if he knew how to enjoy staying at home.”29 Bishop’s poem refocuses Pascal’s formulation: What is it, the poem asks, that drives us to travel? What are we looking for? In this search for new experience, what are the costs? (If we’re going to “lay a siege” maybe we should stay at home, after all.) The poem asks a series of now well-known questions about the ethics of travel: “Is it right to be watching strangers in a play / ​in this strangest of theatres?” “Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?” Unlike Pascal, Bishop does not offer answers to her questions. One could apply these questions to travel experiences in general, not just to Brazil, which makes the poem resonant for any reader who has traveled and thought at all about his or her response to, and impact on, other cultures. But the longest section of the poem focuses on carefully selected and particular detail that is specific to Brazilian culture in the middle of the twentieth century. It is no accident surely that the central images of the poem coalesce in a filling station along the road, “the sites of peculiar knowledge,” as Kim Fortuny has noted.30 The poem for the sake of discussion can be divided into four sections. The first section describes the scenery, but in metaphorical terms that give it a mythic, ageless, timeless sort of quality (as in the opening of the much-later “Santarém”) and emphasizes the country’s natural beauty; it also contains a bit of that tourist voice that we heard in “Arrival at Santos.” The second section asks questions about why we travel, and considers ethical questions about how we should respond to others that we encounter in our travels. The third provides a detailed description of Brazilian sights seen along the road, and the fourth and final section features the words not of the tourist but of the traveler, who attempts to give meaning to the experience, who seizes that moment of “golden silence” to write down what she has seen.

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Bishop establishes movement and change (the dynamism of the road) from the beginning. Here the traveler seems to see the world from the perspective of someone who has recently arrived, perhaps, since her reading of tropical excess implies a comparative framework: There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams hurry too rapidly down to the sea, and the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops makes them spill over the sides in soft slow-motion, turning to waterfalls under our very eyes. (P 91)

This is indeed a bedazzled early view of Brazil, since Bishop’s descriptions in letters to friends from Samambaia just after arriving try out the same imagery. In a 1952 letter to Anny Baumann, Bishop wrote that “a few clouds spill over the tops of the mountains exactly like waterfalls in slow motion” (OA 243). It serves her well in establishing a moving and changing world where everything is changing into something else “under our very eyes,” so that home itself is an indeterminate place. Everything is “travelling, travelling” (P 91). So unstable is the ground on which the reader stands at the beginning of the poem that the first line of the next stanza pulls us up short and sets up a kind of resistance: “Think of the long trip home.” Traveling and dwelling are thus clearly established as the binary at the poem’s center. We are then asked a series of questions that run from the general to the particular: “Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?” It is on this question that most of the rest of the poem centers. “Should” clearly means a sense of obligation and duty, and it goes with the question raised at the end of the poem about Pascal: “Is it lack of imagination that makes us come to imagined places, not just stay at home? Or could Pascal have been not entirely right about just sitting quietly in one’s room?[”] (P 92)

The second question, “Where should we be today?,” is deliberately ambiguous, repeating the “should” of the first question but with less clarity. Does Bishop mean to suggest conditionality: Where should we be today, if we had stayed home and not traveled? Or does she mean to suggest some kind of combination of duty and anticipation: Where should we be (travel) today? And being itself suggests the opposite of travel, a kind of continuous dwelling in the moment, as it were. The entire poem ends with the verb “be.”

52  Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazil

The question, deliberately ambiguous, leads to other questions until the pressure of too many questions drives the speaker to a state of exasperation over the pressure of her own desires: “Oh, must we dream our dreams / ​and have them, too? / ​And have we room / ​for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?” (P 91). The suggestion of consuming these experiences as we would food, as Fortuny has pointed out, underscores the American “gluttony” in all things, including travel, in its echo of having our cake and eating it too, and its question of whether we really have “room” for more.31 It is the poem’s turn to the particular sights seen along the road in the third stanza, though, that relieves the pressure of the tourist’s desires and marks this specifically as a Brazilian poem. This is an important shift in the poem. It is through this descriptive section that the speaker moves away from touristic surface, desires, and judgments, into the country and the mind of the traveler who seeks a greater understanding of the world in which she moves, the drive “to the interior,” as it were. And what is interesting about these descriptions is that Bishop conveys them with negative constructions, referring back to those first two questions: “Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?” and “Where should we be today?” The stanza begins, “But surely it would have been a pity / ​not to have seen the trees along this road, / ​really exaggerated in their beauty, / ​not to have seen them gesturing,” and so on (P 91). The speaker describes what she sees and, therefore, makes it present, but then also negates that feeling of presence with negative constructions that create a simultaneous sense of absence. We will never feel satisfyingly full from these experiences. What does Bishop’s long descriptive section, centering as it does on the road and the filling station, achieve, ultimately? The section itself is the longest in the poem (a total of thirty lines—longer than the first two stanzas of twelve and seventeen lines, respectively). The stanza begins with a theatrical flourish (“But surely it would have been a pity / ​not to have seen the trees along this road, / ​really exaggerated in their beauty, / ​. . . gesturing / ​like noble pantomimists, robed in pink”), ushering in the complex interconnected, interrelated images that the poet brings together under the inspiration of the filling station itself: —Not to have had to stop for gas and heard the sad, two-noted, wooden tune of disparate wooden clogs carelessly clacking over

Letters from the Road  53 a grease-stained filling-station floor. (In another country the clogs would all be tested. Each pair there would have identical pitch.) —A pity not to have heard the other, less primitive music of the fat brown bird who sings above the broken gasoline pump in a bamboo church of Jesuit baroque: three towers, five silver crosses. —Yes, a pity not to have pondered, blurr’dly and inconclusively, on what connection can exist for centuries between the crudest wooden footwear and, careful and finicky, the whittled fantasies of wooden cages. —Never to have studied history in the weak calligraphy of songbirds’ cages. (P 92)

As Ashley Brown, who spent time with Bishop in Brazil, noted long ago, “Questions of Travel” very specifically delineates “things that one can see and hear along a Brazilian highway—say, along the road to Petropolis.”32 Brown, in a moment of nostalgia that is not part of Bishop’s poem, laments the possible loss of these things in a parenthetical statement: “(Some of these phenomena are, I fear, doomed as highway culture in Brazil resembles ours more and more.)”33 These are the sights that the traveler might have missed if she had “not had to stop for gas.” Bishop re-creates the “tune” itself with her alliterative and satisfying descriptive “clogs / ​carelessly clacking” and the layering of years of grease and toil in the compound words “grease-stained filling-station.” Then she introduces a new note—that of the “fat brown bird / ​ who sings above the broken gasoline pump.” These lines create a dynamic relationship of elements that reveal something about Brazil itself and lead the poet (and the reader) to ponder the connection that exists between these three things: clogs, cages, and gasoline pump. We can think of each reference as a “nodal point,” to borrow from Freud’s dream language, condensing in one image a complex series of associations and connection points to immigration in Brazil and a long history of cross-cultural exchange. Embedded in these references, as Fortuny has noted, is an encapsulated history of colonialism in Brazil through which Bishop deepens “the political implications of foreign travel.”34 Take the “wooden clogs,” for instance. Bishop mentions this footwear in

54  Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazil

her Brazil Life World Library book in a chapter on race and cultural assimilation in Brazil as the “usual costume” of the Portuguese immigrants who made up “the largest group of immigrants” into Brazil.35 According to Bishop, they wore “wooden clogs, extra wide trousers, undershirts, and large floppy berets” (Pr 232). They often pushed handcarts around the cities delivering goods, and they were the subject of ridicule by Brazilians who called them burros sem rabos, “Donkeys without Tails” (Pr 232). In this case, it is not native Brazilian workers who are being exploited but more recent Portuguese immigrants. Those who were conquerors (the subject of the poem “Brazil, January 1, 1502,” which immediately precedes “Questions of Travel”) are now conquered. The exploiter becomes the exploited in an endless chain that loops through the cycles of immigration to Brazil. At about the same time that the Portuguese were colonizing Brazil in the sixteenth century, the Jesuits were establishing missions: “Between 1541 and 1556,” Fortuny writes, “Jesuit priests founded numerous missions under St. Ignatius throughout Brazil, where their primary business was to propagate the faith by instructing the unlettered on Christian principle. Thus ‘finicky’ wooden cages of ‘Jesuit baroque’ tell a haphazard story of the fate of the Catholic Church in colonial Brazil.”36 Finally, Fortuny notes that the “birdcage hangs above ‘the broken gasoline pump,’ ” testifying to the presence of Big Oil, and, in terms of the previous chain of signifiers, points to the latest set of conquerors in Brazil’s history of colonialism.37 The fact that “Filling Station” with its Esso cans dates from about the same period serves to reinforce this observation. Bishop writes with Pascal at her side, since he has called up one of the problems of leaving one’s room: besieging towns and exploiting others. Fortuny notes that Pascal wasn’t very keen on “the Jesuits’ penchant for travel” either.38 But the connections are not just ones of conquest. The story is more complex and confusing than that. The speaker of Bishop’s poem ponders “blurredly and inconclusively” the connections between the “wooden footwear” and the “wooden cages.” In a passage she marked in Gilberto Freyre’s The Mansions and the Shanties,39 we learn more about the complicated history of wooden footwear in Brazil and its cross-cultural implications. Freyre writes that people of all classes in Brazil wore “the wooden shoes of rural Portuguese origin” in the cities—from businessmen to “free Negroes,” to the “brothers of the Blessed Sacrament.”40 Freyre’s account, then, connects wooden footwear to wooden cages through the Catholic priesthood and its footwear. In another passage that Bishop marked in Freyre’s book, the word “clacking” to describe

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the sound of the wooden shoes “over the “paving stones of Recife, Salvador, Rio de Janeiro” appears in the translation, the same word that Bishop uses in “Questions of Travel.”41 These, then, are some of the possible connections that exist between the clogs, cages, and gasoline pump. If the traveler had stayed at home, she would never have been able to study the “history in / ​the weak calligraphy of songbirds’ cages.” In that “calligraphy,” a word from the ancient Greek containing beauty (kallos) and writing (graphein), Bishop fuses the two arts (the visual and the written) that have dominated the interactions of the stanza and called attention to her own craft as a writer who crafts these experiences for the reader. In the final simile of the stanza, Bishop brings in two more dimensions of Brazilian life and history, the politics and the spectacular rainstorms that pound down suddenly during the rainy season: —And never to have had to listen to rain so much like politicians’ speeches: two hours of unrelenting oratory and then a sudden golden silence in which the traveller takes a notebook, writes. . . . ​(P 92)

At which point the traveler seizes the opportunity of that “golden silence” to write in her notebook the question inspired by Pascal. All these questions demonstrate how much the poem itself is driven by the generative space of writing as it informs, shapes, defines, and creates travel experience for the reader. It is a transaction that involves others, that cuts across cultures and histories. “The road is life,” Jack Kerouac wrote. The road is history, Elizabeth Bishop might have written about her 1956 poem “Questions of Travel.” Or, as she had put it in her 1947 poem “At the Fishhouses”: “Knowledge is historical.” Because of the fundamental process of history of which the traveler is a part, Bishop reminds us in the last stanza that these choices are “never wide and never free”: [“]Continent, city, country, society: the choice is never wide and never free. And here, or there . . . ​No. Should we have stayed at home, wherever that may be?” (P 92)

The third line of this last stanza reprises the second line of the previous stanza but shifts the formulation to the past tense: “stay at home” becomes “stayed at home.” The change implies that the traveler has not stayed at home.

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The question can only be asked after one has already traveled. The two questions about travel also presuppose a home either that one does not leave or to which one returns. Either way, wherever one’s home may be, Bishop traces the arc of travel—to go away and to return. The aaba rhyme scheme reinforces the parameters of any choice, including one to travel: “society” curtails “free” and “be,” and the triple rhyme contains the word “home.” Both final stanzas contain the word “home,” in fact, which suggests how far the speaker of this poem has come from the outsized touristic desires expressed in the early poem “Arrival at Santos.” That poem deals almost exclusively with the desires of the tourist and the imaginary expectations she brings with her when she arrives in the country. “Questions of Travel,” with all its intersecting Brazilian particularities, is written by a poet who has chosen to stay, one who has driven to the interior, and one who can meditate on the “connections” between herself and other “travelers” who have opted to leave their homes and stay—conquerors, immigrants, missionaries. In making that choice, they, too, have shaped the history and culture of a country. The filling station along the road provides a key locus for these connections. Bishop’s 1965 poem “Under the Window: Ouro Prêto” reverses the outward-​bound road journeys of Bishop’s travel poems and positions the speaker as a dweller in a small Brazilian town who watches from her window as the trucks arrive from out of town. Much as Bishop’s first visit to Ouro Prêto with Macedo Soares caused “quite a sensation,” so too the arrival of the trucks “overawes them all.” Their arrival is overdetermined: Bishop not only describes the trucks in letters about the town, but, more important, she uses them as a signifier for “the dying out of local cultures,” as she puts it in one 1962 letter to Lowell.42 The comment was spurred by a Great Village historical pamphlet from the early 1900s sent to Bishop by a Nova Scotian aunt: The dying out of local cultures seems to me one of the most tragic things in this century—and it’s true everywhere, I suppose—in Brazil, at any rate. Small towns far inland were real centers; they had teachers of music and dancing and languages—they made beautiful furniture here—and built beautiful churches— and now they’re all dead as door nails, and broken-down trucks arrive bringing powdered milk and Japanese jewelry and TIME magazine. (WIA 401)

Once again, Bishop uses Time magazine as an all-purpose signifier for the overall homogenization of culture that she observed in both North and South America at this time. Bishop loved small towns, and she fills her letters about Ouro Prêto,

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where she eventually bought her own house, with details about its rich history and culture. Founded in 1698, Ouro Prêto (the name means Black Gold)43 is the former capital of Minas Gerais, Brazil’s key mining region. The beautifully preserved eighteenth-century town, known for its baroque churches and stone and wood carvings, was designated a national monument in 1933 and a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1980.44 One of the most important aspects of local culture in Ouro Prêto for Bishop was the artistry of the ­eighteenth-​ century sculptor known as Aleijadinho, or the “little cripple.” His extraordinarily exquisite wood carvings can be seen in many of the churches of Ouro Prêto, but it is the group of twelve soapstone statues of Old Testament prophets in Congonhas (seventy-two miles from Ouro Prêto) that led UNESCO to also name that spot a World Heritage Site. Bishop wrote about this religious site in letters, and was enthusiastic about Aleijadinho. She brought many visitors to Congonhas when they were traveling in Brazil. She wanted to write a piece about Aleijadinho, although she never did. Bishop described the scene in a letter to Pearl Kazin: “The prophets are really ­impressive—almost spooky, they look so real at a distance. . . . ​There were the prophets, brooding and prophesying doom and destruction, against the stars—really quite a sight above that funny, completely dead little town” (OA 262). During the arc of this letter to Kazin, Bishop also completes the arc of her trip—the arc of all these trips, returning home to her studio at Samambaia: “This place is wonderful, Pearl. I just spend too much time in looking at it and not working enough. I only hope you don’t have to get to be forty-two before you feel so at home” (OA 262). It is the dynamic of traveling and coming home again that distinguishes Bishop’s letters from the road during all her time in Brazil. Bishop eventually bought one of the oldest houses in Ouro Prêto, a house that she lovingly restored from 1965 to 1972 (fig. 5). The slave quarters underneath her house are a reminder, as is the local museum, of the town’s slave-holding past, which Bishop refers to often in her letters. In a 1965 letter to Lowell, for instance, she includes details of slavery in her description of the home of Lilli Correia de Araújo, where she was staying at the time. ­Lilli’s house, she told Lowell, is “a huge affair built on a cliff at the edge of the town, with a gold-mine in the back yard—also ruined slave quarters, gardens away up the hill—level after level—and water running down a marvelous set of ­aqueducts, tunnels, fountains, stone tanks, etc.—now all overgrown with ferns and moss. She has a ghastly collection of leg-irons dug up in the grounds” (WIA 588–59). The home that Bishop eventually purchased in Ouro Prêto was actually “across the way” from Lilli’s home45 at the edge of town.

58  Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazil

Figure 5. Bishop’s house in Ouro Prêto. (Author photo 2011)

Lilli was the widow of the Brazilian artist Pedro Luiz Correia de Araújo (EAP 334). Archival evidence, including impassioned “love” letters that Bishop wrote to Lilli during some of the troubled later years of her relationship with Lota, indicate that the two women had an affair.46 Lilli also owned the pousada (a small hotel) in town, Chico Rei, named after the African tribal king who along with his family had been “bought at the slave market in Rio de Janeiro” and then “managed to buy his family’s freedom in Ouro Pr[ê]to . . . by smuggling gold dust from the mine under his fingernails and in his hair, and then by working his own gold mine . . . ​from 1702 to 1730.”47 Bishop stayed here during her early visits to the town, and we were able to get rooms in this charming inn when we traveled to Ouro Prêto in 2011. We were surprised to find an original letter written by Lilli to Elizabeth Bishop in the display case in the front room. The inn’s various rooms are named after writers and artists who stayed here, including Bishop herself, Vinícius de Moraes, Burle Marx, Pablo Neruda, and others. Bishop dedicated “Under the Window: Ouro Prêto” to Lilli, and, as she writes in a letter to Howard Moss at the New Yorker in October 1965, the events described in the poem unfold “out my window at [Lilli’s] house.”48

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She and Moss had been exchanging letters on the subject of this dedication. Moss had asked her to remove it, but Bishop insisted on keeping it, in part for personal reasons (Lilli had read the poem and told Bishop it was the “first poem she had ever understood in her life,” and Bishop “was so touched” she decided on the dedication).49 But she also wanted to reinforce the Brazilian cultural and historical dimensions of the poem’s setting. As she wrote, “I know the name means nothing to the reader—however it is obviously a Brazilian name (although a Dane bears it) and so I think gives a bit more color, mystery perhaps, etc.”50 In a September 19, 1965, letter to Lowell written from Lilli’s house at Ouro Prêto, Bishop describes the scene that inspired the poem: There’s a big spring that runs out just below the house—an iron pipe where there used to be a fountain—and everyone stops, always to have a drink there— dogs, donkeys, cars—besides all the pedestrians. Just now came a huge truck, painted pink and blue and decorated with rose-buds—On the bumper it says “Here I am, the one you’ve waited for.” Now all hands are taking a drink.—I can see seven churches and a few odd chapels. People keep stopping by to try to sell Lilli things—today so far two saints—beauties,—stirrups, wooden bowls, lettuce, locks and keys, and a wire egg-basket—so you see there is never a dull moment. (WIA 589)

Many details from this letter are also featured in the poem—the iron pipe that used to be a fountain where everyone stops, the trucks, the people, the animals, the message on the bumper (slightly altered in the poem). Although “Under the Window: Ouro Prêto” is the only complete poem Bishop wrote about the town, it is a key poem of Bishop’s Brazil years, representing as it does a staging ground for encounters in a changing world. It has not been widely discussed as a Brazilian poem, perhaps because it is not grouped with the Brazilian section of Bishop’s 1965 volume Questions of Travel, although it certainly would have fit there. Or maybe it is because it is underappreciated by Bishop’s readers. The poem explores the dimensions of a changing community and implies the threat posed by accelerated industrialization to the people and the environment. Like “The Armadillo” and “The Riverman,” as well as Bishop’s descriptive writing on the road from Rio to Petrópolis, this poem initiates an environmental ethics. The poem’s observer (implied in the title of the poem) watches the pageantry of small-town life from her window as people collect water from the town’s single watering hole: mothers with babies

60  Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazil . . . muffled to the eyes in all the heat—unwrap them, lower them, and give them drinks of water lovingly from dirty hands. . . . ​(P 175)

An old man “with the stick and sack, / ​meandering again. . . . / ​. . . finally gets out his enamelled mug” to enjoy the cool water; a huge stack of laundry arrives “all on its own, three feet above the ground. / ​Oh, no—a small black boy is underneath. // Six donkeys come behind their ‘godmother,’ ” and so on. This “small black boy” shares an affinity with Bishop’s dignified “black boy Balthazár” in “Twelfth Morning; or What You Will” (P 108), a 1964 poem set in Cabo Frio, Brazil, where Bishop and Macedo Soares often vacationed

Figure 6. Macedo Soares with large fish in Cabo Frio. (VC 113.4; Courtesy of Vassar College)

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at Christmas (fig. 6). At the end of the poem, Balthazár approaches with a “four-gallon can” on his head that “keeps flashing that the world’s a pearl, and I / ​I am / ​its highlight!” (P 108–9). The Shakespearean references and the dignity afforded the people going about the business of the town link these two poems. “The seven ages of man,” as the speaker tells us later in “Under the Window,” quoting from Jacques’s monologue in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, “are talkative / ​and soiled and thirsty” (P 176). It is a snapshot of small-town, provincial life with touches of humor and small-town drama: “The conversations are simple: about food, / ​or, ‘When my mother combs my hair it hurts.’ / ​ ‘Women.’ ‘Women!’ Women in red dresses // and plastic sandals” (P 175). Apart from the plastic, we could be in the middle of the late-nineteenth-­ century world of The Diary of “Helena Morley,” which Bishop had translated, until the trucks arrive. But there are indications earlier in the poem of a changing world. In another echo from Jacques’s monologue (“All the world’s a stage”), Bishop describes how this watering hole “used to be / ​a fountain, here where all the world still stops” (P 175). Giving the description another theatrical twist with its mask of comedy and tragedy, the observer tells us, “The water used to run out of the mouths / ​of three green soapstone faces. (One face laughed / ​and one face cried; the middle one just looked . . .)” (P 175). But clearly the town has not seen fit to keep the fountain in good repair, because these soapstone faces (a common material used in the region for both utility and art, as in the Congonhas statues) is now “patched up with plaster” and housed “in the museum.” Now the water runs “from a single iron pipe” (P 175). The museum becomes a signifier for the passing of one kind of society into another, just as it does in “Crusoe in England.” The arrival of the trucks in the eleventh stanza of this seventeen-stanza poem heralds the change that Bishop prepared for earlier with the movement of objects of everyday use into the museum where they become arti­ facts. “HERE AM I FOR WHOM YOU HAVE BEEN WAITING,” the first truck’s bumper sticker announces, mockingly apocalyptic (P 176). It is “a big new truck,” a “Mercedes-Benz,” which arrives “to overawe them all” (P 176). With its brilliant assonance of “awe” and “all,” Bishop emphasizes the loss of individual identity that this near-religious overvaluation of the trucks brings about. Bishop’s startling imagery in this section also emphasizes mixture and change, so that the truck’s body is “painted,” incongruously, “with throbbing

62  Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazil

rosebuds,” and another truck that “grinds up / ​in a blue cloud of burning oil” features “a syphilitic nose” (P 176). The poem’s final lines depend on this mixing of nature and culture:          Oil has seeped into the margins of the ditch of standing water and flashes or looks upward brokenly, like bits of mirror—no, more blue than that: like tatters of the Morpho butterfly. (P 176)

I find this an amazing ending after all the earlier descriptive activity of the poem. Bishop refers to the genus Morpho butterfly (and probably specifically the species of the Blue Morpho) that is characteristic of the Southern Hemisphere, not the Northern one. The word Morpho (from the ancient Greek for changed or modified) calls attention to Bishop’s transformation of the natural and cultural, social world of the poem in the final image—a broken world (with its broken bits of mirror and its butterfly wing tatters) but also somehow luminous. One is reminded of the rainbows caused by the oil from the boat in Bishop’s 1939 poem “The Fish,” which similarly calls our attention to human intervention in the natural world. It is her signature for change. But here Bishop deals with a whole community, not just a single relationship between the fisher and the fish. Finally, this luminosity echoes the luminous world suggested in “Gypsophilia,” set in Samambaia, and hints at a more personal sense of loss. The poem emerges out of the difficult final period in Bishop’s relationship with Macedo Soares, which ended with Lota’s 1967 suicide. Indeed, for Lowell, always an astute reader of Bishop, the poem offers a temporary stay against catastrophe: I carry your “Under the Window” in my billfold, and even read it aloud to Dr. Baumann51 late in December before I went off to the hospital. Much to say. Your style never seems mannered, just marvelous, unguessable description, now as natural as your letters, but full of design and compression. Yes, you have man’s journey, his seven ages, many wonderful flashes, like the second car’s syphilitic nose, all the way thru, then the great rise, just where it is needed, with the Morpho. It’s like going on the pilgrimage of your Fish, or the poem ending awful and wonderful,52 yet the journey is as utterly new and surprising as a first discovery of what life is all about. And so it is. . . . ​Maybe, if I carry your “Window” around long enough, I’ll learn. It’s a kind of patience and freshness. (WIA 613)

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Lowell was given to carrying Bishop’s poems around in his wallet—sometimes to “amaze” people, as he said of “The Fish,” and sometimes as a reminder of what poetry can do to shore up the flagging human spirit. Here, Bishop gives us the rainbow of the pageantry of life through her close observations of a quintessentially Brazilian small-town scene. Bishop’s Brazilian travels inform her poetry from the 1951 “Arrival at Santos” to just before her death in 1979 with “Santarém.” These poems and writings from Brazil speak to the tourist’s dreams and the traveler’s incomplete but more profound knowledge and understanding. They reflect Bishop’s developing poetic aesthetic as she began to understand Brazilian history and culture and her own place in it. This knowledge transformed her meditations on both travel and home. Also crucial to Bishop’s developing knowledge of the country is her study of Brazilian Portuguese, which is an important point of mediation between Bishop and her experiences of living, working, and traveling in the country, featuring as it does Bishop’s witty stories of Lota’s mistakes in English and Bishop’s own letters documenting her struggles with spoken Portuguese. Lota was fluent in English, so Bishop found herself speaking Portuguese at home mostly with the servants and workmen. She learned the language primarily through translation and never really mastered spoken Portuguese. As she said in a 1966 interview with Ashley Brown, “After all these years, I’m like a dog: I understand everything that’s said to me, but I don’t speak it very well.”53 But Bishop was a proficient reader and translator of the language into English, and it is Bishop’s role as translator that I will turn to now as an important and largely unexplored aspect of Bishop’s Brazilian career.

Three

Bishop’s Brazilian Translations

If a work does not compel us, it is untranslatable. —Yves Bonnefoy

In his 2010 book Brazil on the Rise, Larry Rohter claims that Elizabeth Bishop “still stands as one of the superb translators of modern Brazilian poetry.”1 Justin Read ranks her “among the most important translators of the twentieth century” because, in translating such Brazilian “luminaries” as Carlos Drummond de Andrade, João Cabral de Melo Neto, and Manuel Bandeira, Bishop brought “Brazilian modernismo to an Anglo American audience for the first time.”2 Bishop’s final translation project, an anthology of twentieth-century Brazilian poetry, which she edited with Emanuel Brasil, was first published in 1972 to enthusiastic reviews and is still in print. The anthology was a thoroughly cross-cultural endeavor. In addition to working with a coeditor who was himself Brazilian, Bishop brought together many of her American poetry colleagues in her final translation effort, including James Merrill, June Jordan, W. S. Merwin, Mark Strand, and Richard Wilbur, making this anthology a truly inter-American effort. Meanwhile, while her poetry anthology (the last of her translation projects) stands as one of Bishop’s most important achievements as a translator, her first project, the three-hundred-page prose

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translation The Diary of “Helena Morley,” published in 1957, has been reissued several times since then, most recently in 2008 by Virago Press. Bishop’s translations continue to appear in the Latin American anthologies used in many classrooms today,3 and they span the whole of her career in Brazil from the early 1950s to the early 1970s. In addition to the memoir and her help with Henrique Mindlin’s Modern Architecture in Brazil that I ­already mentioned, Bishop published Clarice Lispector’s stories, the work of a number of Brazilian poets, and several Brazilian sambas in the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Kenyon Review. And yet, apart from a handful of articles on the subject, there has been very little critical traffic on Bishop’s translations. If we place Bishop’s Brazilian career, however, in the context of the Brazilian texts she translated, a complex and nuanced cross-cultural dialogue between North America and Brazil and back again emerges. In short, looking at Bishop’s development as a translator places her in a Pan-American context. We can then say not only that north and south was an important axis for Bishop’s career, but that Bishop’s career in Brazil provides a starting point for a consideration of what Gustavo Pérez Firmat has called a “North–South orientation” in literary studies.4 More than twenty years ago, Pérez Firmat lamented the fact that there was very little cross-disciplinary interaction or dialogue “between ‘Americanists’ and ‘Latin Americanists,’ ” a situation he hoped to begin to remedy with the publication of the collection of essays Do the Americas Have a Common Literature?5 The collection brought together scholars who worked to juxtapose North and South American writers in what Pérez Firmat called “inter-American investigations.”6 The collection remains a relevant model for this kind of scholarship, and, yet, in Bishop Studies, at least, such scholarship is in its infancy. Most of the comparative discussion of Bishop in this country has placed her firmly in a North American context with her contemporaries: Lowell, Berryman, Jarrell, Merrill. Or with her modernist precursors: Moore, Stevens. But Bishop shares many characteristics with the Brazilian authors she chose to translate, sometimes more so than with her mid-century American contemporaries. In Brazil, the most significant study to date that breaks this paradigm is Maria Lúcia Milléo Martins’s excellent 2006 comparative critical study in Portuguese of Bishop and the Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Duas Artes (Two Arts).7 The problem remains the language, as very few North American Bishop scholars have studied Portuguese. Moreover, translation has been a two-way street with regards to Bishop

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and Brazil. Translations of Bishop’s poetry by famous Brazilian poets, such as Manuel Bandeira, appeared in Brazilian publications during her lifetime, but those efforts have picked up in recent years and continue into the twenty-first century. Not only is there a scholarly community teaching and writing about Bishop’s work in Portuguese, but translations of Bishop’s poetry into Portuguese continue to appear, including Paulo Henriques Britto’s translation of Bishop’s poems based on Brazilian subjects, Poemas do Brasil, published in São Paulo in 1999. In an article in Portuguese about Britto’s translation of Bishop’s “The Burglar of Babylon,” Brazilian scholar Thaís Flores Nogueira Diniz demonstrates how multiple acts of translation between cultures can reveal layers of cultural exchange and mutual understanding.8 Nogueira Diniz notes that Bishop’s use of the ballad form effectively “translates” an incident common to the favelas of Rio in order to reveal the inequalities of the social class system for an English-speaking audience. In order to convey the same social critique and feel of Bishop’s original poem in Portuguese, Britto uses even more colloquial language than Bishop, Nogueira Diniz argues, capturing a fluency and informality that one might find in song.9 These multiple acts of translation represent a well-established cross-cultural dialogue between Bishop and Brazil that has yet to be explored with the careful attention it deserves. Read has argued that Bishop can be characterized “as one of the great border-crossers of any American literature—a Canadian-U.S.-​­American,10 working-/upper-class lesbian poet/prosaicist/translator, who owned a house in Brazil and a chair at Harvard University.”11 Read goes so far as to say that “all” of Bishop’s “work operates in translation between disparate parts of the Americas.”12 What does Bishop’s career look like in such an inter-American context? What kind of cross-cultural scholarship can such a comparison open up in Bishop Studies? My aim here is not to determine whether Bishop’s translations are “good” or “bad,” but rather to analyze some of the choices she made as a translator that reveal underlying ideologies of race, gender, class, ethnicity, culture, and politics in the cross-cultural context of the United States and Brazil in the 1950s and 1960s. For a translator must make choices in order to make one culture “legible” to another, choices that may reveal something about the whole climate of the poet’s world, and of the three nations—­ Canada, the United States, and Brazil—that exist within the poet.13 In 1953, a year and a half after arriving in Brazil, Bishop undertook her first translation project—the longest she would ever attempt. It was Minha Vida de

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Menina, the journal kept by a young girl who grew up in the diamond mining town of Diamantina in the Minas Gerais region of northeastern Brazil just after the abolition of slavery in 1888 and the beginning of the republic in 1889. The author was Helena Morley (a pseudonym for Alice Dayrell Caldeira Brant), and so Bishop eventually titled her translation The Diary of ­“Helena Morley.” Friends had recommended the book to her in 1952, and Bishop initially began her translation in order to “teach myself Portuguese,” as she wrote to Robert Lowell, but then “decided it really might be quite successful in translation” (WIA 154). Bishop’s letters to Lowell reflect that she undertook the translation for at least three reasons: she loved the book; she thought it would help her learn Portuguese; and she wanted to make money. From the beginning, Bishop thought the book would sell well. Bishop told Lowell in a July 1953 letter that she was translating “Helena Morley” with Lota and that she was “positive” it would “be a success if we can sell it to a U.S. publisher” (WIA 141). In a memorial article in Partisan Review, Pearl Kazin Bell even quotes Bishop as saying that she thought the diary was a “sure-fire Book of the Month Club” selection.14 Eventually, it seems, Bishop was right, at least in part, about the diary’s success, although not to the extent that she had hoped. The memoir was widely reviewed in such publications as the New Statesman, the New York Times, and the New Yorker, and Bishop wrote in a January 1958 letter to Lowell that it was “doing awfully well, it seems” (WIA 251). Readers from V. S. Pritchett, reviewing the first publication of Bishop’s translation in the New Statesman in 1958,15 to Kasia Boddy, reviewing its reissue in the British newspaper The Telegraph in 2008,16 have found the feisty, generous, witty storyteller “Helena Morley” a great read, and Bishop clearly found the story compelling enough to spend three years translating it. The British writer Diana Athill wrote about this book a few years ago in a column published in the Guardian.17 Writers for the column were prompted to recall books they had discovered while traveling that had sparked a simultaneous journey of the imagination. Athill read Bishop’s translation of the diary in the early 1960s on board a ship bound for Lesbos and was immediately “transported from an Aegean steamer in the 60s to a tiny diamond-mining town in a remote corner of Brazil in the 1890s.”18 Athill, like many readers before and after her, including Bishop herself, was captivated by the “wonderfully observant, intelligent, critical, humorous, loving and sometimes bumptious child” that tells the story and whose voice comes through engagingly in Bishop’s translation. Athill concludes, “I have continued to love this little book to this day.”19

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At the center of Helena’s story is her beloved and indulgent grandmother who acts as a substitute and counterweight to Helena’s piously religious and distracted mother. Helena stays with her grandmother during her mother’s frequent absences to visit Helena’s father, a not entirely successful mining engineer in Boa Vista. Bishop wrote in her introduction that Helena’s diary is at once a Brazilian book and a book that “could have happened in any small provincial town or village, and at almost any period of history—at least before the arrival of the automobile and the moving-picture theatre” (x). Critics have characterized this first act of translation as a way into Bishop’s own psychic spaces, a pathway to memory, as Susan McCabe has argued.20 Two of Bishop’s Nova Scotian poems, “Manners (Poem for a Child of 1918)” (1955) and “Sestina” (1956)—with a child and her grandmother at its center—date from this period, as well as her Nova Scotian story “In the Village” (1953). Since McCabe’s book, the discussion of Bishop’s time in Brazil and her reconnection to childhood memory and loss has been a well-traveled path in Bishop criticism. In a Brazilian context, the diary is very much a document of its time. Helena kept the diary from 1893 to 1895, faithfully recording her life and the social interactions in her small provincial village, a time of massive change in Brazil, marking as it did the end of slavery in 1888 and the beginning of the republic in 1889. Consequently, the book is packed with references to freed slaves who continue working as servants for various families in town. Moreover, because its author writes from the point of view of a somewhat open-minded child, recording the attitudes of adults in wonderful stories, it feels like a truthful rendering of one aspect of race relations at the turn of the century in Brazil, at least from the point of view of a white child. ­Helena’s representation of race ranges from straight description (“I arrive at the chácara, look for grandma, and find her sitting in the garden watching the Negro women make tallow candles” [13]) to meditations on race relations in which the child Helena Morley struggles with race and inequality. These passages would have been a minefield for an American translator in the racially charged context of the United States in the 1950s. While Bishop was translating the diary, the U.S. Supreme Court heard the landmark Civil Rights case Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, declaring separate public schools unconstitutional under the equal rights clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, yet there is no critical discussion of how Bishop negotiates this explosive topic in the translation. Yet the choices Bishop makes in order to render race rela-

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tions “legible” to an English-speaking readership reveal much about modern race relations in both countries. One example from Helena’s diary will serve to illustrate the problem. ­Helena’s father is mining in Boa Vista, and so the family spends some of their school vacations visiting him there. The family usually stays in a cabin in town, but that has been torn down, and so, during this particular vacation, they rent rooms from Seu João and Virginia, whom Helena describes as “dois pretos muito bons,”21 which Bishop translates as “two very good Negroes” (97). In the word “Negro,” Bishop has chosen a language of equivalency. At the time, “Negro” in the United States was the respectful term. A literal translation of this sentence would have been “two very good blacks.”22 In both the Portuguese and Bishop’s translation, the language is not meant to be derogatory.23 However, the vacation becomes an occasion for one of Helena’s serious meditations on race when the couple’s little girl becomes sick, and ­Helena, who loves babies, spends her nights nursing the child, patting her belly, and singing to her until she falls asleep. On the third night of this routine, ­Helena reports that her mother stops her and says, “Não vá! Que bobagem é essa agora de passer as noites pajeando negrinha?”24 In an effort, I think, to make the mother’s obvious prejudice legible to an American readership in the 1950s, Bishop translates “negrinha” as “nigger.” Here is her translation of the mother’s outburst: “Don’t you go! What kind of nonsense is this, spending your nights nursing a little nigger?” (97). Negrinha can be a term of affection or it can be pejorative, depending on context, and in this case, I think Bishop is right in her choice. Later in this passage, Helena reflects on the situation: “But what can I do if I can’t change my nature? I think that if the little girl had been white [‘branquinha’], mama wouldn’t have minded. But she always scolds if we nurse Negro babies [‘negrinhos’]. Is it their fault if the poor little things are black [‘pretos’]? I don’t make any distinction, I like them all [‘gosto de todos’]” (98). Here Bishop translates “negrinhos,” rightly again for the time, I think, as “Negro babies,” since I can discern no anger or prejudice toward these children on Helena’s part in the Portuguese. However, Bishop makes one possibly unfortunate choice in her translation of race that exposes the racism of her time—her use of the word “pickaninny,” which she occasionally uses as a substitute for “negrinho”/ “negrinha” or “crioulinho” (a black child born in Brazil). The word’s usage in the United States in the middle of the twentieth century is complicated. While it is certainly racist, Bishop might have chosen it as a way to reflect a degree of toler-

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ance toward black children that was not extended to adults. “Helena Morley” herself loved “little black babies,” but that love tended to wear off when they grew up. For instance, here is Bishop’s translation of a passage from the diary where Helena is discussing the different attitudes held by her beloved grandmother and her parents about race: “At home mama and papa are always talking about the weakness grandma and Dindinha have for always having a pickaninny around to bring up and love, as if it were white. Each of them always has one. If that one grows up another one immediately comes to take his place” (147). In the original, “crioulinho” is a neutral term: “Meu pai e mamãe sempre conversam em casa sobre a mania de vovó e Dindinha nunca passarem sem um crioulinho para criar e gostarem tanto como se fosse branco.”25 Despite the relative neutrality of the word “crioulinho,” the passage, in both the Portuguese and the English, sounds more like Helena is talking about a series of pets rather than people. Perhaps that is why Bishop chose to translate it as “pickaninny.” Nevertheless, for anyone living in the United States in the middle of the twentieth century, such a word might have conjured a host of popular racist images of the black child. According to David Pilgrim, the pickaninny “was the dominant racial caricature of black children for most of this country’s history.”26 Pickaninnies, Pilgrim notes, “were ‘child coons,’ miniature versions of Stepin Fetchit.”27 They “had bulging eyes, unkempt hair, red lips, and wide mouths into which they stuffed huge slices of watermelon. They were themselves tasty morsels for alligators. They were routinely shown on postcards, posters, and other ephemera being chased or eaten. [They] were portrayed as nameless, shiftless natural buffoons running from alligators and toward fried chicken.”28 For a white reader of “Helena Morley” in the 1950s in North America, such a word may well have called to mind these familiar stereotypes. It is not difficult today for us to see the racist ideology lurking behind these references. As Manthia Diawara has noted, “Every stereotype emerges in the wake of a pre-existing ideology which deforms it, appropriates it, and naturalizes it. The blackface stereotype too, by deforming the body, silences it and leaves room only for white supremacy to speak through it.”29 Bishop’s rendering of “negrinho” or “crioulinho” as “pickaninny” is a kind of silencing of both the Brazilian voice of Helena Morley and the Afro-Brazilian voice. Because of the overt racism associated with the word itself in the United States, and because Bishop uses it interchangeably with a more neutral term in “Helena Morley,” her usage of “pickaninny” may not serve as a good translation in this work.

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But while Bishop’s translation of “pickaninny” might have been an unfortunate choice in hindsight, it was intentional rather than simply a mistake in translation. The same could not be said for Bishop’s translation error in a passage concerning race in her Life World Library Brazil book. In a passage from a chapter on race relations in Brazil, Bishop offers the following anecdote: “The widespread poverty, backwardness, ignorance, and suffering in Brazil are tragic; for millions, life is hungry and dirty, short and cruel. And yet—to a South African or a North American or anyone who has lived in a colonial country,—to be able to hear a black cook call her small, elderly, white mistress minha negrinha (my little nigger) as a term of affection, comes as a revelation,—a breath of fresh air at last” (Pr 231). I quote here from Bishop’s original manuscript, but the published version was not altered significantly by the Life editors.30 And as Benjamin Moser has recently pointed out, the word “negrinha” is incorrect; Bishop misheard it. The phrase would have been minha neguinha, which means “something like [my little] sweetie.”31 There is a point to be made about race (and class) in Brazil based on this anecdote, but it is not the point that Bishop makes. Bishop’s translation of race, however, does not just reflect her own brand of North American racism; it foregrounds the racist ideologies of both countries. In terms of Brazil, Bishop (with some qualifications) bought into the dominant myth that Brazil was a racial paradise. These views were shaped by her alignment with Brazil’s elite through her partner Lota de Macedo Soares and her reading of Gilberto Freyre’s influential work on the subject. Freyre, as the Latin American historian Thomas Skidmore has argued, “became the most influential twentieth-century interpreter of Brazilian character and society,”32 and his writing initiated a cultural shift in the way that the elite classes in Brazil thought about race. As Skidmore notes, “Freyre’s writing (of which the high point was The Masters and the Slaves, first published in 1933), combined with that of like-minded writers, artists, and scientists, resulted in a radical reorientation of elite thought about race in Brazil. The non-white element—especially the African element—was now seen as a positive factor in Brazilian social formation. Racist conceptions, among at least a significant part of the elite, were increasingly replaced with emphasis on the roles of health and education in countering the apparent backwardness of non-whites.”33 Bishop included Freyre’s Masters and Slaves in the bibliography for her Life World Library book on Brazil, and she conveys the myth in the following passage from that book: “Brazilians have great pride in their fine record in race

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relations. Their attitude can best be described by saying that the upper-class Brazilian is usually proud of his racial tolerance, while the lower-class Brazilian is not aware of his—he just practices it” (114).34 As Larry Rohter has noted, Freyre’s work “provid[ed] the intellectual doctrine required to buttress” the myth propagated throughout the world that Brazil was a “racial democracy.”35 Beyond race, what else can we learn from “Helena Morley” about Bishop’s early approach to translation? Certainly, Bishop had not developed much of a theory of translation by this stage. According to most current thinking on translation, the translator should provide some discussion of methodology in her preface or introduction. Bishop and Brasil do so in their poetry anthology of 1972. However, Bishop provides no such apparatus in her introduction to The Diary of “Helena Morley.” In omitting this discussion, the Brazilian critic Maria Teresa Machado feels that Bishop has committed the unforgivable sin as a translator of not telling her readers what she took out of her translation and why.36 A quick glance at the Portuguese text alongside the English one shows that Bishop removed entries throughout, presumably in order to streamline the narrative. We can probably assume that the Caldeira Brants approved of these excisions, since Bishop worked closely with Alice Caldeira Brant’s husband, Dr. Mario Augusto Caldeira Brant, in preparing the final manuscript. But Machado is right; Bishop should have told her readers what she had altered. Bishop undertook her first translation in part to help her learn the language. Her serious struggle with speaking the language is evident throughout her letters, but archival evidence suggests that her reading knowledge of Portuguese was eventually quite good and that, at least in her early translations, she worked closely with Macedo Soares, who was fluent in both languages (although not always correct in English usage). Bishop wrote in a 1953 letter to Lowell that she was reading a tremendous amount (she and Macedo Soares had an extensive library between them), “& tackling some Portuguese. Camões is very much like what Ezra Pound says, but have you ever seen any of his holy sonnets? They are superb” (WIA 149). Bishop would later use a quotation from Camões in her dedication to Macedo Soares in Questions of Travel. But even as late as May 1955, after she had been in the country nearly four years, she wrote to Lowell about how she tried to get a doll out of customs that Lowell had sent her, describing it in her “faltering Portuguese” (WIA 160). The extent to which Bishop’s spoken Portuguese plagued her is evident in a letter she wrote to the poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade as late

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as 1963, after she had been in the country for twelve years. Bishop confessed that because she did not speak Portuguese well, they should limit their contact to letters, even though the two were actually both living in Rio de Janeiro at the time. Bishop writes: “I have heard that you are ‘shy’ with strangers— well, unfortunately, so am I, and I also speak Portuguese badly. So I thought that rather than telephoning or calling in person, it might be a good idea to confine our relationship to writing, for the time being” (PPL 851). She had her moments of confidence, though, with the spoken language. By June 1956, when she writes Lowell about visiting Diamantina where “He­ lena Morley’s” Diary is set, she brags, “Once I get going I lose my fears of airplanes and the Portuguese language, so much so that I really think I’ll tackle an Amazon trip next year” (WIA 177). What also emerges from her letters to Lowell is a narrative of collaboration with other Brazilian writers, which helped to promote Bishop’s reputation in Brazil. Macedo Soares, who was connected to a vast network of Brazilian artists, poets, politicians, and intellectuals, introduced Bishop to a number of Brazilian poets, some of whom, such as Manuel Bandeira, became close friends and also translated her work. On July 28, 1953, Bishop wrote to Lowell, I am having some poems in English-Portuguese in a literary supplement, here—there are no magazines, so the newspapers cover literature in varying degrees of seriousness. The Brazilian poet, a man of about 65, Manuel Bandeira, is doing them and doing them extremely well, I think. I have been trying to return the compliment, I’ve read quite a lot of Brazilian poetry by now, and it is all graceful, and slight, I think, although Bandeira is sometimes extremely witty, like a gentler Cummings. But how hopeless to write Portuguese. But I can read Camões, etc., pretty well now, and he—his sonnets—are superb—as good as any in English, certainly. (WIA 142)

Bandeira had provided an introduction to Senhora Caldeira Brant,37 but Bishop and Bandeira seem to have met in person only a few times. And yet their literary relationship was intimate, featuring a delightful exchange of poetry and gifts and a witty repartee that both Bishop and Bandeira would not have been able to manage face-to-face, since neither spoke the other’s language fluently.38 Bishop was clearly delighted with the relationship, for she wrote to Lowell on May 20, 1955, “I am a friend of THE poet (at least I keep him provided with marmalade, and he has written me a poem and I have written him one) and he gave me a hammock” (WIA 161). Theirs was a relationship conducted through the act of translation (and gift giving) as her

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recently published poem “To Manuel Bandeira, With Jam and Jelly” demonstrates. The poem is a witty note to Bandeira (accompanied by a jar of Bishop’s homemade jam), thanking him for copies of his own books of poetry, peppered with current references to events reported in the news in Brazil and the United States, complete with footnotes. Bishop captures the irony of their predicament in the second stanza, capping it with a political twist when she quotes Senator McCarthy: Two mighty poets at a loss, unable to exchange a word, —to quote McCarthy, “It’s the most unheard-of thing I’ve ever heard!” (EAP 105)

In one stroke of brilliant metonymy, Bishop aligns the poets’ loss of shared speech with the more ominous and oppressive silencing practiced by McCar­ thy’s House Un-American Committee, echoed in the prefix “un,” repeated in “unable” and “unheard-of,” negating ability and hearing, two crucial elements of the translation process. And yet, through poetry and translation, they communicate brilliantly. Bishop’s poem ends, and, Manuel, may this silent jelly speak sweetly to your poet’s belly, and once more let me say I am devoted with a jar of jam. (EAP 106)

Bandeira apparently responded, “I wish I had two bellies / ​because of your good jellies” (EAP 312–13). Bandeira’s and Bishop’s humorous repartee, an improvisation on the binary “speech/silence,” not only demonstrates their affinities as poets but also alludes to a larger truth about the art of translation— that translation is a fundamental act of speech: “When we learn to speak,” Octavio Paz has written, “we are learning to translate.”39 Bishop’s experience of “translating” Brazil, in all its dimensions, made this fundamental act more intentional. If the child’s voice of “Helena Morley” and her desire to learn Portuguese compelled Bishop to undertake her first translation project, Brazil’s celebrated novelist Clarice Lispector drew her in a different way. Bishop first met Lispector in 1962 in Rio de Janeiro, where they had become neighbors. Macedo Soares had an apartment in Rio, and the two women now spent most of their time there (rather than in Samambaia) to be closer to Macedo Soares’s work

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as chief coordinator of an elaborate park project. She held an unpaid appointment granted in 1960 by her friend Carlos Lacerda when he became governor of Guanabara (greater Rio de Janeiro).40 Bishop admired Lispector’s writing, particularly her stories, and worked to promote her in North America. In addition to translating and publishing three of Lispector’s stories in the Kenyon Review in 1964, Bishop’s enthusiasm was instrumental in Alfred Knopf’s decision to publish a book-length translation of Lispector’s novel The Apple in the Dark in 1967. Comparative work on these two writers is scant, yet Bishop translated Lispector, wrote about her in letters, and shared a deep affinity with her work that offers interesting opportunities for cross-cultural analysis. At least one of these stories can be seen as one of several key texts Bishop was working on in Brazil that provide social commentary and critique on the history of colonialism and the exploitation of indigenous populations in Brazil. Lispector is a striking figure, and a real star in Brazilian literature. When she was only twenty-three years old in 1943, her first novel, Near to the Wild Heart, caused a sensation in Brazil. She was still in law school when she wrote it and working as a journalist.41 Critics compared the “intellectual lucidity” of her characters to those of Dostoevsky and declared the novel “the ­greatest . . . ​a woman has ever written in the Portuguese language.”42 Giorgio de Chirico painted her portrait in Rome in 1945. She is today considered one of the great Brazilian writers of the twentieth century. Like Bishop, she was also a kind of exile. Critics focused on the strangeness of Lispector’s language, its foreignness. They compared her to Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Proust, Gide, but not to Brazilian writers. As Benjamin Moser notes in his excellent 2009 biography of Lispector, “She is both Brazil’s greatest modern writer and, in a profound sense, not a Brazilian writer at all.”43 He goes on to quote from the poet Lêdo Ivo, who had the following to say about Lispector’s language: “The foreign[n]ess of her prose is one of the most overwhelming facts of our literary history, and even, of the history of our language.”44 This placement of Lispector in the pantheon of European modernism plays large in Bishop’s reception of Lispector and explains to some extent her attraction to the Brazilian writer. Modernism was Bishop’s own legacy: Moore, Eliot, and Stevens were all important influences on her work. On a more personal level, Bishop and Lispector shared a certain lexicon of absence and loss. Both their childhoods were marked by exile and abandonment. The outlines of Bishop’s story are well known. Bishop was born in 1911 in Worcester, Massachusetts, but moved with her Canadian mother to Great Village, Nova Scotia (her mother’s family home), shortly after her

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father’s death when she was only eighteen months old; her mother, unable to cope, was finally committed to a mental institution when Bishop was only five. Bishop never saw her again and was shuttled between relatives until she went to college. More recently, new revelations that Bishop also experienced childhood sexual abuse have come to light with Vassar College’s acquisition of a series of intimate letters that Bishop wrote to her psychoanalyst Ruth Foster in 1947.45 The more complete outlines of Lispector’s story have been revealed much more recently with Moser’s superb biography. Lispector was Jewish. She was born in Chechelnek in the Ukraine in 1920, but her family fled to Brazil when Lispector was just two months old to escape the terrible pogroms that, according to one source, “[covered] the fields and towns of the Ukraine with rivers of Jewish blood.”46 According to Lispector’s own account, her mother was gang-raped by Russian soldiers and contracted syphilis, which eventually led to her death in Brazil when Lispector was only eight years old.47 Both writers felt a sense of being foreign and alien in their own countries. As Lispector said in one letter, “There isn’t really a place one can live. It’s all somebody else’s country, where other people are happy.”48 Both were world travelers (Lispector was the wife of a diplomat). And their work reflects their global perspective on the world, and their sense of being outsiders in it. Bishop’s letters, tracing her early encounters with Lispector, reveal what one could call the “imaginary” of Bishop’s fascinated reception of this celebrated Brazilian writer. One unpublished letter in particular quoted in Mo­ ser’s biography reveals Bishop’s interest. At the time that Bishop wrote this letter to Ilse and Kit Barker in 1962, her relationship with Macedo Soares was in trouble, brought on in part by the stress Macedo Soares was experiencing on the park project and Bishop’s unhappiness and inability to control her alcoholism. The economic and political situation in Brazil had turned dire with runaway inflation and rampant political corruption, leading up to the 1964 military coup that ended democracy in Brazil and eventually turned the country into a police state until 1985. This, then, is the context for Bishop’s first encounter with Lispector: I have found one contemporary I like . . . ​—living right down the street from us in Rio—I put off reading her because I thought I wouldn’t like her, and now I find I not only like her stories very much but like her, too. She has a wonderful name—Clarice Lispector (Russian). Her 2 or 3 novels I don’t think are so good but her short stories are almost like the stories I’ve always thought

Bishop’s Brazilian Translations  77 should be written about Brazil—Tchekovian, slightly sinister and fantastic—I am sending some to ENCOUNTER soon—She has a N.Y. publisher who wants them and maybe I’ll do the whole book for her—I swore I’d never do any more ­translating—but I don’t mind very short things and feel I should, really—She is rather large-boned fair and completely Oriental Russian-looking—“Khergis,” I think is the race, something like that—like the girl in “The Magic Mountain,” I imagine—but otherwise very Brazilian, and very shy. I know or care for so few of the “intellectuals” here that it is nice to find someone new. . . . ​Actually I think she is better than J.L. Borges—who is good, but not all that good!49

Bishop’s letter presents a condensation of ideas and images that resemble a dream in their density and complexity. The nodal point of this dreamscape is Thomas Mann’s modernist novel The Magic Mountain and the figure of Madame Chauchat, the woman who becomes Hans Castorp’s obsession in the sanatorium, an obsession that stems from an earlier childhood experience of Castorp’s (forbidden) love of a boy with “Kirghiz eyes” at school, Pribislav Hippe.50 When Castorp first encounters the catlike Madame Chauchat with her “broad cheekbones and narrow eyes,” he is aware of “a vague memory of something or somebody [that] brushed over him.”51 Later, in an illness-​ induced dream sequence in the mountains while Castorp is out walking, the memory of the boy returns to him in full, and he is transported back in time, “to that risky, adventurous moment when he had had a conversation, a real conversation with Privislav Hippe.”52 It seems that in Bishop’s letter to Lowell, she has transposed the homosexual subtext of Mann’s novel onto her “reading” of Lispector. She has re-created her as the exotic other, a focal point for renewed energy and desire, just as Madame Chauchat fulfilled this role for Castorp. Bishop’s creation of an exotic European other as a source of fascination and intrigue is an interesting choice in Brazil! Moreover, Bishop’s reading of Lispector in letters demonstrates that the novelist fed Bishop’s fantasies of Brazilian “primitives.” In one letter she describes Lispector as “the most non-literary writer I’ve ever known, and ‘never cracks a book’ as we used to say” (WIA 479). She goes on to say that Lispector “never read anything, that I can discover—I think she’s a ‘self-taught’ writer, like a primitive painter” (WIA 479). It seems hard to imagine how Bishop could have come up with such a view, since even a cursory reading of Lispector’s work reveals the rich complexity of an educated writer who has read extensively and deeply. But Bishop’s reading of Lispector, which is certainly “spectacularly off the mark,” as Moser has pointed out, is also a testament to

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Lispector’s success at convincing the public that she lacked culture and erudition.53 But in order to swallow this line, I think Bishop was also reflecting common European and American attitudes toward South American writers as more “primitive” than those in the West. Whatever Bishop’s attitudes in letters, the translations themselves of Lispector’s Chekhovian stories seem careful, sensitive, and accurate, for the most part, revealing the elegance of Lispector’s prose. There is at least one odd translation of a phrase. Bishop translates “árvores mornas de umidade” as “lukewarm trees” in “The Smallest Woman in the World,” as if the trees were themselves reflecting apathy, when really the sense is more trees “moist with humidity,” as Giovanni Pontiero rendered it in a later translation.54 Bishop translated three of Lispector’s stories—two from Laços de família (Family Ties), “Uma galinha” (“A Hen”) and “A menor mulher do mundo” (“The Smallest Woman in the World”), and a third story, “Marmosets.” The two stories from Family Ties provide contrasting visions of female power, a major theme of Lispector’s interconnected collection. As Marta Peixoto has pointed out in her chapter on female power in Family Ties, all of Lispector’s stories in this collection focus on the interaction between gender and power at mid-century.55 These are the ties that bind, for both men and women, ties that are represented most often in the stories as chains and cages. Female protagonists in these stories struggle with the conflict between their own desires and those of the family, and the roles of wife and mother that are expected of them. Many stories involve an epiphany where the protagonist realizes this conflict. Some escape into madness, but most often the main character accepts the constraints placed upon her. But in the interstices of the encounter, Lispector is able to challenge and expose women’s lack of power and control within patriarchal culture. In “A Hen,” as Peixoto points out, this exposure of female gender roles is taken to a parodic level.56 Most of Lispector’s stories are written in the third person, and her narrators take a more distant, ironic stance on the action, which is sometimes sympathetic, sometimes critical. Such a stance is Bishop’s favored mode; the power of critique for Bishop, and for Lispector, most often lies in this ironic gaze. In “A Hen,” the chicken in question is the one for Sunday’s lunch, which the family hasn’t gotten around to butchering yet. As if aware of her fate, the chicken has been huddling in a corner of the kitchen, but suddenly, to the family’s amazement, she makes a wild attempt to flee: “she opened her little wings, puffed out her breast, and, after two or three tries, reached the wall of the terrace” where “she remained like a misplaced weather vane, hesitating,

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first on one foot, then the other” (Pr 385). I like Bishop’s use of “weather vane,” although it veers away from Lispector’s phrase “Lá ficou em adorno deslocado,” which in a more literal translation might be rendered “there the chicken remained like a displaced ornament,” as Pontiero has it.57 One suspects Bishop was going for the visual and gendered effects that “weather vane” supplies, since roosters are often featured as weather vanes, and so the chicken, being female, is displaced, although to really enhance this effect Bishop should have rendered “deslocado” as displaced rather than misplaced. Gender roles are certainly central to Lispector’s story. The man of the house runs after the chicken like a “hunter” after “prey,” and the chicken, enjoying a moment of temporary safety, is “stupid, timid, and free. Not victorious, the way a rooster in flight would have looked” (Pr 385). After she is captured and dumped on the kitchen floor, she surprises everyone by laying an egg, at which point the family decides for various reasons that she shouldn’t be killed. And so, in her role as mother, the chicken gains a short reprieve and becomes “queen of the house” (Pr 386). In this mock fable of the life cycle of conventional womanhood, the queenly status conferred on the chicken by her motherhood is all too brief, and the story ends, as one would expect, with her inevitable death sentence, the last sentence of the story: “Until one day they killed her and ate her and the years went by” (Pr 386). It is not surprising that Bishop was drawn to Lispector’s short fiction rather than her novels. The fascinating but highly self-interested, narcissistic Joana from Near to the Wild Heart would not be to Bishop’s tastes, although Bishop would appreciate the modernist experimentation of the novel. Lispector’s short stories, on the other hand, are masterful examples of the kind of subtle social critique that Bishop was trying for in her own work of the period. Bishop’s translation of Lispector’s “The Smallest Woman in the World,” for instance, might be considered alongside several key texts about or concerning Brazil that Bishop was working on between 1959 and 1962—“Brazil, January 1, 1502,” one of her great poems, published in the New Yorker in 1960; her Life World Library Brazil book; and the unpublished essay she wrote that gives an account of the trip she took to Brasília, the new capital of Brazil, and the surrounding indigenous people. She traveled with Aldous Huxley and his wife, as well as others, in 1958. The essay can be seen as a kind of companion piece to that poem, revealing—along with other posthumously published material in Alice Quinn’s Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box (2006), the Library of America edition, Poems and Prose, and the complete Lowell and Bishop correspondence—Bishop’s increasingly involved dialogue with Brazilian pol-

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itics, the subject I will take up in the next chapter. But the layers of Bishop’s engagement with literary and cultural Brazil deepen if we add Lispector’s story to the mix. It is unclear exactly when Bishop translated the stories (her translations were published in 1964), but a 1962 letter from Lowell refers to them. It is quite possible that Bishop read “The Smallest Woman in the World” when it came out in the inaugural issue of the new Brazilian literary magazine Senhor in March 1959.58 In that issue Lispector’s story was published with a number of American and British writers, including Bradbury, Auden, and Hemingway, as well as the Brazilian journalist and political agitator Carlos Lacerda,59 a close friend and colleague of Macedo Soares’s. Since theirs was a literary household, it is likely that Bishop saw this magazine, even though she claimed in the 1962 letter to Ilse and Kit Barker that I quoted from earlier that she hadn’t known of Lispector before. But Bishop’s poem “Brazil, January 1, 1502” shares significant language with the story. Lispector’s story recounts the discovery by a French explorer of a pygmy tribe living deep in the heart of the Eastern Congo and its smallest member, a tiny pregnant woman who stands less than two feet high. As soon as the explorer discovers her, he names her Little Flower “in order to be able to classify her among the recognizable realities.” Immediately upon naming her, he “began to collect facts about her” (Pr 380). Much of the rest of the story concerns the various reactions of middle-class Brazilians to this discovery when they see her “life-size” photograph in the Sunday “colored supplements” (Pr 381). Lispector reveals in these scenes just how much the viewer’s/reader’s desire comes into play in generating a response to the “other”—also a major achievement of Bishop’s best work. Middle-class Brazilians “read” Little Flower in a variety of ways: “A woman seeing the picture of Little Flower in the paper didn’t want to look a second time because ‘It gives me the creeps’ ” (Pr 381); in one house “a clever little boy had a clever idea”—he wanted to make Little Flower “ ‘our toy’ ” (Pr 382). The desire to own completely takes over in another house where the family “gave themselves up to the enthralling task of measuring the seventeen and three-quarter inches of Little Flower against the wall. . . . ​In the heart of each member of the family was born, nostalgic, the desire to have that tiny and indomitable thing for itself, that thing spared having been eaten. . . . ​To tell the truth, who hasn’t wanted to own a human being just for himself?” (Pr 383) Lispector structures Brazilian response to the indigenous woman largely around questions of representation, as does Bishop in “Brazil, January 1,

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1502,” which involves a much earlier encounter between the Portuguese colonizers and the indigenous tribes who were there first. Bishop’s poem is organized around the metaphorical conceit of Brazil as landscape/canvas. Bishop takes the poem’s epigraph, “embroidered nature . . . ​tapestried landscape,” from Sir Kenneth Clark’s 1949 book Landscape into Art (P 89). This Donne-like conceit allows Bishop to make a series of complex statements about how we “read” and interpret our encounters with the “other.” For one thing, the poem’s opening lines place the modern traveler in line with the Portuguese conquistadors: “Januaries, Nature greets our eyes / ​exactly as she must have greeted theirs” (P 89), reminding the modern reader and traveler of a different but nevertheless possible potential for our exploitation of the other. Our own desires, as it were, inevitably come into play in these encounters. The Portuguese symbolically “read” the landscape of Brazil—its Nature (with a capital “N” in Bishop’s poem)—through their own imposed set of values, so that “five sooty dragons near some massy rocks” represent Sin (with a capital “S”) when seen through Portuguese eyes. And the lizards become seductresses: “all eyes,” the lines read, “are on the smaller, female one, back-to, / ​ her wicked tail straight up and over, / ​red as a red-hot wire” (P 89–90). This red-hot wire appears to generate the electrical current that leads straight to the heart of violence at the poem’s center, which describes not only how the Portuguese rape the landscape but the indigenous women in it. Here, too, is a stunning example of the benefits of establishing a cross-cultural dialogue between Bishop and Lispector. In the second stanza, Bishop reverses Lispector’s narrative of “The Smallest Woman in the World,” making not the indigenous people small, but the Portuguese Christians, who are miniaturized as they discover the new world; they are the smallest men in the world in their “creaking armor,” “tiny as nails.” In keeping with the extended metaphor of the poem, the Portuguese Christians, “Directly after Mass,” “ripped away into the hanging fabric” of the jungle with a violence that represents a rape, for we find that each of the conquerors are “out to catch an Indian for himself” (90). These are, the poem tells us, those “maddening little women who kept calling, / ​calling to each other . . . / ​and retreating, always retreating, behind it” (emphasis mine; 90)—that is, the hanging canvas. Bishop’s poem at this point shares nearly identical language with Lispector’s story. In Lispector’s story, “the tiny race” has been “retreating, always retreating” as a result of being hunted by the Bahundes (emphasis mine; Pr 381).60 The Portuguese is “sempre a recuar e a recuar,”61 literally “always retreating and retreating.” These calls also resemble the Smallest Woman’s laugh. As Bishop’s translation

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indicates, “It was a laugh that the explorer, constrained, couldn’t classify” (Pr 383). It was a laugh that left him “baffled” (Pr 384). The women call, the smallest woman laughs—something escapes from this relentless classification system in both Bishop’s poem and Lispector’s story, if only temporarily. Reading these two texts alongside one another enriches our reading of both and our understanding of Bishop’s deep engagement with literary, historical, cultural, and political Brazil, demonstrating that there is more to Brazil for Bishop than a temporary safe haven, a writer’s idyll that allowed her to explore inner worlds of childhood memory and loss. Bishop’s immersion in Brazilian culture, as this brief moment of cross-cultural dialogue shows, opened outward as well, toward a range of subjects and subject positions that allowed her to deepen and intertwine history, memory, and desire. Bishop’s first published poetry translations were selections from João Cabral de Melo Neto’s long verse drama “Morte e Vida Severina” (“The Death and Life of a Severino”), which she published in Poetry in 1963.62 Her letters to Lowell document some of her thoughts on Cabral and the process of translating him, beginning in 1958. She had been reading Cabral for a long time and found him “the only one I really like much, but he doesn’t come out very well in English” (WIA 341). Reflecting on the process of translation, she told Lowell, “it’s usually more what one can do than what one likes best, in translating” (WIA 341). But she eventually found that Cabral’s verse drama went “into English fairly easily,” as she mentioned in a March 1963 letter to Lowell (WIA 449). In this same letter, Bishop records a comment from a New Yorker editor about her translation: “Miss Kray writes me my translations of Cabral . . . ​are ‘brilliant’—that’s nice, but I wonder how she knows?” (WIA 449). Her offhand comment belies what was in fact her growing knowledge and awareness of translation issues at mid-century. In one of the major statements on translation of this period, Vladimir Nabokov had made a similar statement: I constantly find in reviews of verse translations the following kind of thing that sends me into spasms of helpless fury: “Mr. (or Miss) So-and-so’s translation reads smoothly.” In other words, the reviewer of the “translation,” who neither has, nor would be able to have, without special study, any knowledge whatsoever of the original, praises as “readable” an imitation only because the drudge or the rhymester has substituted easy platitudes for the breathtaking intricacies of the text.63

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Bishop shares Nabokov’s opinion on such judgments on the translator’s craft in a more developed statement that she wrote but never published. In “Remarks on Translation,” Bishop was responding to the book jacket of Ler­ montov’s A Hero of Our Time, which Nabokov translated with his son in 1958: “I believe that no one is entitled to say a translation is good—or bad— . . . ​ unless he or she knows the language of the original fairly well. He or she may say he or she ‘enjoyed it’—or ‘didn’t enjoy it’—but a translation—in one dimension, so to speak—CANNOT be judged.”64 Bishop’s approach to translation evolved during her years in Brazil, and we can trace that evolution through her letters to Lowell and in contrast to Lowell’s own approach to translation. At the start of the twentieth century, translation theory, influenced by modernist movements that valued formal experimentation, emphasized innovation and saw the translation of foreign texts as a path to “revitalizing culture,” according to Lawrence Venuti.65 In this approach, translators view language as “constitutive” rather than “communicative,” and “translation is seen as an interpretation which necessarily reconstitutes and transforms the foreign text.”66 One of the major proponents of this view of translation was Ezra Pound, whose essay on translating Guido Cavalcanti is reprinted in Venuti’s reader. In his letters and in his own translations, Lowell reveals himself to be very much in the Pound tradition, whereas Bishop uses their letters and discussions over Lowell’s Imitations as a forum for setting herself apart from that tradition. In response to Lowell’s “free translations” from French, Italian, and Russian poets, published as Imitations (1961), Bishop wrote pages of corrections, focusing on French writers, such as Rimbaud, since she knew the language well. Despite the fact that Lowell had “been careful to call” his translations “free,” as Bishop wrote in a March 1961 letter, she worried that “once in a while . . . ​you have made changes that sound like mistakes” (WIA 356). As the letter continues, the “mistakes” accumulate: “I feel I am running an awful risk and I am suffering, writing this,” she tells him (WIA 356). And a little later she half-heartedly apologizes, “If you will forgive my sounding like the teacher of French 2A” (WIA 356). Finally, she ends with an exasperated “I just can’t decide how ‘free’ one has the right to be with the poet’s intentions” (WIA 357). The fact is, she can decide, and has. Lowell is too free. Bishop is working through her own position on the translator’s art, and it is not Lowell’s. While noting the un-decidability of this enterprise, the rest of the sentence, and, indeed, the entire letter, outlines a decision. The translator must try to be as “faithful” as possible to the original, following the “unconditional law” of

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translation, as Peggy Kamuf has recently written.67 Under the guidance of this law, the translator strives to produce a “faithful” translation while understanding, at the same time, that he or she will be unable to achieve it. For even if, like Bishop, the translator decides to stay as close as possible to the author’s text, he or she faces a dilemma: in order to translate at all, Kamuf argues, the translator is “obliged to separate out one meaning from the other, thereby deciding between them.”68 In her essay, Kamuf draws on Derrida’s discussion of translation in his 1968 essay “Plato’s Pharmacy” in order to outline the translator’s dilemma through Derrida’s example of Plato’s use of the word pharmakon as a figure for writing. In Greek the word can mean “remedy,” “recipe,” “poison,” “drug,” “philter,” and the like, but certainly not writing. The translator, however, must choose, and so, in choosing, “seals off the passage that has been opened up by Plato’s writing between these contradictory senses.”69 Lines from Bishop’s 1965 “Questions of Travel,” one of her most ethically driven poems, make the same point and speak directly to the choices inherent in both travel and translation: “Continent, city, country, society: / ​the choice is never wide and never free” (P 92). The archival evidence shows that Bishop developed an approach to translation that was in line with the major translation trends of the 1940s and 1950s whose practitioners were concerned with the “translatability” of the foreign text70—that is, whether the text could be translated so that the sense of the original would be clear. In addition, as Venuti has shown, translators at mid-century saw “translation as a problem of language and culture.”71 In her notes on translation, Bishop addresses this very problem by suggesting that geography, for instance, has some bearing on the choices a translator might make. As she writes, “Some say that only the images of poetry can be translated. . . . ​One has to go cautiously here. A rainstorm in Panama may be quite different from a rainstorm in England.”72 Indeed, Bishop’s “translation” of rainstorms in her own poetry proves this point: a rainstorm in Key West in Bishop’s work is different from one in Samambaia—each one accumulating images and references that are typical of that region’s language and culture. In her unpublished “Remarks on Translation,” Bishop goes on to say that “TRANSLATION IS HARD, IF NOT IMPOSSIBLE,” and then, in a more measured tone considers the role that geography plays in a poet’s work and our understanding of it: It is true that sometimes . . . ​one has a feeling right or wrong—that one does know what the poem says. . . . ​Out of this feeling can come a whole cluster of

Bishop’s Brazilian Translations  85 emotions, intuitions, appreciations . . . ​but probably not good translations. It’s sometimes what makes it worthwhile to read poetry in a foreign language even if one doesn’t know it well. In 1935 I spent a few weeks quite alone in a small fishing village in Brittany. I had only school French—a dictionary Cassells—and some books of poetry. It was fairly near where Corbière had lived—When I read in “A season in Hell”—[“]Me voice sur la plage armoricaine . . .” (while in Brittany) I thought I understood Rimbaud. . . . I had taken a long, day-long pilgrimage, on foot, with villagers, to a shrine of St. Anne?—and then I thought I understood Corbière. . . . But of course I could scarcely read either—but this was a beginning, and I think it is a beginning in the right way, more or less. But one can’t get in the real atmosphere of another country, period (in that case)—or landscape etc—and perhaps some translators don’t think this important—or never think of it at all—or don’t attempt to visualize—They may be right BUT73

This passage from her unpublished remarks also demonstrates just how intertwined travel and translation were for Bishop. Bishop enumerates her theory of translation in these remarks almost entirely in opposition to Lowell. She writes, Robert Lowell once said to me,—(apropos of translation)—“What’s worth doing at all is worth doing badly”. . . . ​I had never heard it before and I wanted to argue about it, since one of my grandmothers . . . ​had always said just the opposite. . . . ​I think I know what he meant; I’m not sure—is it that translation has always to be done badly? . . . ​. What I’m going to talk about now . . . ​is my feeling that it doesn’t have to be done as badly as it frequently is.74

Bishop enumerates several key complaints about translation: (1) “inaccuracy—​the wrong word—”; (2) “almost the right word, but still wrong—in our language”; (3) “using three words—or more—when one would do,” which she explains as “the attempt to make a ‘beautiful’ poem . . . ​in English but untrue to the original”; and (4) “just plain carelessness.” Her advice is “when a word is repeated—repeat it!” and “stick to the structure.” These are fairly well-articulated points. Since Bishop had a great deal to say about translation in these remarks, as well as in her letters to Lowell, I believe we must judge her efforts in the context of the criteria and standards she herself establishes for the practice. With Bishop’s own template before us, we can see that Bishop sometimes failed to live up to her first two categories (is there a translator alive who has not made mistakes?). She was “inaccurate” in the case of the difference between the words negrinho and neguinho, and we saw how her

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own prejudice probably informed this misunderstanding and mistranslation, and she had “almost the right word” with regards to her use of “pickaninny,” but the results would not have conveyed the sense of the original in English because of the racist valence of the word. I don’t think she was outright careless, however, and in poetry, she did try to “stick to the structure.” Because of Bishop’s fairly rigorous standards for poetry translation, she delayed her own attempts to render Brazilian verse into English until later in her Brazilian career. Her decision to translate Cabral first is a revealing choice. “The Death and Life of a Severino” is an overtly political poem about poverty and class in Brazil, and her translation of it coincides with the publication of several of Bishop’s own poems about poverty and class divisions in Brazil, including “Twelfth Morning; or What You Will,” in the New York Review of Books in April 1964, and “The Burglar of Babylon,” Bishop’s own ­Severino-​like ballad, published in the New Yorker in November 1964.75 Bishop’s references to Cabral in her letters overlap with discussions of the shameful poverty she witnessed in the resort town of Cabo Frio, the subject of “Twelfth Morning.” Bishop admired Cabral because “his poetry is the only Brazilian poetry I know that shows real sympathy, and is about the poor not just whimsically” (WIA 282). Bishop’s letters to Lowell about Cabral also demonstrate just how interconnected poetry and politics were in Brazil, and, once again, Lota’s family and its broad and powerful network play a role in Cabral’s career. As Bishop wrote, Cabral “is in the diplomatic ser-vice (like all S.A. poets)76 and was having a good career when a few years ago he was accused of being a Communist—as far as I know completely untrue, but probably he was sympathetic. . . . ​Anyway, he was cleared, but left in a difficult situation, and to solve it, and keep him in the service he was given a fantastically good job (Lota’s Uncle’s idea—he was Foreign Minister then) doing research at the Library in Seville, for six years, I think” (WIA 282). Cabral’s background was privileged (his family owned a sugar plantation in Recife on the coast), but, as Bishop tells Lowell, he was most definitely not “whimsical” about the poor. He developed his “social consciousness,” according to Richard Zenith, as a result of this early exposure to the lives of the “retirantes,” or migrant workers, who worked on his family’s plantation.77 These workers, Sertanejos as they were called, “poured in” from the drought-​ ridden Sertão in the Northeast of Brazil, the poorest region of the country.78 As Zenith describes it, “In the evening the sugar mill workers would gather around and hear the little boy [Cabral] recite popular verse narratives, pub-

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lished in pamphlet form and sold in the marketplace. This kind of versified storytelling—traceable to the narrative poetry traditions of medieval Iberia— became the major vehicle for what could be called Cabral’s ‘socially engaged’ poetry.”79 Zenith writes that Cabral’s “contact with those workers, acting as a vaccine . . . ​, gave him a permanent immunity to facile emotional responses. His poetry displays no pity, and hence no condescension.”80 The pamphlets that influenced Cabral’s writing of “Death and Life of a Severino,” called literatura de cordel, or literature on a string, may also have influenced Bishop’s writing about such heroes as Micucú, the bandit in her Rio ballad, “The Burglar of Babylon.” Mark Curran describes literatura de cordel as “a hybrid literature of both popular and folkloric forms.”81 Most poets of this form were from the rural classes who wrote of poverty and political and class struggle.82 These pamphlets often told the story of hard times in the Northeast, and often the protagonists were outsiders, such as bandits. Bishop herself wrote of these pamphlets in her letters and apparently sent some to Lowell: “I wonder if you got my cards from the Amazon,” she wrote in 1960, “and the ballad books? . . . ​those are folk poetry all right. . . . ​The form goes back to Camões, and they sell thousands of them, displays in all the markets, like Marlboro book-shops in N.Y., and people buying all the time. I know you can’t read it properly, but sometimes they are quite good, and they are composed by people who can’t read or write, and sung to guitars. Some stanzas go in for long lists of place-names, rhymed, or people’s names, with very classical effect” (WIA 315). Cabral’s verse drama makes use of this form and these effects, and I suspect that Bishop thought it went into verse well because of its folk ballad–like quality. Since she would not be able to create the rhyming effects in English in translating Cabral, she re-creates the effect in something approximating ballad form in English. It is a tricky business, and Bishop does it mostly well, although we lose a lot of the rhyming, punning effects of Cabral’s original, and, thereby, some of the political import, pleasure, and richness of the Portuguese. Bishop’s reads better in English than Frederick Williams’s recent literal translation of the first section of this poem, but Williams’s renders more clearly and accurately the argument and syntactical linkages of Cabral’s Portuguese. Cabral tells the story of a typical “retirante,” or migrant worker from the Northeast of Brazil, whose very name, derived from the Portuguese adjective severo, meaning severe, serious, grave, underscores the harsh material conditions that mark his existence, and, indeed, the millions like him, for

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Cabral emphasizes that “there are many of us Severinos” (“Somos muitos Severinos”). In the first part of Bishop’s translation, the retirante explains to the reader who he is and what he does (“quem é e a que vai”), which might be rendered better as who he is and how it goes (with him). And how it goes is not good: Somos muitos Severinos iguais em tudo e na sina: a de abrandar estas pedras suando-se muito em cima, a de tentar despertar terra sempre mais extinta, a de querer arrancar algum roçado da cinza.83

Bishop translates these lines as follows: We are many Severinos and our destiny’s the same: to soften up these stones by sweating over them, to try to bring to life a dead and deader land, to try to wrest a farm out of burnt-over land.84

Bishop’s predominantly three-beat line re-creates some of the music of the original Portuguese of Cabral’s verse poem. What is difficult to render in English are the class distinctions that Cabral’s poem emphasizes through irony. For example, Cabral’s line “iguais em tudo e na sina” suggests that these Severinos share total equality with each other and so their fates are sure to be equal as well, an ironic take on the very notion of equality. Cabral’s poem in Portuguese tells the story of the elites versus the masses in Brazil and the history of land acquisition that dates back to the colonial ­period, a history that would be immediately apparent to a Brazilian reading the poem but not necessarily to a North American readership, and it would probably have been an impossible concept for a translator to get across, except through heavy footnoting, advice that Nabokov would have given the translator. This history is conveyed throughout the poem, but we are clued into such a reading by Cabral’s use of the word “sesmaria.” As Severino at-

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tempts to further explain who he is, he tells the reader that his explanation that he is the son of Maria of the late Zacarias still doesn’t explain much (“Mas isso ainda diz pouco”). Rather, there are a lot of Severinos in the district because of a certain landowner named Zacarias who was the first “colonel” of “desta sesmaria.” Presumably, he had many sons by many Marias, and his descendants had more sons by more Marias, and so it goes. Both Williams and Bishop translate “desta sesmaria” as “this region,” but sesmaria to a Brazilian has a long, important history. The sesmarias, or system of small land grants, began in the 1530s when the Portuguese set up the sugar plantations,85 leading to the role that Brazil would play as “the world’s leading sugar exporter . . . ​for more than a century.”86 According to the Brazilian historian Marcia Maria Menendes Motta, the Portuguese sesmaria system was set up in Brazil in order “to regularize colonization.”87 As Skidmore writes, “Thus was established the nexus of the Brazilian colonial economy: land-extensive single-crop agriculture based on slave labor, concentrated primarily in the Northeast. This plantation system generated the hierarchical society of the colonial era.”88 Skidmore describes “the typical export-oriented plantation of the colonial era . . . ​after 1600” as “largely self-sufficient, growing much of its own foodstuffs, maintaining its own chapel (often with a resident priest), and being marked by an axis of power concentrated in the casa grande (big house) of the fazendeiro (landowner) and filtering down to the senzala (slave quarters). . . . ​This is the plantation world depicted in Gilberto Freyre’s The Masters and the Slaves— the world of the all powerful fazendeiro and the closed agrarian horizons that have so deeply influenced modern Brazil.”89 Cabral dramatizes the eventual environmental and human cost of this system. Such intensive sugar farming led to the impoverishment and ultimate destruction of the land and the perpetual drought conditions that continue to this day. It also led to the mass migrations of workers to other parts of the country in search of work and better conditions, which are the subject of some of the cordel literature. Bishop’s translation fails to impart this complex history of exploitation and impoverishment, although she captures the essence of the anonymous life of a typical migrant worker. But the rich history of the country is lost in translation. Translations of Cabral’s poetry make up the largest segment of the bi­ lingual poetry anthology Bishop edited with Emanuel Brasil, although she herself only translated the Severino sequence. The largest number of poems

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of any one poet that Bishop translated, however, are those of Carlos Drummond de Andrade. Bishop translated all seven of the poems of Drummond’s that appear in the anthology. In turning now to Drummond and Bishop, I draw on the excellent work of the Brazilian critic Maria Lúcia Milléo Martins, whose monograph on the two poets, Duas Artes (Two Arts), was published in 2006 in Portuguese. Milléo Martins’s work is superb but not well known among North American Bishop scholars because of the language. Milléo Martins identifies the “affinities” shared by the poets who also shared a “coincidental displacement” to Rio de Janeiro—Drummond having come there from his native Itabira. This displacement prompted in the two poets a simultaneous revisiting of the “landscape” of childhood. In a letter to Bishop, Drummond wrote that he thought they shared an “affinity of spirit,” which Milléo Martins interprets “in . . . ​earthly terms” as “a coincidental predestination to ‘be gauche in life,’ ”90 a term borrowed from Drummond’s “Poema de Sete Faces,” which Bishop translated as “Seven-Sided Poem.” In terms of their relation to the world, the poets share a sense of estrangement expressed in another Drummond phrase, the “strange idea of family,” from “Retrato de família” (“Family Portrait” in Bishop’s translation).91 Moreover, these estrangements are sometimes staged through a scene of reading.92 If, as Milléo Martins argues, there is a dominant theme linking Drummond and Bishop, it is contained in those evocative lines. The speaker of Drummond’s poem peers at a dusty family portrait as he considers what the image reveals or doesn’t reveal about its sitters, who seem, ultimately, like “seated strangers” who can’t possibly be related to the speaker: “They’re guests amusing themselves / ​in a rarely-opened parlor,” the speaker concludes.93 Nevertheless, even though the portrait “does not reply” to him but only stares, casting its dust upon the speaker’s own eyes, and contemplating only itself, he does see something familiar there, as the poem ends with these lines: “I only perceive / ​the strange idea of family // traveling through the flesh.”94 It is this idea of family as estrangement, as well as the strangeness of family as relatedness, that is a major trope of Bishop’s. We have only to think of “In the Waiting Room,” written shortly after these translations, where the child, Elizabeth, in the midst of her existential crisis, as she waits for her aunt in the waiting room of the dentist’s office, realizes she is “one of them” (P 180). As she gives “a sidelong glance . . . / ​ at shadowy gray knees, trousers and skirts and boots / ​and different pairs of hands / ​lying under the lamps,” she thinks, “I knew that nothing stranger / ​had

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ever happened, that nothing / ​stranger could ever happen. / ​Why should I be my aunt, / ​or me, or anyone?” (P 180–81). Just as the speaker of Drummond’s “Family Portrait” had reacted with skepticism (“All these seated strangers, / ​ my relations? I don’t believe it.”95), so, too, Bishop’s child in the waiting room emphasizes the word “stranger,” acting as an adjective in this case but nevertheless suggesting the noun as well. Even the name of the child’s aunt, Consuelo, is estranging. Why Consuelo? Why would an Anglo poet from New England choose such an obviously Latin name? Most of the poems of Geography III, as well as most of the poetry translations, were done in the wake of Macedo Soares’s suicide, and so it is not surprising that many of Bishop’s poems of this period bear the trace of that loss and feature a number of ways that she attempted to “master disaster,” as “One Art” tells us.96 But Bishop was actually quite far along in her composition of “In the Waiting Room” in the summer before Lota’s suicide. She told Lowell in a letter written from New York in August 1967 that she only needed “an afternoon’s work in the public library” to complete it (WIA 629). Aunt Consuelo’s name, then, might be seen as a marker for a lost life, as well as a signifier of family. The sound of her voice in the poem—the “oh! of pain”—sends the young Elizabeth into a tailspin (P 180). She finds herself “falling off the round, turning world / ​into cold, blue-black space,” and later she is “sliding / ​beneath a big black wave, / ​another, and another” (P 180–81). The cold black wave, incidentally, shows up in the elegy fragment for Lota, “Aubade and Elegy,” written shortly after her suicide. There is no question that “In the Waiting Room” dramatizes a “gendered” identity crisis, as a number of critics have pointed out (see most notably Lee Edelman),97 but it is also a crisis in translation. How does one translate another’s voice? How does one translate “the family voice” that “Elizabeth” suddenly feels in her own throat? The realization in the poem is that one’s very existence is one of translation. Bishop also moves beyond a narrow view of family—where family contains only relatives—to a global level through the National Geographic (and the name Aunt Consuelo): What similarities— boots, hands, the family voice I felt in my throat, or even the National Geographic and those awful hanging breasts— held us all together

92  Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazil or made us all just one? How—I didn’t know any word for it—how “unlikely” . . . ​(P 181)

Perhaps Bishop also turned to translation at this time, as Marianne Moore had done when her mother died, as a way of focusing her attention and mastering loss. Milléo Martins also compares Bishop’s recently published elegy “For Grandfather” and Drummond’s “Viagem na família” (“Traveling in the Family”), which Bishop also translated. Both poets express an overwhelming desire to communicate in these poems and they set their efforts in vast landscapes, Drummond in the “desert of Itabira” where the shadow of his father “took me by the hand”98 and Bishop in the frozen north, “under the North Star” (P 329). The desert of Drummond’s poem is strewn with the father’s life: “His legal documents. / ​His tales of love-affairs. / ​Opening of tin trunks / ​and violent memories,”99 but the father never speaks, until, finally, the son, exasperated, “looked in his white eyes” and “cried to him: Speak!”100 But throughout the poem, he never does, despite the son’s pleading. In “For Grandfather,” the child follows the grandfather across arctic wastes, attempting to communicate with the dead with questions: “Where is your sealskin cap with earlugs? / ​That old fur coat with the black frogs?” The last three lines end with a similar construction to Drummond’s of hailing the grandfather: “These drifts are endless, I think; as far as the Pole / ​they hold no shadows but their own, and ours. / ​Grandfather, please stop! I haven’t been this cold in years” (P 329). The drafts of Bishop’s poetry translations in the archives show the care she took with her translations. Her three complete drafts of Drummond’s “The Table,” for instance, show extensive working over of the language with lots of characteristic insertions or possibilities placed on the sides, as Bishop did with her own poetry drafts when she was working through options.101 Bishop’s translations of Drummond also show her struggle with form and meaning in translation. As Bishop put it in a notebook labeled Ouro Prêto, kept from 1961 to 1965, “Translating poetry is like trying to put your feet into gloves-” (EAP 314). Indeed, a particularly difficult stanza in Drummond’s “Seven-Sided Poem” illustrates the complexity of this process. Much of Bishop’s translation of this poem is pitch-perfect. Drummond’s first stanza: Quando nasci, um anjo torto dêsses que vivem na sombra disse: Vai, Carlos, ser gauche na vida.102

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And Bishop’s translation: When I was born, one of the crooked angels who live in shadow, said: Carlos, go on! Be gauche in life.103

Bishop captures the rhythm and import of Drummond’s stanza in English that sounds like poetry, and the English exclamation point, and the phrase “go on” in the last line captures the nudging sort of urging command of the Portuguese “Vai.” If we compare Bishop’s elegant translation to this more recent one published in a bilingual selection of Poets of Brazil in 2004, we can begin to see the tricky business of getting a translation “right,” and the different choices at play in the process: When I was born, a crooked angel of the kind that live in shadows said: Go, Carlos! be gauche in life.104

Bishop chose, for example, to translate “um anjo torto / ​dêsses que vivem na sombra” as “one of the crooked / ​angels who live in shadow,” whereas Frederick Williams translates this same text as “a crooked angel / ​of the kind that live in shadows,” which makes the line a little awkward to my ear, although in both cases, the translators have made choices that attempt to capture faithfully the sense of the Portuguese, which is that we have here a crooked angel who is one of a number (dêsses) who live in shadow. Bishop struggled mightily, however, over the famous penultimate stanza of the poem. She worried later in a letter to Drummond that she had mutilated the lines, which read: Mundo, mundo vasto mundo, Se eu me chamasse Raimundo Seria uma rima, não seria uma solução. Mundo mundo vasto mundo, Mais vasto é meu coração.105

Obviously, the rhyme is important here, but Bishop loses the sense of the Portuguese in her translation in straining for the rhyme. Here is her translation of the stanza: Universe, vast universe, if I had been named Eugene that would not be what I mean but it would go into verse

94  Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazil faster. Universe, vast universe, my heart is vaster.106

The problem that Bishop faced as a translator with this particular stanza is that meaning resides in the rhyme in Portuguese of “solution” with “heart,” “solução” with “coração,” for which there is no English equivalent. It could be argued that Bishop does capture the sense of the stanza in English, since she manages to link the act of putting a rhyme into verse with “faster,” which is tied to heart with the rhyme “vaster,” and, further, she rhymes verse with universe, thereby re-creating metonymically Drummond’s playful idea that Raimundo’s name contains the world (mundo). And Bishop strives to keep that link intact, whereas Williams’s more accurately literal translation severs it with these lines: Wide world wide world world so wide, if my name were Raymond McBride it would be a rhyme, it wouldn’t be a solution though. Wide world wide world world so wide, my heart is much wider I know.107

The lines are too long; “McBride” rhymes with “wide,” not with “world,” and so on. Williams writes in his introduction that he has tried to “remain faithful to the content,” as well as to the rhyme and rhythm in order to “more closely approximate the original, even if some aspects of meaning are at times lost in order to retain the form.”108 I would say that Bishop more often chose meaning over form, although, as a poet, she tried to find a form in English that would remain “faithful” to Portuguese rhythm and rhyme. Tom Burns offers the best translation of these lines in his critique of Bishop’s translation: World, world, the world is wide, if my name were Clyde it would be a rhyme, not a reason. World, world, the world is wide, but wider is my heart.109

I like Burns’s rendering of the line “seria uma rima, não seria uma solução” as “it would be a rhyme, not a reason.” Burns explains his reasoning as being “both more succinct and closer to Drummond’s line” than Bishop’s rendition.110 It also “recalls the cliché ‘neither rhyme nor reason,’ which may be thought of as either an advantage or a defect.”111 I don’t, however, agree with

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Burns’s final conclusion about Bishop’s translations of Drummond: that “despite nearly two decades in Brazil she had not mastered the language well enough to do a proper job, which, in turn, calls into question her ‘credentials’ for assembling and editing an anthology of twentieth-century Brazilian ­poetry.”112 This is harsh criticism, and it is not supported by the scant evidence that Burns supplies in his essay. He notes only one grammatical error in Bishop’s translation of Drummond’s “Infância” and points out that Bishop might better have translated Drummond’s title of this poem as “Childhood,” rather than “Infancy.” Fair enough, but many of his criticisms are more about choices, as opposed to errors. There is simply no way to render the resonance of “Raimundo” in English; its literal translation as “Raymond” misses the point, as do Eugene and Clyde and McBride. To a Brazilian, “Raimundo” would have a faintly comical resonance—as if it were banal, more than simply commonplace—and that is why Drummond uses it. Bishop tries mightily here to render a “faithful” translation, but, necessarily, fails. Sometimes a line, a phrase, a name is untranslatable.113 My point in comparing these various translations is to illustrate the ethical dimension of the translation process and to understand translation for what it is—a complicated cross-linguistic and cross-cultural enterprise. In judging Bishop’s translations, we should at least consider her methods and understand her efforts in the broader context of mid-century culture and translation theory. Bishop’s translations were the first to introduce a North American audience to a small portion of Brazilian literary history. These writers influenced Bishop’s poetry in her approach to both Brazilian and childhood themes. She actively worked to promote Brazilian writers, helping them to find a new English-speaking audience. Those writers, as in the case of “Helena Morley,” are still finding an enthusiastic audience through Bishop’s translations. In the process of translating Brazilian writers throughout her years in Brazil, Bishop made mistakes, but her translations for the most part are good in English and demonstrate an ethical approach to translation. Translation is hard. Neil Besner writes that “a translator, by definition, is appropriating one language and all that language carries with it . . . ​and moving it into the realm of another language.”114 If a translation is “ ‘successful,’ ” then, it must in some sense “erase the original,” but it must also be ­“provisional”—that is, “it must carry, and carry in bold outline, as many traces as possible of its particular and non-universal origins—in this case, it must seem Brazilian; speak as if Brazilian; explain, narrate, report, argue,

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analyze as if it were Brazilian, because it is”115 (319). Many of Bishop’s translations were successful; Athill was “transported” to that small diamond mining town in Minas Gerais when she read Bishop’s translation of “Helena Morley.” When I read Bishop’s translation of Drummond’s “Traveling in the Family,” I am walking across that desert in Itabira, trying to reach my father. Bishop’s translations are important because they bring us closer to Brazil and its writers. They also bring us closer to Bishop.

Four

Bishop’s Brazilian Politics

It’s terribly hard to find the exact and right and surprising enough, or un-surprising enough, point at which to revolt now. —Elizabeth Bishop to Robert Lowell, June 1961 I am thinking really that the Revolution might give a thread for you to draw together the gathering impressions of your ten years’ stay. —Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, May 1964

Elizabeth Bishop wrote the first overtly political poem of her career in 1954 in Brazil.1 Inspired by the suicide in August 1954 of Brazil’s president Getúlio Vargas, “Suicide of a Moderate Dictator” attempts to understand the events that ended Vargas’s long career as leader of Brazil, first as dictator from 1930 to 1945 and then as Brazil’s democratically elected president in 1951. Bishop dedicated the poem to her friend, the muck-raking journalist and political agitator Carlos Lacerda, who founded his right-wing newspaper Tribuna da Imprensa for the sole purpose of destroying Vargas’s presidency.2 Lacerda’s accusations of corruption against the Vargas family led to an assassination attempt on Lacerda’s life, followed by a call from the Brazilian military for Vargas’s resignation, which resulted in Vargas’s suicide (WIA 164n). This dedication is significant, as Bishop’s views about the political situation in Brazil

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would become inextricably linked to Lacerda’s political fate for the next decade. Lacerda was an “old old friend”3 of Lota de Macedo Soares, whose family ties were rooted in Brazil’s political, cultural, and intellectual elite. Both were pro-American and rabidly anti-Communist and critical of presidents who appeared to be too socialist-leaning in their policies. As a North American poet, living in Brazil at the height of the Cold War, Bishop tended to reflect in her letters and prose Macedo Soares’s and Lacerda’s views, although Bishop became more critical as she spent more time in Brazil. Lacerda was, as the historian Thomas Skidmore has written, a “master of political invective” and “destroyer of presidents.”4 After Vargas committed suicide in 1954, Lacerda, who had presidential ambitions, aimed his attack at his successor, Juscelino Kubitschek, and then Jânio Quadros, who resigned in 1961 after only seven months in office; and then finally, in 1963, he worked to oust the democratically elected João Goulart (with the financial support of the United States). Goulart’s presidency fell in 1964 after a military coup that ended democracy in Brazil and plunged the country into a long period of military rule until 1985. This colorful history features Lacerda in a series of operatic incidents surrounding the demise of these presidencies. At one point, Lacerda was “hiding out” at the house in Samambaia, and, during the coup, which Lacerda had helped to support, he was barricaded in his palace “dressed in a leather jacket and armed with two submachine guns and a pistol.”5 Bishop came very close to the gathering political crisis in 1961. When Lacerda became governor of Guanabara (greater Rio de Janeiro) in 1960, he hired Macedo Soares to be chief coordinator of a complicated project to build an elaborate park along a three-mile piece of land on the southern shore of Guanabara Bay, and the two women began to spend more time in Macedo Soares’s apartment in Rio.6 In a June 1961 letter to Lowell, Bishop referred to Macedo Soares as “chief-Co-ordinatress of the Fill” (WIA 361). In these early days of Macedo Soares’s new job, Bishop wrote enthusiastically about it: “It is wonderful for her, and if it works out the way she wants it to, it will be a wonderful big shady park, two or three restaurants, playgrounds, outdoor cafes, etc.—and give all classes of Rio somewhere to go and walk and enjoy the view and sea-breezes—which they badly need” (WIA 361). Bishop’s letters to Lowell are often full of praise for Lacerda, but even as early as 1954, Bishop tempered her praise in a letter to her friend Pearl Kazin. She wrote that she found Lacerda “honest” but worried that “he’s got too much ego and will probably end up in about ten years as a cynical politician” (OA 288). Bishop’s move to Rio placed her much closer to the action. While

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she seemed to prefer the quiet, rural life at Samambaia, she nevertheless capitalized on this new drama in her letters to Lowell, and they most certainly fed her art. These letters reveal a Bishop struggling with how to find a suitable “form” of protest that could address the gathering revolutionary crisis in Brazil. This story has a geographic dimension as well. During these years, under the Kubitschek administration, Brazil’s capital moved from Rio de Janeiro to Brasília. Bishop traveled to Brasília with Aldous Huxley and his wife in 1958. The trip was clearly part of a promotional tour for Brasília, but Bishop’s account reflects her criticism of the utopian impulse behind Brasília and pays particular attention to how this massive development project threatened the region’s indigenous population. The essay is obviously finished and polished, and Bishop sent it to the New Yorker. The magazine rejected it, apparently because Huxley did not say enough in it.7 The trip most certainly inspired one of Bishop’s great poems, “Brazil, January 1, 1502.” And the essay can be seen as a kind of companion piece to that poem, revealing—along with other newly published material in Alice Quinn’s Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box, the Library of America edition, the new collections of Bishop’s Poems and Prose, and the complete Lowell and Bishop correspondence—Bishop’s increasingly involved dialogue with Brazilian politics. One of the great contributions of all these new collections of Bishop’s work is that they demonstrate beyond a doubt that Bishop’s artistic life was all of a piece. It was indeed “one art.” She used prose—letters, political commentary, stories—to work through and elaborate a theory of poetics that she laid out in three essays she wrote in college and continued to rely on this method of composition throughout her career. During college, in the politically fraught 1930s, she did not yet have the skill as a poet to bring together that complex nexus of social commentary that would one day become a feature of some of her best poetry.8 But Brazil changed that for her—the influx of new experience, the direct access to political upheaval, her relationship with Lowell, the writing of the Brazil book for the Life World Library, the travel—all contributed to a perspective that allowed her to develop the political dimensions of her Brazilian experience, giving us another important angle on Bishop’s Brazil. I told part of this story in a book chapter published in Elizabeth Bishop in the Twenty-First Century, but here I trace the full arc of that story from 1954, when Bishop wrote “Suicide of a Moderate Dictator,” to 1979 when the New Yorker published her brilliant political satire “Pink Dog.” Lacerda plays a part in the whole range of Bishop’s Brazilian politics, and, in

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the end, his politics do not end up being just cynical, as Bishop had feared, but murderous. The story begins with Getúlio Vargas, who had a reputation for reform and so was popular with the “Brazilian masses,” as Bishop put it in her account of the Vargas government in her Life Brazil book (130). His opponents described his regime as “ ‘Fascism Brazilian-Style,’ or ‘Fascism with Sugar,’ ” according to Bishop’s account of him (130). She explains that under the Vargas regime, “individual rights were curtailed, there were arbitrary arrests and the press was controlled. But there were no public executions, no shootings, no concentration camps” (130). Hence, the “moderate” modifier in Bishop’s title for her poem “Suicide of a Moderate Dictator.” Bishop’s poem begins by imagining how the news will reach the people: This is a day when truths will out, perhaps;— leak from the dangling telephone ear-phones sapping the festooned switchboards’ strength; fall from the windows, blow from off the sills, —the vague, slight unremarkable contents of emptying ash-trays; rub off on our fingers like ink from the un-proof-read newspapers. (P 299)9

Each of the poem’s three stanzas begins with a variation on that opening line: “This is the day . . . ​,” “Today’s the day . . . ​,” “This is the day. . . . ” The repetition alone works against the wish-fulfillment fantasy that some kind of “truth” will emerge from this story. Bishop’s leaking and dangling telephones, pollinating, “un-proof-read newspapers,” ashtray contents, and the “sapping” of strength all suggest that getting at the truth is highly unlikely. We are literally dusted with the political fallout. The poem exists in five drafts, according to Alice Quinn’s notes (EAP 310), and this version is the final typed draft with only a few corrections. It seems finished, or nearly so. Bishop composed this poem at about the same time as her Pound poem, “Visits to St. Elizabeths,” and it shares some of that poem’s use of the lulling cadences of the nursery rhyme as ironic political commentary, although “Suicide of a Moderate Dictator” lacks the cumulative power of the Pound poem. But it wasn’t until the late 1950s, after Bishop’s trip to Brasília with the Huxleys, that she was able to develop a method that could turn her concern with the political and social into powerful poetry focused on the political problems of Brazil. It begins with her 1958 essay “A New Capital, Aldous Huxley, and Some Indians.” Inspired, as Jeffrey Gray has argued,10 by her readings

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in anthropology, particularly Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes tropiques, Bishop focuses on the themes of the traveler and his or her encounter with the other, staging intimate, sometimes uncomfortable encounters for the reader with other cultures and ways of knowing. The trip to Brazil’s new capital and the utopian discourse surrounding the founding of Brasília provide Bishop with rich material for irony. Bishop begins her essay by highlighting geographical points that serve to define the essay’s major themes. She writes, “One could graph modern Brasilian history . . . ​on the three points connected by the Huxley trip: by way of Itamarati [in Rio de Janeiro, former capital of Brazil]; to the safe, democratic insipidity of the name ‘Brasília,’ and then beyond, to the dwindling tribes along the Xingu River, Indian again, for here as in the United States, many geographical names have held to their originals, or approximations of them” (Pr 292). Bishop maps the following points on her rhetorical compass. First is Rio de Janeiro, River of January, the original site of the Portuguese “discovery” of Brazil and subsequent “colonization”; it is Brazil’s old capital; next, Brasília, the bland, new center of Brazil; and, finally, the “dwindling” Indian tribes whose numbers will become even more endangered as a result of the move to the interior. Bishop’s adjectives—“insipidity,” “dwindling”—make her own attitude and the direction of the essay clear. Although Bishop attempts journalistic balance—she states both the pros and the cons of locating the country’s new capital in such a remote location—her use of irony slants her readers toward the view that Bishop shared with Macedo Soares and their political friends. They, like most of their fellow denizens of Rio, thought the whole idea of Brasília was a disaster: here was a remote city built in the middle of the arid plain, inaccessible except by plane, while people in Brazil’s former capital, Rio de Janeiro, lacked such basic amenities as water and electricity. As Bishop noted in her essay, opponents thought that the “attempt to build a city before building a railroad to its site” was ludicrous (Pr 293): “Brasil11 needs schools, roads, railroads . . . ​medical care, improved methods of agriculture, and dams and electric power,” Bishop wrote (Pr 293). Brasília itself is flat, uninteresting, “remarkably unattractive and unpromising” (Pr 295), and full of dust. Bishop notes that “in the late summer of 1958 one’s first and last impression of Brasília was of miles and miles and miles of blowing red dust” (294). Bishop’s description of Brasília is in direct opposition to the utopian discourse surrounding the idea of Brasília. Brasília is based on an old dream that could be dated more than a century earlier. As Bishop wrote in

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Brazil, “The move was thought of as a sort of exodus to a land of Canaan, a great stroke that would solve the country’s problems as if by magic. A capital in the interior would be a romantic repetition of the long marches of the bandeirantes through the wilderness, bringing civilization to the remotest areas, as far away as the western frontier. It was the myth of the city of gold, with the possibility of wealth and opportunity for all” (56). Bishop attempts to puncture this inflated dream in her Huxley essay. Take, for instance, her description of President Kubitschek, the mastermind behind Brasília, who appears early in the essay like some postmodern Kurtz, a commodity fetish in among the “sunglasses,” “sardines,” “ropes of dry red sausages,” “bottles of cachaça,” and “headache remedies” (Pr 294). His head— Bishop describes it as “the head from which all this has sprung”—appears in profile “in a blur of gold” on “plastic plaques embossed in gold” with the “magic word BRASILIA” (Pr 294). Brasília was the visible symbol, according to Skidmore, of Kubitschek’s successful economic development program.12 Kubitschek had an enormous populist appeal, and his presidency, which began in 1956, was a time of unprecedented economic growth and political stability for Brazil, as Brazil experienced growth “three times that of the rest of Latin America.”13 Kubitschek was able to exploit Vargas’s alliances but “without the authoritarianism.”14 The building of Brasília, Skidmore notes, “generated a sense of excitement among all classes of Brazilians, who looked upon the construction of a new capital in the neglected interior as the sign of Brazil’s coming of age.”15 But it also “diverted attention from many difficult social and economic problems, such as reform of the agrarian system and the universities.”16 Bishop’s essay refocuses our attention on the problems that the utopian myth of Brasília hides. Take Brasília’s “visionary architect,” the celebrated Oscar Niemeyer. It is not that Bishop does not appreciate the power of Niemeyer’s design, but she is quick to point out that they reflect the old prejudices: “It might strike a critical visitor as ironical that for over two years thousands of workers have been left to build wooden houses or shacks and shift for themselves, while the first two buildings to be completed should both be called ‘Palace’ ” (Pr 297). Of Niemeyer’s design for the “Palace of the Dawn,” Bishop notes that it is “certainly one of the most beautiful of all Oscar Niemeyer’s buildings. The pillars in particular, are an architectural triumph,” but consistent with her attention to a reading of utopian desires (and their dangers) in their grand project, she adds, “it is, after all, no mean feat to invent a new ‘order’ ” (Pr 301). But the coup de grâce in Bishop’s commentary on Niemeyer’s design is the

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“sunken wing” he built for the “servants quarters,” which is “connected with the Palace by a subterranean passage” (Pr 304). Bishop calls it a “feeble, not to say depressing, solution. . . . ​Surely,” she writes, “in Brasília, sometimes referred to as ‘the most modern city in the world,’ Niemeyer, of all architects, should not have found it necessary to put them underground” (Pr 304).17 It turns out that Niemeyer used the same design for his own house outside Rio, a move that had been criticized, Bishop notes, by Henry-Russell Hitchcock in the magazine Latin American Architecture. Bishop writes, “In both cases his solution of practical problems seems to have been the same: put them underneath, or underground, like a lazy housewife shoving household gear out of sight under a deceptively well-made bed” (Pr 304). In this more politicized phase of her Brazilian career, Bishop’s evolving sensitivity to class issues extends beyond the domestic sphere of the Samambaia household to the larger sphere of city planning and the role modern architecture played in the building of the new Brazil. When we finally reach the Iaualapití18 Indians, we are predisposed to dismiss Brasília as folly, and its costs become more evident when Bishop points out the connection between their “dwindling” tribes and the erection of the utopian city. Huxley’s role in all this also becomes abundantly clear: he has been brought in as a propagandist for the government. During the trip, an “exuberant” man shows up to ask Huxley to write a message for a collection to be put “in a future Brasília museum” from “visiting celebrities.” Huxley dutifully “produced a few phrases,” as Bishop puts it, “about the interesting experience of flying from the past (the colonial towns in Minas) to the future, the brand-new city of Brasília” (Pr 311). Bishop adds dryly that Huxley’s missive was published in the Rio papers “as a telegram Huxley had sent to President Kubitschek, giving a rather odd impression of the Huxley telegram style” (Pr 311). Like a characteristic Bishop poem, the description of the reality for endangered indigenous people that follows this duplicitous public fawning after celebrity forces us to reevaluate and reconsider Brasília’s potentially sinister ramifications. Bishop meets Claudio Villas Boas, who has lived and worked among the Indians for many years for the Brazilian Indian service, who speaks of “how hard it is to help the Indians, a losing battle against disease and corruption” (Pr 314). “Brasília,” he tells Bishop, “has brought the possibility nearer by six hundred miles” that the land on which the Indians live will be sold, and they will be left with nowhere to go: “The Indians own no land; there are no reservations for them to retreat to if the lands where they live should ever be

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sold” (Pr 314). Those “retreating” Indians who withdraw always farther back behind the jungle canvas in Bishop’s “Brazil, January 1, 1502” acquire further poignancy next to this comment. Huxley really does not come off well in Bishop’s account. Perhaps that is the true reason the New Yorker rejected this piece. Indeed, as Bishop reports it, the Indians call him “homely.” Bishop herself observes, “And under the circumstances Huxley did appear, not homely, but exceedingly long, white, refined, and misplaced” (Pr 315). Bishop enhances the difference between the two of them by relating the anecdote, which she also told in a number of letters, that one of the indigenous men asked her to stay behind to be his wife, resulting in much merriment. But the story suggests that Bishop had achieved a level of acceptance that the remote Huxley could not. Toward the end, Bishop definitively links Huxley to the utopian folly of Brasília through his own more recent work. Huxley, author of one of the most famous dystopian novels of the twentieth century, Brave New World (1932), spoke to Bishop about his new book, which he referred to by the working title “Utopia,” but which was published as Island in 1962.19 Bishop quotes what Huxley told her about the novel: “It is a society ‘where men are able to realize their potentialities as they have never been able to in any past or present civilization,’ ” to which Bishop adds with keen dramatic irony, “It seemed quite natural to be hearing about it five thousand feet up in the air, deserting one of the most primitive societies left on earth, rushing towards still another attempt at ‘the most modern city in the world’ ” (Pr 319). Bishop’s criticism of Brasília is underscored by Antônio Callado’s account of the same trip in Correio da Manha,20 the Brazilian newspaper that Bishop quotes in her essay: “It is a city of consumers, set down in a desert where not even a cabbage plant can be seen. For a long time to come, its red dust will absorb, like blotting paper, the energies of the country” (Pr 320). Callado’s remarks are shared by “all intelligent Brasilians I know,” Bishop writes at the end of the essay, but, nevertheless, “rather desperately and resignedly, they are hoping for the best.” She ends with this sentence: “Perhaps we should also spare a little hope for the Indians” (Pr 321). Bishop’s poem “Brasil, 1959,” unpublished in her lifetime, was her first attempt to put the nexus of ideas generated by the Brasília trip into poetry. She begins by describing the dire economic situation in Brazil and its endemic problem of runaway inflation: “The radio says black beans are up again” (PPL 244). Disasters accumulate. The beans are full of worms; “a woman [is] drowned right in the city’s heart”; floods are common: “Why doesn’t the army

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send us trucks?” the speaker asks. Against this stark economic reality, Brasília rises in the middle of the poem, “a fairy palace small, impractical”; it “rises upon a barren field of mud / ​a lovely bauble, expensive as a jewel” (PPL 244). The poem also notes Brazil’s corruption in a raw line: “crooks, crooks, stupid stupid stupid crooks” (PPL 244). Ultimately, this early poetic attempt falls far short of the essay, however. Just a year later, though, the New Yorker published “Brazil, January 1, 1502.” I discussed in the last chapter how this poem takes up a dialogue with Clarice Lispector in its representation of the indigenous women. A further dimension of the poem is revealed if we place it alongside Bishop’s essay. As I have suggested, this poem shares some of the same language as the essay in its staging of alienating first encounters. When she stepped off the plane in Brasília, Bishop writes in her essay, “the first thing that greeted my eyes . . . ​ was a three-throned shoe-shine stand against the wall of the small airport building” (Pr 294). In “Brazil, January 1, 1502,” she begins with lines that faintly echo the essay’s moment of first encounter: “Januaries, Nature greets our eyes / ​exactly as she must have greeted theirs” (P 89). Several critics have already noted how these lines establish a connection between the twentieth-​ century traveler (and reader)—“our eyes”—and the Portuguese conquistadores of the poem. James Longenbach argues that in addition to exposing Portuguese colonialism, the poem also raises “the possibility of Bishop’s—or anyone’s—complicity in the continuing imposition of those values.”21 Jeffrey Gray notes that in “Brazil, January 1,” Bishop brings together “two experiences of discovery: the classical moment of the conquistador and the modern arrival of the tourist,” providing a crucial decentering of both.22 With these poems, Gray argues, “Bishop helps us understand travel in postmodernity— neither as conquest, nor as pilgrimage, nor even as immersion in societies necessarily less spoiled and more grounded than one’s own but rather as decentered, travel in which neither the traveling subject nor the visited site are stable entities.”23 This close affiliation creates discomfort for the reader and allows Bishop to lead us to a kind of critical awareness of the poem’s multilayered critique: the violence of the Portuguese exploitation of the Indians, as well as our own potential to continue the violence. It is a question of sight, of how we see the world. In Brasília it is important to describe what “greeted my eyes.” It is not fairy palaces but the “shoe-shine stand,” representing some poor laborer, probably, that cleans the shoes of the traveler, which will be covered with the RED dust of Brasília. We realize, too, that it was what the Portuguese saw that led them to find

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their own utopian dream in Brazil. Like the utopian dream of Brasília, the Portuguese turned the Brazil they found into something not unfamiliar . . . . . . corresponding . . . to an old dream of wealth and luxury already out of style when they left home— wealth, plus a brand-new pleasure. (P 90)

Thus, “directly after Mass,” the Portuguese “ripped away into the hanging fabric, / ​each out to catch an Indian for himself” (P 90). Bishop’s poem dramatizes the exploitation of the Indians as part of Brazil’s colonial past, but the opening lines link the poem to the present, placing “our eyes” uncomfortably in line with “theirs.” As travelers to this country, we also bring with us a set of prejudices and desires. Those desires, in this case that “old dream,” as Gray argues, “is important to Bishop’s theme of travel projection. . . . ​Because the Portuguese are primed with Edenic texts and dreams, they find Brazil ‘not unfamiliar.’ ”24 If we think about this poem in connection with Bishop’s essay about Brasília, we see some of the same significant points. Treating Bishop’s essay and her poem as companion pieces shows how closely the ideas of both overlap and how each shares a utopian dream of a city of gold that is catastrophic for the poor and disenfranchised. Bishop’s message is consistent in her political poetics of this period, developing as it does a method of critique that allows her (and us) to “spare a little hope.” It is Robert Lowell who is generally considered the more overtly political poet, but extensive correspondence between Bishop and Lowell during Bishop’s almost two decades in Brazil reveals just how deeply politics became personal for Bishop in a way that it never had before, and particularly after 1961, when Bishop and Macedo Soares moved from their quiet retreat in Samambaia to spend more time in the apartment in Rio de Janeiro. The move put Bishop into closer proximity to the profound political turmoil of this period, which began with the sudden exodus from office of President Jânio Quadros in 1961. Quadros’s election was originally a source of renewed hope for many Brazilians. He had campaigned on a platform of reform, promising to deal with runaway inflation and corruption. Instead, what followed was a period of tremendous instability, political turmoil, and the constant threat of revolution. Indeed, just seven months after Quadros took office, he was “leaving the country without a tie,” as Lowell, who was reading the unfolding news in the

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New York Times, put it in one panicky letter to Bishop (WIA 374). In response to the gathering crisis, Lowell offered to send Bishop money in case she and Macedo Soares had been unable to get their money out before the banks closed (WIA 376). Bishop assured Lowell in a September 25, 1961, letter that they and their money were safe. But her description shows how closely connected Bishop was to the events that precipitated Quadros’s resignation. Once again, their friend Carlos Lacerda was at the forefront of the attack that brought down Quadros. Lacerda was a member of the Democratic National Union Party, União Democrática Nacional, or UDN, which “drew support from upwardly mobile middle class groups, especially in larger towns and urban centers.”25 The party’s members were by no means unified in their views, but generally speaking they were anti-communist, pro-democracy and pro-development. Lacerda was nominated as the party’s presidential candidate just before the military coup that unseated Goulart in 1964. Lacerda’s attack against Quadros ostensibly had to do with Quadros’s “independent” foreign policy. Quadros “had begun to identify himself with the ‘nationalist’ position, which contradicted the views of most of the UDN, as well as the ‘anti-​Communist’ officers among the military.”26 Lacerda’s strategy of attack was similar to the one he had used against Vargas and then Kubitschek, except that there he had focused on corruption instead of foreign policy. At any rate, it was Lacerda’s “access to mass media” that made his attacks so successful.27 The event in August that Bishop mentions in her letter to Lowell “began over Quadros’s sudden award of the Cruzeiro do Sul Order to Cuba’s Che Guevara,” a sign that Quadros had moved to the left.28 Skidmore describes “a comic-opera incident, involving a mix-up with Lacerda’s baggage,” where Quadros refused to see Lacerda, and on the night of August 24, “Lacerda delivered a blistering radio attack.”29 Bishop told Lowell in her letter that Lota was very much involved in everything and stayed at the Governor’s Palace all night long several nights, arriving home for breakfast. You know that the Governor of the State of Guanabara is an old friend of ours, Carlos Lacerda—and he is the man who set the whole thing off—more or less. It is extremely complicated, of course. I even wrote a note to the NY Times about ten days ago—maybe you’ll see it—maybe they won’t print it. But really—the US papers I’ve seen, or what’s been quoted from them here—have everything entirely wrong. My one point was that the US doesn’t believe a word of what Russia says—but when it comes to S.A. anything anyone says—dictators or would-be dic. of the right or of the left (as now) they take on faith. Things look very bad. . . . ​I think I’ll give after-dinner speeches on the Brazilian Situation when I get to N.Y. I seem

108  Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazil to know quite a lot about it. The Navy steamed up and down right in front of our apartment here and I watched through binoculars. But Rio itself was pretty quiet—thanks to Carlos—(whom the NY Times calls “feudal and reactionary” etc., etc. The army actually is so un-warlike that they backed down—and really behaved very well!) (WIA 376)

While Bishop’s political discourse strikes one, in retrospect, as rather naïve, even reactionary, this letter to Lowell reflects Bishop’s increasingly personal involvement. She was both in the middle of it through her relationship with Macedo Soares, as it were, and somewhat outside of it. After all, she was an American living in Brazil, and so she might have remained an observer, although an involved one. The situation in Brazil and in the world (Lowell wrote to her repeatedly during this period about his fear of nuclear annihilation) prompted Bishop to seriously consider what would be a suitable form of protest, given the political situation. In a June 1961 letter to Lowell, Bishop tries to put it into words. Referring to a comment Lowell had made in an interview that appeared in the Paris Review in the winter-spring issue, she writes: “What you are saying about Marianne [Moore] is fine: ‘terrible, private, and strange revolutionary poetry. There isn’t the motive to do that now.’ But I wonder—isn’t there? Isn’t there even more—only it’s terribly hard to find the exact and right and surprising enough, or un-surprising enough, point at which to revolt now? The Beats have just fallen back on an old corpse-strewn or monument-strewn battle-field—the real protest I suspect is something quite different (If only I could find it. Klee’s picture called FEAR seems close to it, I think . . .)” (WIA 364). There is some dispute over which Klee painting Bishop meant. The editors of Words in Air identify it as Klee’s 1932 Mask of Fear, which in hindsight strikes me as the perfect condensation in visual form of one of Bishop’s most famous lines from “The Bight”: “All the untidy activity continues / ​awful but cheerful” (P 59). Klee’s large blob-like mask that moves across his canvas on tiny feet embodies the “awful but cheerful.” But in her essay on Bishop and Klee, Peggy Samuels identifies the painting as Klee’s 1934 Angst,30 which Bishop had seen exhibited at the Buchholz gallery.31 Whatever the case, Klee’s art provided Bishop with “an aesthetic model,” as Samuels puts it, for what was at present “difficult to invent” in poetry.32 Form, as Bishop suggests in this letter, certainly plays a role in how she formulates a “real protest” to political and social crisis in her own work.33 I think we can now see that Bishop achieves this “form” of protest in a va-

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riety of ways, but especially in 1964 in her neglected but brilliant ballad “The Burglar of Babylon,” a poem that grows directly out of the political chaos and concerns of these years, and in the terza rima of the brilliant political satire “Pink Dog.” Bishop actually began drafting “Pink Dog” in the early 1960s, and so it dates from the same period as “The Burglar.” Both are set in the Leme district of Rio where Macedo Soares had an apartment and where the favela, Morro da Babilônia (the hill of Babylon), exists in close proximity to the luxury apartments. And both dramatize in their own particular forms the repressive policies of the Lacerda government to deal with crime and beggars in Rio. In a letter to the New Yorker, Bishop called “The Burglar of Babylon” “last week’s news in the form of poetry—like TIME magazine.”34 The seeds for “The Burglar of Babylon” (and “Pink Dog”) seem to have been planted around the time of political upheaval in Rio and Bishop’s move there with Macedo Soares. Bishop wrote to Lowell that Elizabeth Hardwick’s August 1961 review of Oscar Lewis’s The Children of Sanchez in the New York Times Book Review35 inspired her “to tackle the favela business here— (The Rio slums—if anyone doesn’t know by now)” (WIA 379). She took on this challenge in both her Brazil book and then in 1964 in what Marianne Moore called her “finest poem” (WIA 560), her ballad “The Burglar of Babylon.” From 1961 to 1964, the political situation worsened in Brazil, leading finally in 1964 to the fall of Goulart and the end of democracy in Brazil. After Quadros resigned in 1961, Goulart, his vice president, became president, but not before the country went from a presidential to a parliamentary system in an effort to minimize Goulart’s power. Goulart’s policies of land reform and nationalization of parts of the oil industry that had been privately owned were unpopular with Brazil’s middle class. In a letter to Lowell from April 1962 that she mistakenly dated April 26, 1928—a mistake that Bishop attributed, in a humorous aside to Lowell, to the current state of chaos in ­Brazil—she wrote: “There are rumors, rumors of revolution; things have never been such a mess. . . . ​The thieving is beyond belief” (WIA 408). By late 1963, the widespread fear was “that all of Goulart’s moves had no further purpose than to create a revolutionary situation in which the president would emerge as the Brazilian Perón.”36 In a 1964 letter to Bishop, Lowell addressed the question of how to put all this into poetry: I think everyone here feels that Brazil was rapidly dropping into chaos, more rapidly than even Brazilians knew or anticipated till lately. . . . ​This is a very

110  Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazil confusing time. The big wars may be over, but when have so many governments toppled, so many changes, good and bad, come by violence. The radical business has brought us a little nearer to the turbulence. The issue is clear, but the working out is all uncertain, and wrung with twisted lines. You speak of the artistic temperament, unsuited to this stuff. But you grasp strongly, and come up with full hands. . . . ​I wish you could find forms, narrative, description, fiction, poems—to get it out. . . . ​No eye in the world has seen what yours has. I have a vague image of a sequence of poems through which the Revolution moves. . . . ​I am thinking really that the Revolution might give a thread for you to draw together the gathering impressions of your ten years’ stay. (WIA 533–34)

Despite Lowell’s encouragement, Bishop, ultimately, knew that her poetic gifts did not rest in writing overtly political lyrics, and writing such a sequence of poems was beyond her grasp to shape into art, as Lowell might have done. But Bishop had gathered her impressions in ways that were more suited to her poetic skills, and that was in her recently completed ballad, one of several ballads that Bishop wrote at various points during her poetic career. And Lowell was clearly pleased with the results. As he said in a letter to Bishop when the ballad appeared, “It’s surely one of the great ballads in the language, and oddly enough gives more of Brazil somehow than your whole Life book” (WIA 560). Lowell compared it to Bishop’s poem on Pound, “Visits to St. Elizabeths,” calling it one of Bishop’s “peculiar triumphs like the Pound” (WIA 560). Set in the favelas of Rio, “The Burglar of Babylon” tells the story of the hunt for and eventual death of the thief Micuçú on the hills of Rio where the poor live as “a fearful stain” on the hillside: “The poor who come to Rio / ​And can’t go home again” (P 110). In her Life World Library book, Brazil, Bishop’s first attempt two years previously to take on the favelas, she had noted the terrible conditions and fragile houses of the favelas, “without running water or sewers” and “literally a stone’s throw from Rio’s luxury apartment houses” (140). Bishop wrote many of her most subversive poems using conventional meter and rhyme, and this ballad is no exception. Here Bishop resists the convention of the traditional folk ballad. Rather than eliciting our pity for the poor unfortunates, as W. B. Yeats does in “The Ballad of Moll Magee,” Bishop uses the occasion to slide both the speaker of her poems and her readers into a series of (sometimes uncomfortable) subject positions that force us to confront questions about gender, power, and even, in the case of the Burglar, the very question raised by the title poem of Bishop’s 1965 volume Questions

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of Travel: “Is it right to be watching strangers in a play / ​in this strangest of theatres?” (P 91). It is a technique that I have argued owes much to her Brazil years and her prose renditions of that experience. The ballad’s shifting perspectives and framing devices and forms of surveillance make it very much a Cold War document, as well as a political commentary on Brazil. It was published in the New Yorker in 1964, the year of the military coup. The rich (and Bishop includes herself among these in a letter she wrote about the incident) watch the unfolding story of the hunt for Micuçú “with their binoculars,” providing just one of the many layers of voyeurism and surveillance noted in the ballad, which also includes “a buzzard,” “an army helicopter,” “hysteric[al] soldiers” who end up shooting the officer in command by mistake, and “the yellow sun” itself. Jacqueline Vaught Brogan has pointed out—in the most substantive previous reading of this ballad—that it may have taken as its model the “goodnight ballad,” which emerged in the late nineteenth century and consisted of a criminal’s last words and his warning to society before his execution.37 Brogan argues that the ballad turns the “narrative line of the good-night ballad . . . ​inside out, revealing it to be society and its scripting of situations that is the actual ‘criminal.’ ”38 In its detailing of gross governmental incompetence and blind devotion to authority contained in the dying words of the mistakenly shot officer, who “committed his soul to God / ​And his sons to the Governor” (P 112), Bishop’s ballad has other models as well, most notably the political sambas composed for Carnival, a selection of which she translated in 1965. Moreover, the line appears to be a fairly direct criticism of Lacerda, who was still governor of Rio at the time. It was Lacerda’s popularity with the military—along with his access to the mass media—that made him so successful in bringing down presidents. Bishop may have once been partial to Lacerda as a result of her relationship with Macedo Soares, but that changed as Lacerda seemed to Bishop to become more like the dictators he was fighting against, demanding the ultimate sacrifice from his soldiers (and their sons), not for freedom or justice, but for him alone. Perhaps Bishop also had in mind the sacrifice that Macedo Soares had made for Lacerda—of her time and of her health. As in “Brazil, January 1, 1502,” Bishop’s ballad links contemporary Brazil to its history of colonial conflict in an early quatrain: There are caves up there, and hideouts,   And an old fort, falling down.

112  Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazil They used to watch for Frenchmen   From the hill of Babylon. (P 111)

These lines with their historical references serve to deepen the layers of social persecution. She may have hated working on the Brazil book—that “awful” book, as she called it in a 1962 letter to Lowell (WIA 397)—but the work she did there, the lines of historical and contemporary political conflict she traced, gave her the foundation for this skillful and subversive ballad. But there is another way that Bishop subverts the convention of the ballad form, and that is in the breaking down of the distance that is so much a part of the convention. The form, in other words, gave her the distance she needed to contain the chaos swirling around her, while at the same time allowing her to break the conventions that also worked to create more intimacy with the thief at the heart of the story. For most of this ballad, we feel we are perched outside looking into Micuçú’s world; essentially we are in the position of the rich people. But there is a moment in the ballad when Bishop closes that distance in these three quatrains in the middle of the ballad: Rich people in apartments   Watched through binoculars As long as the daylight lasted.   And all night, under the stars, Micuçú hid in the grasses   Or sat in a little tree, Listening for sounds, and staring   At the lighthouse out at sea. And the lighthouse stared back at him,   Till finally it was dawn. He was soaked with dew, and hungry,   On the hill of Babylon. (P 113)

At the beginning of the quatrain, the rich people are watching, but there’s a full stop at the end of the third line and a shift in perspective. Night has fallen, and Micuçú is alone on the hillside. This quiet moment lasts for only one quatrain before the surveillance frame closes in again, but in the intimacy it conveys, it shares much with other moments in Bishop’s work—­ Crusoe dangling his feet over the side of the volcano in “Crusoe in England,” the hermit in “Chemin de Fer” (another ballad), and even the confused child

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of “In the Waiting Room.” In breaking down this distance, if only very briefly, Bishop perhaps offers her greatest challenge not only to the ballad form itself but to authoritarian political systems, such as those she was increasingly recognizing in Lacerda’s Rio. James Merrill suggests what is perhaps at the heart of why Bishop turned to the ballad at certain times in her career in a talk he gave in 1988, “The Education of the Poet.” Here, Merrill joined the debate over politics and poetic form. When he was growing up, Merrill told his audience, what was “very much in the air . . . ​was the injunction to forge a ‘new measure.’ ”39 Merrill cites modernist poets—Pound and Williams—as well as his ­contemporaries— Ginsberg and Ashbery—as a source for this injunction, which suggests that formal innovation should follow a change in world. The question goes something like this, as Merrill puts it: “Doesn’t our world, with all its terrifying fragmentations and new frontiers, call for equivalent formal breakthroughs? Who would dream of coping with today in heroic couplets or terza rima?”40 And yet, in the end, Merrill defends his use of traditional form and points to his “need for a rhyme or an amphibrach,” traditional elements that he “found most conducive to surprise.”41 Bishop would most certainly agree. In discussing the political situation in an April 13, 1964, letter to Lowell, Bishop writes, “Ballads seem the only way of putting it all” (WIA 531). At the end of the letter, she signs off with the ambivalent: “But this isn’t my world—or is it?—Much love, Elizabeth” (WIA 531). For all its ambivalence, Bishop stakes a kind of claim that she has ultimately adopted this world—for better or for worse—and that tentative adoption is important to her commitment to writing about it and in using poetic form in new ways. Bishop set other poems in the Leme district of Rio that highlight the stark contrast between the rich people in the apartments and the poor on the street. In the atmospheric and unfinished poem “Apartment in Leme,” for instance, “two men / ​get up from shallow, newspaper-lined graves” in the first light (EAP 135). Bishop’s 1968 New Yorker poem “Going to the Bakery (Rio de Janeiro)” features a formal structure that effectively illuminates the stark contrast between rich and poor: this time she uses iambic tetrameter quatrains with rhyming second and fourth lines. The sad state of the bakery and its wares reflects the dire state of the country. “Rationed electricity” makes the bakery lights “dim,” and the rolls, and the baker, as well as the society around them, all appear sick, wasted, “feverish.” The speaker’s money is useless both in terms of buying good food and in alleviating human suffering:

114  Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazil the round cakes look about to faint— each turns up a glazed white eye. The gooey tarts are red and sore. Buy, buy, what shall I buy? Now flour is adulterated with cornmeal, the loaves of bread lie like yellow-fever victims laid out in a crowded ward. The baker, sickly too, suggests the “milk rolls,” since they still are warm and made with milk, he says. They feel like a baby on the arm. (P 173)

As the poet returns to the apartment, she notes, a “childish puta / ​dances, feverish as an atom,” and “a black man sits in a black shade” in front of her apartment building, “lifting his shirt to show a bandage” (P 174). The poem ends in a transaction that emphasizes the speaker’s ethical dilemma as a rich North American in this crumbling society. Just as her money had no power to buy decent food, it also has no power to alleviate human suffering. She gives the black man money, “seven cents in my / ​terrific money,” and then she says “ ‘Good night’ / ​from force of habit. Oh, mean habit! / ​Not one word more apt or bright?” (P 174). Habits die hard, as they say, and this habit (and the words that go with it) is useless in the face of such sickness and suffering. Its brightness illuminates futility. But it is the terza rima of her late poem “Pink Dog” that really stuns the reader. Like “The Burglar of Babylon,” the situation dramatized in the poem can be directly linked to Lacerda’s administration and deadly policies concerning the poor. I mentioned that Bishop overtly refers to Lacerda’s governorship in her “Burglar” poem, but her choice of the name of her pursued criminal, Micuçú, can also be linked to the more shadowy aspects of Lacerda’s politics, although there is no indication that Bishop was aware of such a possibility. The two poems, at any rate, in both content and composition, share the same dark moment in Lacerda’s political career. When Lacerda took office as governor of the new state of Guanabara in December 1960, he reorganized the state’s military police in order to fight crime, and one of the solutions to combatting crime in Rio was the death squads commanded by Milton Le Cocq de Oliveira.42 Among Le Cocq’s long list of victims, remembered today only by their nicknames, is the notorious Micuçu.43 By late

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1961, R. S. Rose notes, “many of the casualities of summary justice began to be dumped into the Guandu River.”44 Bishop must have been aware of the reports of death squads in Brazil, since Amado Ribeiro, a journalist at Última Hora, started to use the term Esquadrão da Morte (Squadron of Death) in the late 1950s in reference to the early death squads, which began in 1957 with the Grupo de Diligências Especiais (Special Diligence Group), or GDE.45 The GDE continued to operate under Lacerda’s reorganization plan, but Bishop, as I said, did not connect Lacerda to these events. Bishop certainly knew, however, of the 1962 scandal of the Lacerda government that inspired some of the central lines of her brilliant political satire “Pink Dog.” According to Rose, “The calamity began in August 1962, when two correspondents from the newspaper Última Hora began investigating the strange deaths of several mendigos [beggars] who had turned up drowned in two outlying rivers [the Guandu and the Guarda]. During the course of their investigations, the reporters uncovered a policy on the part of a police agency, the Department of Mendicancy (Delegacia de Mendicancia), to treat detained beggars as human litter.”46 The story was covered extensively by the press in 1962 and 1963, and Rose notes that “the accumulating evidence ended up implicating Governor Lacerda as being primarily responsible. . . . ​Front-page editorial cartoons of the bespectacled governor in Última Hora lampooned the affair for some time.”47 Impeachment proceedings were initiated against Lacerda, but ultimately nothing came of them.48 However, the allegations ruined Lacerda’s political ambitions to become president, and he was never able to shake the label “Mata-mendigo” (“Kill-a-Beggar”).49 From the very first drafts of “Pink Dog,” Bishop refers to beggars being thrown into the river, so she clearly knew about the incidents, although, again, she did not think Lacerda was responsible. The now well-known lines published in the poem’s final 1979 version immortalize this knowledge: Didn’t you know? It’s been in all the papers, to solve this problem, how they deal with beggars? They take and throw them in the tidal rivers. Yes, idiots, paralytics, parasites go bobbing in the ebbing sewage, nights out in the suburbs, where there are no lights. (P 212).50

In her unpublished dissertation, the Brazilian scholar Regina Przybycien connects this scandal to these lines, which at least partially solves the prob-

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lem of when Bishop began writing this poem.51 There has been a lot of confusion over the dating of the early drafts. The first drafts of the poem appear in the same notebook as her draft poem “Brasil, 1959,” and probably because of this, Vassar dates these early drafts from 1959. However, this date would be too early to incorporate the incident referred to in the poem. Brett Millier (and some critics after her) dates the early drafts of “Pink Dog” to the 1963 Rio Carnival season, an understandable mistake since Bishop had become quite cynical about Carnival in her letters to Lowell by the time the 1963 season rolled around. But we know that Bishop was not present at the 1963 Rio Carnival, because she wrote in a letter to Lowell that she and Macedo Soares had spent it in Samambaia (WIA 446). While Bishop’s extensive experience of the Carnival season, and her growing cynicism, certainly informs the poem throughout, 1963 may be too late for the earliest draft. Given the evidence, Bishop probably began drafting the poem in 1962 shortly after the incidents were reported in the papers. Brazilians seem to generally agree that this incident is behind the poem. Elizabeth Neely notes that Henriques Britto’s recent translation of Bishop’s “Pink Dog” into Portuguese restores the specificity of the context by naming the river in his translation, so that Brazilians reading Bishop’s poem will be aware immediately of the dark political past that “Pink Dog” reveals. Lacerda never admitted to his involvement. He wrote in his 1977 autobiography Depoimento (Testimony) that he remembered reading in Última Hora about just such an incident where the body of a man floated up in the Guarda River; he “had been tied up, with bullet holes in the back of his neck,” and Lacerda mentions the inquest afterward that “revealed that an employee in the Service for the Recuperation of Beggars (Serviçio de Recuperação de Mendigos) had formed ‘a little death squad,’ ” but he never admits to authorizing these actions or takes responsibility for them.52 There is no evidence that Bishop suspected Lacerda’s involvement, either. Based on Bishop’s defense of Lacerda in 1962 in an angry rebuttal in the New Republic and her later qualified defense of him in letters, she clearly did not believe he was capable of such tactics. On April 30, 1962, Bishop responded to an article by the Brazilian correspondent Louis Wiznitzer that had appeared in the New Republic a month earlier: “I want to register strong protest,” Bishop begins.53 Wiznitzer had claimed that Lacerda was responsible for “a wave of rightwing terrorism [that] has been spreading throughout Brazil.”54 He also accused Lacerda of “blackmailing” Quadros and, as Bishop puts it, “selling government property

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as real estate.”55 Lacerda’s removal of favela dwellers in Rio to free up expensive real estate in Rio is now well documented.56 Bishop calls Wiznitzer’s accusations groundless, and, in the case of the latter, one that “exactly follow[s] the line of Communist propaganda here.”57 Wiznitzer argued that the majority of Brazilians wanted Quadros to return to the presidency. Bishop disagrees: “During the past year I have been working on a book about Brazil and I have had talks with reputable journalists, economists, and international lawyers in Rio de Janeiro. These people and all my Brazilian friends are pro-democracy and pro-United States.”58 She calls Wiznitzer’s article “malicious” and “distorted.”59 Bishop did become more critical of Lacerda as the situation worsened in Brazil from 1961 to 1963. As she wrote in a letter to Lowell at the beginning of January 1963, “But let me say once again—we do NOT approve of C. in many ways—and he is dangerous, when there is no one else” (WIA 436). By October of that year, she worried about Lacerda using their Samambaia house as a “hide-out” (WIA 506). Nevertheless, she continued to defend him. In a 1963 letter to the New Yorker’s Katherine White, she wrote that, “Lacerda . . . ​has his faults, but he’s much the most intelligent man in the country.”60 Whatever Bishop knew or didn’t know, “Pink Dog” speaks for itself and represents a lasting and brilliant response to the problem of poverty, the cynical and murderous tactics of a corrupt government, and the treatment of the homeless as disposable waste. The poem’s speaker urges the hairless and diseased dog to save herself by wearing a disguise, so that she will not be thrown in the river (or worse): “Dress up! Dress up and dance at Carnival!” A version of these final lines, like the lines about the beggars, were also present in the first draft.61 It is Bishop’s own Swiftian “Modest Proposal” to the problem of the poor and unsightly, and, as Elizabeth Neely has argued, it is a uniquely Brazilian solution. Neely’s 2014 article provides the most thoroughgoing analysis of “Pink Dog” in its Cariocan62 context to date, establishing the poem’s many points of Cariocan reference. She also synthesizes much of the Brazilian criticism of the poem. Neely notes that the Pink Dog of the poem passes through three distinctly Cariocan settings subject to their own sets of rules and regulations, crucial to understanding the poem’s significance, and, I would argue, its politics—the beach, the Avenue, and finally Carnival: The sun is blazing and the sky is blue. Umbrellas clothe the beach in every hue. Naked, you trot across the avenue. (lines 1–3)

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The Rio beach would invite near nakedness but not complete nakedness, as Neely points out, and Brazilians have certain standards for how the body should appear (certainly not pink and naked)—more like a “ ‘toasted gold brown’ shade.”63 So this is hardly the egalitarian space that would accept the hairless dog. As the dog crosses to the Avenue, she truly becomes a subject for social sanction: Oh, never have I seen a dog so bare! Naked and pink, without a single hair . . . Startled, the passersby draw back and stare. (lines 4–6)

Neely points out that in Bishop’s drafts, she actually identifies the street where she first saw the dog that inspired the poem, Avenida Princesa Isabel, “one of the largest avenues in the Copacabana area,” running “perpendicular to Avenida Atlântica (the main beachfront avenue).”64 This street is actually a boulevard, “grander than the small streets that feed into it,” Neely writes.65 It is a major commercial street with shops and cafés where residents and visitors would be “fully clothed . . . ​despite the proximity to the beach.”66 Here, the “Pink Dog” would certainly stick out like the “eyesore” she is, causing consternation and fear: “Of course they’re mortally afraid of rabies,” the speaker says (line 7). Neely, Lloyd Schwartz, and George Monteiro67 have all noted that Bishop’s poem is also a parody of the enormously popular bossa nova song contemporary with Bishop’s time in Brazil, “The Girl from Ipanema.” Bishop was friends with the poet Vinícius de Moraes, who wrote the lyrics for Antonio Carlos Jobim’s music; but as Neely has rightly pointed out, the satirical style and wit is closer to samba. Bishop, as I mentioned before in the context of the Burglar’s effects, was interested in the way that samba was used to provide contemporary political commentary, and she translated some of these sambas, such as this one: Rio de Janeiro, My joy and my delight! By day I have no water, By night I have no light. (P 251)

Another source of Bishop’s choice to go with satire may be her reading of William Blake. In a letter to Lowell dated January 8, 1963, just before the 1963 Rio Carnival, Bishop turns to Blake’s “Holy Thursday” to express a satiric

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tone: “Carnival comes next. The songs are already being sung,” and then she slightly misquotes these Blake lines: Is that trembling cry a song? Can it be a song of joy? And so many children poor? It is a land of poverty! And their sun does never shine. And their fields are bleak & bare. And their ways are fill’d with thorns. It is eternal winter there.

Making the marginal visible is the key to “Pink Dog.” Ordinarily, as in the “Girl from Ipanema,” spectators take pleasure, as does the listener, in the passing of the beautiful woman before our eyes. But it is the hideousness of this dog that makes people stare. Because the dog has clearly crossed a boundary here, the speaker’s empathy for the dog is unusual in this setting, Neely notes.68 The speaker does not share the reaction of the Cariocans; her reaction is more considered, curious: You are not mad; you have a case of scabies but look intelligent. Where are your babies? (A nursing mother, by those hanging teats.) In what slum have you hidden them, poor bitch, while you go begging, living by your wits? (lines 8–12)

The speaker’s sympathy prompts her to warn the dog about what they’re doing to the beggars of Rio: If they do this to anyone who begs, drugged, drunk, or sober, with or without legs, what would they do to sick, four-leggèd dogs? (lines 19–21)

And so, the speaker offers a very Brazilian solution to the problem: Now look, the practical, the sensible solution is to wear a fantasía. Tonight you simply can’t afford to be an eyesore. But no one will ever see a dog in máscara this time of year. (lines 27–31)

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It is a Brazilian solution precisely because, as Neely has pointed out, Carnival is “a temporary measure to get the poor off the streets in their present form and into a more acceptable guise.”69 And this solution is also why the poem can be called Swiftian satire: Carnival is always wonderful! A depilated dog would not look well. Dress up! Dress up and dance at Carnival! (lines 37–39)

Such a Brazilian solution calls for Bishop’s specific use of Brazilian language at this point as well. While a fantasía is, as she notes in a footnote, a Carnival costume, it also means fantasy and illusion. It is the fantasy to which the 1959 Brazilian film Orfeu Negro (Black Orpheus) calls our attention. Based on the play Orfeu da Conceição by Bishop’s friend and fellow poet Vinícius de Moraes, Black Orpheus retells the Greek legend of Orpheus and Eurydice but is set in a modern-day favela in Rio during Carnival, and Orpheus is poor and black, a humble bonde (streetcar) driver. Bishop mentions having seen the film in several letters, and the favela featured in the film is also the setting of Bishop’s “Burglar of Babylon.” The film, directed by the French director Marcel Camus and winner of the Cannes Palme D’Or, was influential in the international reception of Brazil at mid-century. As Alex Bellos wrote in the Guardian in a review of movies set in Rio, “Black Orpheus—with its stunning scenery, mulatto actors, bossa nova soundtrack and voodoo-style portrayal of samba—gave European [and North American] cinemagoers their first taste of the exotic sensuality of carnival.”70 But while it tended to romanticize favela life, it also, in its tragic story, spoke to the underlying reality of Carnival. That reality is spoken in the final voiceover of the film as the camera pans across Orpheus, scaling the high hills of his neighborhood over the Atlantic Ocean, carrying the dead body of Euryd­ ice in his arms: “The illusion of Carnival is the happiness of the poor.” This is the illusion that provides the solution to the problem of “Pink Dog.” In it Bishop fused both her own powerful poetic skill and sympathy with a Brazilian wit and sensibility. Through this fusion, she truly found that unique form of protest for which she had been searching throughout the years of political turmoil in Brazil.

Five

Amazon Worlds

Geographic curiosity leads me on and on and I can’t stop. —Elizabeth Bishop to Howard Moss, May 1960

Elizabeth Bishop had been living in Brazil for almost a decade when she traveled to the Amazon in February 1960. The trip was, as Bishop told Lota in a letter written from the Amazon, “one of the most amazing experiences of my life” (qtd. in EAP 324). When she returned home to Samambaia, she could not get the Amazon out of her mind. In April she wrote to Robert Lowell, “I want to go back to the Amazon. . . . ​I dream dreams every night. I don’t know quite why I found it so affecting” (WIA 316). In May she wrote to Howard Moss at the New Yorker that she was “now . . . ​living to go back there again—it was much more beautiful than I’d imagined and I liked the people very much. . . . ​Geographic curiosity leads me on and on and I can’t stop” (OA 386). Almost immediately, Bishop began drafting poems and essays about the trip, including the poem fragment “On the Amazon,” published posthumously in 2006 in Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box. She also finished a travel piece, “A Trip to Vigia,” published for the first time in 2008. To the end of her life, Bishop worked to draft a major poem that was equal to her experience of the Amazon, and in 1979 she finally published the magisterial “Santarém,” one of the final poems of her life.

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Bishop’s fascination with the region began long before her trip there. She had read a great deal about the Amazon, including Through the Brazilian Wilderness, Teddy Roosevelt’s account of the Brazilian government-funded joint scientific expedition that he made in 1912; she also read the work of Brazilian writers, such as Euclides da Cunha, and that of contemporary anthropologists, such as Charles Wagley, widely regarded today “as the founder of Brazilian anthropology in the United States,”1 and whose 1953 ethnographic study Amazon Town provided the basis for Bishop’s first Amazon poem “The Riverman,” published in the New Yorker in 1959 before she ever set foot in the region. In poem drafts, letters, and travel writing, Bishop began shaping and mastering her craft around one central, geographic region that is rich in everything she found appealing as a writer: it is a region that is unsurpassed in natural beauty and abundance; the Amazon River, the largest river network in the world, has been the destination of travelers and explorers (many of whom Bishop read) since the sixteenth century (Mr. Swan, of “Santarém,” is certainly not unusual in his desire to see the Amazon before he died); a region that has long been the source of both mythos and istoria and often a blending of both, the Amazon is a place where religions, races, peoples, histories, cultures, and even waters meet. Bishop’s readers have not considered the poet’s Amazon writing as a whole. Very few critics have even discussed Bishop’s two major Amazon poems—“The Riverman” and “Santarém”—together.2 Bishop’s writing about the Amazon, however, when considered as a body of work, brings into sharper focus through comparison the impact of this experience on how Bishop thought about and shaped her career and how her stylistic choices illuminate the power of her poetry to make us think in ethical ways. Moreover, Bishop’s Amazon experience is another major cross-cultural contact zone in her writing. This work brings together two powerful strands in Bishop’s life in Brazil: that of the amateur ethnographer who immerses herself in a culture and dwells there for a while and that of the traveler, who passes through a community briefly. We have seen how Bishop immersed herself in life in Brazil, very much like James Clifford’s ethnographer. Although she didn’t set out to be a “fieldworker,” she nevertheless became one, in a sense. As Clifford tells us, “The fieldworker is ‘adopted,’ ‘learns’ the culture and the language. The field is a home away from home, an experience of dwelling which includes work and growth, the development of both personal and ‘cultural’ competence.”3 Bishop is as close as we can come to a poet who exemplifies these

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characteristics.4 Her “Riverman,” a man of the Amazon, too, immerses himself in a different culture in order to learn its ways, for he wants to become a great medicine man. This idea of the ethnographer abroad resonates with Bishop’s prolonged encounter with Brazil. By February 1960, when she traveled to the Amazon, not with Macedo Soares but with another Brazilian friend, she had been living in Brazil for almost a decade and had developed significant competence (and confidence) in Brazilian culture. She was beginning to speak and listen for herself. One aspect of being a homebody abroad, however, according to Clifford, is that ethnographers tend to focus on the “field” and so therefore “tend to marginalize or erase several blurred boundary areas, historical realities that slip out of the ethnographic frame,” such as the “means of ­transport . . . ​ —the boat, the land rover, the mission airplane . . . ​­technologies [that] suggest systematic prior and ongoing contacts and commerce with exterior places and forces which are not part of the field/object.”5 And so, Clifford argues, “the discourse of ethnography (‘being there’) is separated from that of travel (‘getting there’).”6 Bishop’s best writing on the Amazon represents both the experience of dwelling (conveyed through the dramatic monologue of “The Riverman”) and that of dwelling and traveling (the late lyric “Santarém,” which seems to anticipate Clifford’s privileged site of cultural representation in the twenty-​ first century). In his chapter “Traveling Cultures” from Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, Clifford writes that “ethnography (in the normative practices of twentieth-century anthropology) has privileged relations of dwelling over relations of travel.”7 Wagley’s study—which so influenced Bishop’s writing of “The Riverman”—fits this category. Clifford is quick to emphasize the tremendous contribution that such ­participant-​ ­observations have made to the field. As he notes, these are “probably anthropology’s most enduring contribution to humanistic study.”8 But he worries about what these studies leave out. Clifford wants to tip the balance towards traveling in ethnography, so that “the ‘chronotope’ of culture (a setting or scene organizing time and space in representable whole form) comes to resemble as much a site of travel encounters as of residence,” a space, in other words, of both travel and dwelling.9 For Clifford, this is where twenty-first-century ethnography should be. What comes into focus, then, is something that has been hidden in much ethnographic research, according to Clifford, “the wider global world of intercultural import-export in which the ethnographic encounter is always already enmeshed.”10 Bishop’s “Santarém” offers this kind of

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encounter by presenting a “chronotope” of the region that emphasizes travel and residence. It reveals—using again Clifford’s words—the “systematic prior and ongoing contacts and commerce with exterior places and forces,”11 including that of the poet who arrives by boat. While Bishop’s writing on Brazil was clearly influenced by the ethnographic discourses of her own period— Wagley’s and Claude Lévi-Strauss’s, as well as the adventurers and explorers she read who wrote about Brazil—the fact that Clifford’s vision of what a new anthropology might do in the twenty-first century also seems to fit Bishop’s “Santarém” is testament to what good poetry is capable of doing. Clifford emphasizes global exchange, and Bishop’s global reach is one characteristic that has contributed to her ascendency in the last decade. Oddly enough, Bishop achieves full immersion in a particular aspect of Amazonian culture not by experiencing it herself but through her reading of Wagley’s ethnographic research. Bishop’s first Amazon poem, “The Riverman,” was published in the New Yorker in April 1960 just after Bishop had returned from her trip to the Amazon, but it had actually been accepted the year before, as she indicated in a July 1959 letter to Anny Baumann. Wagley’s book Amazon Town: A Study of Man in the Tropics had “established [Wagley’s] stature in 1953 as a leader in Amazon studies,” according to Janet Chernela’s recent review of anthropological research in Brazil.12 Wagley had been doing field research in the Brazilian Amazon for many years, resulting in three books, the last of which was Amazon Town, based on “data collected from June to September, 1948,” including the case studies of 113 families in the Amazon town of Gurupá, to which Wagley gives the pseudonym Itá.13 Wagley was among the first generation of U.S. anthropologists who studied at Columbia University with Franz Boas.14 Bishop draws most of the details for “The Riverman” from one long chapter in Wagley, “From Magic to Science,”15 which tells of the current spiritual life of the Tupí-speaking Indians and their relationship to both Catholicism and shamanism, which exist, according to Wagley, side-by-side in the community and “do not oppose each other.”16 As Wagley writes, the saints of Catholicism “protect the general welfare of the community,” while the medicine men or shamans “protect them against the demons, . . . ​cure sickness, and . . . ​relieve them of the misfortunes caused by the spirits.”17 But Wagley describes a community in transition, and although shamanism shows remarkable resilience as a belief system, despite “three centuries of Christian influence,” people at the time of Wagley’s research were beginning to discredit the shaman. As Wagley writes, “Nowadays people profess, at least, that

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they do not want their children to become pagés [medicine men]: The pagé is persecuted by the authorities, called ‘pagan’ by the padre, and publicly criticized by the upper class.”18 Wagley adopts a style in this chapter that allows his interviewees to speak for themselves for long stretches of the narrative, so the effect is that we, as readers, are able to adopt different points of view as we move through their stories. Satiro’s story is the one that seems to have captured Bishop’s imagination, as he becomes the prototype for the Riverman. Satiro is a young man of the town who wants desperately to become one of the great sacacas, but “is still learning his profession.”19 Bishop’s Riverman tells that same story in verse. “The Riverman,” too, wants to become one of the great medicine men, or sacacas, and that ambition is what drives the poem: “Why shouldn’t I be ambitious?” the Riverman asks. That is the central question of the poem and the key to its power as poetry, as well as its power to tell a complex story of a culture in transition. Given Bishop’s attraction to cultural outsiders, it is not surprising she is drawn to Satiro, but her identification with this man and her choice of dramatic monologue to tell his story also has the effect of immersing her readers in the Riverman’s non-Western worldview right from the beginning: I got up in the night for the Dolphin spoke to me. He grunted beneath my window, hid by the river mist, but I glimpsed him—a man like myself. (P 103)

The mirroring effect (the Dolphin was “a man like myself”) provides one of the poem’s first and key moments of identification with the spirits of the water, which will recur throughout the poem. The fact that the dolphin is male also adds a homoerotic dimension, as Regina Przybycien has suggested.20 The dolphin is a shape shifter, and typically in these stories he would appear as a man to seduce women and vice versa, but here he is the same sex as the Riverman. “The Riverman” presents a watery world of fluid gender roles, which, as Przybycien has noted, link this poem to “Santarém” and the speaker’s desire there to dwell in a place that does not appear to be “dominated by rigid binary oppositions and fixed identities.”21 Many “authentic” details from Wagley lend credence to the Riverman’s shamanistic world: the use of “the port” through which the sacaca enters the river (“I waded into the river / ​and suddenly a door / ​in the water opened

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inward, / ​groaning a little, with water / ​bulging above the lintel”); the cigar smoke and alcohol to bring on trance-like states (“we drank cachaça and smoked / ​the green cheroots”); the sacaca’s ability to travel underwater (“oh, faster than you can think it / ​we travel upstream and downstream”); the magical river dolphin as guide; the water spirit, Luandinha, a giant water snake, whose appearance marks another key moment of identification (she is described as “a tall, beautiful serpent / ​in elegant white satin, / ​with her big eyes green and gold / ​like the lights on the river steamers— / ​yes, Luandinha, none other— / ​entered and greeted me”); the rattle the sacaca uses in his practice (“They gave me a mottled rattle”). When the Riverman expresses his “desire to be / ​a serious sacaca,” he recites the names of the great sacacas of a “generation ago” that Bishop had read about in Wagley: “Fortunato Pombo, / ​or Lúcio, or even / ​the great Joaquim Sacaca.” These are tales of transformation, and as Robert Boschman has argued, Bishop’s “Riverman” “is a transformation narrative to rival anything in Ovid.”22 Boschman identifies “The Riverman” as “another form of the Acteon myth in which a lone male is changed by a goddess into a lifeform that retains human consciousness and memory.”23 The only difference is that “the Riverman goes willingly into the transformation experience.”24 The stories of the great sacacas also share details with the myth of Orpheus, as Wagley notes. Fortunato Pombo, for instance, disappears for three days and three nights as a child, and when he reappears, he tells his mother “of the companion spirits he had seen in the depths of the water, and of the food, and of the large beautifully painted tamari (cigar) which he had been offered, which he did not accept for fear of never returning.”25 Bishop emphasizes the “underworld” theme with similes that mix fire and water. When the Riverman first goes down to the river in answer to the dolphin’s calls, he finds that “the moon was burning bright / ​as the gasoline-lamp mantle / ​with the flame turned up too high, / ​just before it begins to scorch.” And in the final stanza, the Riverman tells us that “When the moon burns white / ​and the river makes that sound / ​like a primus pumped up high— / ​. . . / ​I’ll be there below” (P 103). A trip to the underworld, transformation, initiation, immersion—these are the stories that poets have been telling for centuries. It is hardly a big leap to suggest that shamanism and poetry share affinities, and that the Riverman’s ambitions also speak to Bishop’s own. What makes this a characteristically Bishop poem is that it describes the process of transformation, the Riverman’s desire to become a great sacaca, but he is learning, and so the

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poem describes a process rather than an arrival, a life in transit, in flux; he is caught between two worlds, finding his way; the Riverman both dwells in his world and moves rapidly through it, describing a dynamic arc of change. His transformation has begun (“I don’t eat fish any more. / ​There is fine mud on my scalp / ​and I know from smelling my comb / ​that the river smells in my hair. / ​My hands and feet are cold”), but it is not complete. His job is to study and learn. He returns again and again through the port in the river, because, as he says, “I know some things already, / ​But it will take years of study, / ​It is all so difficult.” The Riverman is a thaumaturge in training, and as a visionary, he will, as he says, “need a virgin mirror / ​no one’s ever looked at.” Bishop borrows details directly from Satiro’s story. As Wagley relates it, another “more powerful pagé” in the town had told Satiro “that he also needs a ‘virgin mirror’—one into which no one has ever looked—so that he could see his spirit companions without danger to himself while traveling under water.”26 Satiro had “tried unsuccessfully several times to buy such a mirror, but someone always looks over his shoulder as the box containing them is opened in the store.”27 Bishop’s lines are I need a virgin mirror no one’s ever looked at, that’s never looked back at anyone, to flash up the spirits’ eyes and help me recognize them. The storekeeper offered me a box of little mirrors, but each time I picked one up a neighbor looked over my shoulder and then that one was spoiled— spoiled, that is, for anything but the girls to look at their mouths in, to examine their teeth and smiles. (P 105)

The reader might pause for a moment to consider that with the introduction of this mirror, the poem delightfully offers up a little joke, since the major components of the shaman’s art (and perhaps the poet’s) are smoke and mirrors. But “The Riverman” is a deeply serious poem, in the sense that it does not

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condescend to its subject. The poet identifies with this shaman in training. Here, again, Bishop is compelled by Satiro’s story, as the one she tells in this stanza about the virgin mirror is nearly identical, except for two important details that move the verse beyond mere translation: the detail of the eyes (the eyes of the spirit world dominate Bishop’s poem throughout), and the detail that presents its opposite: the vain girls, who notice their smiles but tellingly do not examine their eyes. Identification, the recognition of the other that began the poem, is the key to understanding. With this detail, Bishop moves her readers smoothly into the field of vision, bringing us to the center of the poem—the Riverman’s ambition: Why shouldn’t I be ambitious? I sincerely desire to be a serious sacaca like Fortunato Pombo, or Lúcio, or even the great Joaquim Sacaca. Look, it stands to reason that everything we need can be obtained from the river. It drains the jungles; it draws from trees and plants and rocks from half around the world, it draws from the very heart of the earth the remedy for each of the diseases— one just has to know how to find it. (P 105–6)

The Riverman’s question, “Why shouldn’t I be ambitious?,” is defensive. It calls our attention to the fact that such a role is not entirely accepted within his community. The names of the great sacacas the Riverman lists no longer practice here; people in Itá say these great sacacas actually “lived about a generation ago.”28 And so, the Riverman’s ambition can be seen both as emerging from his culture and as countercultural. What he wants is no longer desirable within his community, and, indeed, his wife tries to “cure” him with some forest medicine of her own, brewing him “stinking teas,” which he “throw[s] out, behind her back” (P 104). But he reasons “everything we need / ​can be obtained from the river. / ​. . . it draws from the very heart / ​of the earth the remedy” (P 105–6). These lines echo those that compare the sea to knowledge at the end of Bishop’s “At the Fishhouses” from A Cold Spring:

Amazon Worlds  129 It is like what we imagine knowledge to be: dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free, drawn from the cold hard mouth of the world, derived from the rocky breasts (P 64)

But the Riverman’s sense of knowledge is quite different. In “At the Fishhouses,” knowledge is distant, cold, “free,” but not comforting, not part of a warm life world. It is available to all, but the poem never designates what use it would be to us. The Riverman is the antidote to “At the Fishhouses”; here knowledge could offer a cure or “the remedy” for our ills. Knowledge is a gift the Riverman can share with his community; it is non-alienating and non-Western. It is not “drawn from the cold hard mouth / ​of the world” but from the warm depths of the river: The river breathes in salt And breathes it out again, And all is sweetness there In the deep, enchanted silt. (P 106)

The Riverman’s ambition is for himself but also for his community. His relation to nature is ethical and ecological, as Boschman has argued.29 He remains underneath the river with his ancestors above him: “Godfathers and cousins, / ​your canoes are over my head,” so that “When the moon shines and the river / ​lies across the earth / ​and sucks it like a child, / ​then I will go to work / ​to get you health and money” (P 106–7). The Riverman has been ­“singled . . . ​out” by the Dolphin and, as the last line of the poem tells us, “Luandinha seconded it.” The Riverman’s ambition is backed up by the authority of the spiritual world of the river where the ancestors live within the animal spirits to pass on the deep knowledge of the community. If we go there with the Riverman, allow ourselves to undergo the transformation, we will be changed somehow and come to know, however briefly, the power of the river, a kind of ecological deep knowledge that might make us want to preserve and protect. Again, Bishop places her readers, as she did with her translations, in an ethical relation with the subjects she wants them to know. “The Riverman” is also in the tradition of Bishop’s earlier dramatic monologue “The Man-Moth,” and yet there is none of the loneliness and alienation of that creature, and the Riverman is not sly. He offers a much larger gift for his community than does the Man-Moth, who will only hand over his “tear” if you pay attention. The Riverman’s gesture is larger, more globally encompassing. Robert Lowell located

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the source of the ancient power of “The Riverman” in Bishop’s own dreams. Calling the poem her “best fairy story in verse I know,” he told Bishop that it reminded him of “an old dream of yours, you said you felt you were a mermaid scraping barnacles off a wharf-pile. That was Maine, not Brazil” (WIA 321). No doubt the source of the Man-Moth’s underground tear was also Bishop’s dreams, but the key phrase in Lowell’s letter is the one that identifies the geographical poles of Bishop’s art—“Maine, not Brazil”; north, not south. Bishop’s movement south to Brazil, as “The Riverman” shows, marks a global expansion, a fundamental shift in her relationship to the world. Nearly twenty years passed before Bishop finally completed her second and last poem on the Amazon. The gap is not unusual for Bishop. She often began drafts years before they were completed, but in this particular case, it seems appropriate to invoke the thoughts on such twenty-year hiatuses of another anthropologist whose work Bishop had read. When he was returning to write about his travels in Brazil after twenty years, Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote in Tristes tropiques: “Every man,” wrote Chateaubriand, “carries within him a world which is composed of all that he has seen and loved, and to which he constantly returns, even when he is traveling through, and seems to be living in, some different world.” Henceforth, it will be possible to bridge the gap between the two worlds. Time, in an unexpected way, has extended its isthmus between life and myself; twenty years of forgetfulness were required before I could establish communion with my earlier experience, which I had sought the world over without understanding its significance or appreciating its essence.30

At the end of her life, time had unexpectedly “extended its isthmus” between, as Bishop put it in “Poem,” “life and the memory of it.” Ultimately, it seems to have taken the wrenching experience of leaving Brazil to produce “Santarém,” one of four last poems, including also “North Haven,” her elegy for Lowell; “Pink Dog,” her most successful political satire and farewell to Rio; and finally “Sonnet”—all written in 1978 and 1979. “Santarém” is an important achievement as it presents a whole capsulized history of the European contact that shaped the region from the explorer, to the missionaries, to slavery, to the modern traveler “who wanted to see the Amazon before he died.” As in “The Riverman,” desire and ambition underlie the poem (albeit understated here); in the case of “Santarém,” we have the accumulated desires of not only the modern traveler but all those who came before her. The poem establishes a “dazzling dialectic” with the past

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and the present that is exceptional in its global reach and scope. Unlike “The Riverman,” Bishop’s “Santarém” is based on her own trip to the Amazon, and so she chose the lyric mode to tell this story, not the dramatic monologue. Like many of Bishop’s lyric poems, “Santarém” begins with the description of a place that the poet has actually seen, giving the poem an immediacy that could not have been achieved otherwise. The trip itself was also significant as a touchstone for discussions with Lowell about her own poetic career and the importance of Brazil to her development. For these reasons, it is worth taking a moment to describe the trip that Bishop took and how she worked over this experience in letters that became a sort of laboratory for the major ideas of “Santarém.” Bishop traveled to the Amazon with a Brazilian friend, Rosinha Leão, and Leão’s sixteen-year-old nephew. In February 1960 the three travelers left Rio on the 17th, flew to Belém, “stopped an hour,” and then “flew up the Amazon to Manaus,” Bishop wrote in an unpublished journal-like account of her trip.31 After several days in Manaus, they boarded the Lauro Sodré for the thousand-mile trip down the river to Belém, stopping at many towns along the way, including Santarém, in order to pick up people and a virtual ­Noah’s ark of animals—hens, dogs, a turkey, and turtles, which were placed in the lifeboats; stuffed alligators for sale; “black pigs—puppies—a coati? in a box”—all traveling down the river to their various destinations: Itacoatiara, Urucurituba, Parintins, Juruti, Oriximiná, Óbidos,32 and, eventually, Santa­ rém. Bishop’s boat, based on her descriptions, would have been typical of the three-decker boats still in operation that take the local people and their goods to and from the major towns on the Amazon. These are not tourist boats, and most people string up hammocks in the deck areas. There are a few cabins for the richer folk. The trip normally takes about four to five days to travel the thousand miles between Manaus and Belém. We already know that Bishop was adventurous, but for a white American woman to make this trip in 1960 is quite amazing. As Kim Fortuny has pointed out, traveling to the Amazon at this point, before the building of the trans-Amazonian highway, would have been difficult even for Brazilians.33 Bishop wrote to Macedo Soares that she was “proud” of what they had accomplished, surviving this “rough and rigorous life” on the river. Most of the passengers traveled in second class, stringing their hammocks up on the lower decks, while Bishop and Leão had a cabin de luxo, as she described it in the letter, which “became a sort of salon where we served Nescafé and biscuits and prunes to the chosen few, and lent books and gave out medicines” (EAP 324). Although she does

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not say it here, we can presume that this “salon” only included the first-class passengers, given Leão’s comments made in an interview with Gary Fountain and Peter Brazeau. Leão was shocked that Bishop took her nephew and went below decks to see second class, which just wasn’t done, according to Leão.34 The strict class hierarchy that Bishop experienced on the boat might have reinforced Bishop’s already developing political turn at this stage in her career. But in terms of the writing of “Santarém,” another section of Bishop’s letter to Macedo Soares captures something of the world of “crazy shipping” that would later be featured in the poem: The people all stream down to the boat, all the population—in their best clothes, apparently. . . . ​They sell the most unlikely things—dugouts full of rocking chairs—live stock of all kinds—fruits and eggs and fried shrimps. . . . ​ The people are wonderful—and so beautiful—they get better and better looking all the time, I swear—particularly the little boys and young girls—But here in Belém they have that city disagreeableness again, alas—in Manaus they were all like angels. And Santarém—I’d like to go there for a rest cure or something— no pavements, just deep orange sand, beautiful houses and absolute silence— walks along the water front, and two cafés—just the way a town should be laid out. (qtd. in EAP 324–25)

This letter to Macedo Soares was written in the moment, but even here among the touristic neophyte touches we see the major contrast that would create the dynamic tension of Bishop’s poem “Santarém”: the bustle of travel and the quiet of dwelling in this town. Already forming in Bishop’s imagination is Santarém as a place of healing, an idea that—whether it be physical or psychic health—further links “The Riverman” to “Santarém.” In letters to Lowell she wrote immediately after her return, Bishop struggles to use the experience of the Amazon in her poetry and reflects on what it means to her career. In one letter Bishop relates a somewhat surreal incident when the boat “stopped at a place called ‘Liverpool’ late one night” to pick up a dying man. Bishop describes it as “a narrow channel, nothing visible but a few white blurs of houses and candles, and one lantern.” She continues, The ship waited and waited—then plop, plop—very gently, a canoe came out, a big one. Several men were in it, with two lanterns—one the old-fashioned burglar’s kind of dark lantern. They were bringing out a dying man to be taken to the hospital in Belém. It was very hard to raise him up to the ship—in a sheet, I think, an old man with a nightcap on. The lantern fell on his face, on the red, muddy water. It was quite incredible. They are very quiet people, and

Amazon Worlds  133 ­ andsome—Portuguese and Indian mixed, “caboclos” and “mamalucos”35—I h must find out where that name comes from. But I worry a great deal about what to do with all this accumulation of exotic or picturesque or charming detail, and I don’t want to become a poet who can only write about South America etc. It is one of my greatest worries now, how to use everything and keep on living here, most of the time, probably, and yet be a New Englander herring-choker bluenoser at the same time. (WIA 317)

Bishop sets up a dichotomy in this letter between a sublime portrait of life and death on the Amazon, worthy of Albert Bierstadt had he painted the Amazon, and the proud, white, Nova Scotian bluenose with her Puritan mantel still clinging to her shoulders. Bishop’s portrait of Life and Death on the Amazon is, by contrast, sublime with its “old-fashioned burglar’s kind of dark lantern,” illuminating the face of the dying man against the backdrop of the “red, muddy” river. Bishop also emphasizes the mixing of the people in this letter formulated against the mixing of the river, which would become a crucial topos in “Santarém.” Bishop’s “accumulation of exotic or picturesque or charming detail” would inform the artistry of “Santarém,” but by that time she had successfully shed the tourist’s tendency to romanticize the other that is evident in her letter to Lowell. What remains in “Santarém” is a picture of the town and the Amazon as a meeting place of cultures, a palimpsest of contact that has left behind its traces in both benign ways in the architecture (the Portuguese blue and white tiles—azulejos) and in more sinister ways (the blue eyes of the American slaveholders who came after the Civil War). Bishop is interested throughout her letters in this mixing, in the traces of the past that are evident in the present, traces that Bishop noted earlier in the same letter when she described the opera house in Manaus, which was then and still is the major tourist attraction in the city. The Teatro Amazonas, on the Praça São Sebastão, opened in 1896, a symbol of the prosperous rubber boom days that, as Bishop wrote in her letter, collapsed a decade after the opera house was opened when rubber from British and Dutch plantations in Southeast Asia flooded the market, at which point the town began its long decline around it. Before the collapse, according to José Seixas Lourenço, Belém and Manaus had “[become] strategic points for the trade and shipping of rubber to European and North American markets.”36 But by 1926, “Brazilian rubber production [had fallen] from 50 percent in 1910 to only 5 percent” of the global market.37 By the time Bishop traveled to Manaus, the town was shabby indeed. The hotel was “a dump,”

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the streets dark because there were almost no “streetlamps,” and one was in danger of stepping off the curb “directly into an open sewer.”38 She also noted in her unpublished account the lack of women in the public squares. As Bishop described the town, only vestiges of Manaus’s former splendor could be found there in the opera house. Perhaps it is this combination of splendor and squalor, as well as the layering of history, that prompted Bishop to begin her description to Lowell with these words: “You’d like Manaus,” she told Lowell, Its most famous sight is the huge opera house built around 1905 at the height of the rubber boom. Rubber collapsed completely just after that and there the Opera house stands, huge, magnificent, art-nouveau-ish, with the town dwindled to nothing around it, and the Rio Negro rolling magnificently below. It is quite lovely inside, rose damask and mirrors (the last governor stole a lot of mirrors and girandoles) and armchairs with cane seats, for coolness; the plaster work is very delicate, all regional things, palms, coffee trees, alligators, etc., and huge paintings of Guaraní, sunrise on the river, etc. The ballroom is marble and tortoiseshell—but the pillars around the sides are fake marble, because that last shipload from Carrara was sunk. (WIA 315)

The inside of the opera house is a monument to excess and rivals many of those in Europe—Venetian glass chandeliers everywhere you look, Italian and Portuguese marble, French marquetry in the ballroom, and steel from Glasgow, all brought in with great hardship and expense through the jungles and down the river. The paintings that Bishop mentions romanticize the ­Amazon jungle and its inhabitants, the Guaraní American Indians, even as it and they were exploited and destroyed for the very profits that built the opera house. Bishop’s letters to Lowell are an important source for how Bishop was thinking about the significance of this region as she shaped her craft and for the details on which she chose to focus: the mixing of waters, cultures, and peoples of the region; the region as a center of the wider global world of intercultural exchange; and its history of political, economic, and religious exploitation.39 “Santarém’s” key word is “conflux” from the words “con,” together, and “flux,” meaning both the process of flowing and continuous change. Santarém is a town located, as Bishop tells us, “in that conflux of two great rivers, Tapajós, Amazon, / ​grandly, silently flowing, flowing east” (P 207). The rivers travel side by side, the one black, the other the color of café com leite, until they join to form the Amazon itself. Temperature, speed, and density account

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for the difference in the color of the two rivers that meet here in Santarém. The meeting of the waters here and at Manaus is now one of the major tourist attractions of the region. A whole industry has grown up around boat trips for tourists to see the Meeting of the Waters. But Santarém, as Bishop’s poem indicates, has been a meeting place for centuries. It is under the sign of this conflux that the action of the poem unfolds. Everything is subject to change, especially the traveler’s memory, indicated in the poem’s opening unrhymed couplet: “Of course I may be remembering it all wrong / ​after, after—how many years?” (P 207). The traveler recalls that when she saw Santarém for the first time, she felt a tremendous desire to stay, but, ultimately, she becomes part of the conflux, even in these opening lines: “That golden evening I really wanted to go no farther; / ​more than anything else I wanted to stay awhile / ​in that conflux of two great rivers” (P 207). Bishop captures a moment where everything is right: the scene that “suddenly” bursts with activity as we approach the shore (“houses, people, and lots of mongrel / ​riverboats skittering back and forth”) and unfolds “under a sky of gorgeous, under-lit clouds, / ​with everything gilded, burnished along one side” (P 207). What Bishop describes is a world that exists for the traveler’s edification. It presents itself before us in all its golden glory; it is perhaps the reason why “Mr. Swan, / ​Dutch, the retiring head of Philips Electric”—who gets the last word in this poem—“wanted to see the Amazon before he died” (P 209). The adjective “mongrel,” to describe the riverboats, however, introduces a certain degree of randomness into the scene, which works against the desires of our romantic traveler, and anticipates the mixed breeding that will appear later in the poem as part of Santarém’s history of slavery. The poem asks, How do we (or how should we) interpret our experiences of travel, our encounters with other cultures? Two rivers. Hadn’t two rivers sprung from the Garden of Eden? No, that was four and they’d diverged. Here only two and coming together. Even if one were tempted to literary interpretations such as: life/death, right/wrong, male/female —such notions would have resolved, dissolved, straight off in that watery, dazzling dialectic. (P 207)

Bishop plays with equations (2, 2, 4, 1), which don’t add up, in the end, to a final solution but rather a dissolution. This is clever word play that simul-

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taneously reminds us of our tendency to find biblical, or mythic, or, indeed, literary interpretations for our experience, and, like New Critics in the Ama­ zon, attempt to resolve the paradoxes, the binaries, the contradictions into one reading that explains them all. One is indeed tempted to literary interpretations here, or spiritual ones, or both, at this place of the meeting of the waters, so evocative is the moment when the traveler first sees the two rivers coming together. That internal rhyme on “resolved, dissolved” shows the futility of such attempts as they dissolve into the reflection off the waters into that “watery, dazzling dialectic.” As Jeffrey Gray points out, these lines show us that “ ‘the idea of the place’ is convergence. Its opposite, the Edenic branching of originary sources, imported from Western mythologies, is, as this traveler sees it, less attractive— either irrelevant or, worse, a symbol of division, of the Fall.”40 “Santarém” will proceed under this sign throughout, revealing its very method as convergence and conflux, and the speaker’s and our immersion in that conflux.41 The movement of “Santarém” follows the pattern of the traveler’s arrival and departure: from the conflux of the rivers, the boat moves in to the shore, which the narrator describes with the accuracy of a documentary; as we disembark, we see more deeply into the region’s layered history; the traveler has one brief and significant encounter in the pharmacy; and then she returns to the boat with her cherished object, only to have her choice of object rejected by a fellow traveler. Such are the bare bones of the poem’s trajectory, as it were, coming and going, revealing the series of exchanges and transactions that are at the center of the poem. Some have sweeping historical consequences, while others are more personal and less consequential, but all reveal ethical questions of value and judgment, beginning with the ways of seeing and interpreting a scene set up in the dialectic of the first stanza. In the next stanza, styles converge to offer the reader two different ways of experiencing the traveler’s arrival. One is documentary, the other classical, ancient (gilded), as if the picture represented something out of that engraved children’s Bible the narrator peruses in “Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance.” The overall effect is one of being lulled, like the “family with pets” in the manger of that poem’s final lines. As soon as we see the shore, we see the church, or, as Bishop reminds us, “the Cathedral, rather.” The traveler has to remind herself of how Brazilians see the church in their ambition that it be a cathedral rather than merely a church. Immediately, a well-placed adverb, “rather,” has linked us to the world of perception and prejudice that operates in such encounters with other cultures. Bishop then

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proceeds with documentary-style description: “in front of the church,” “a modest promenade,” “a belvedere / ​about to fall into the river, / ​stubby palms, flamboyants like pans of embers,” “buildings one story high, stucco, blue or yellow,” and “one house faced with azulejos, buttercup yellow.” The stanza shifts, however, as we set foot on the shore, returning to the golden light that washed the beginning of the poem: The street was deep in dark-gold river sand damp from the ritual afternoon rain, and teams of zebus plodded, gentle, proud, and blue, with down-curved horns and hanging ears, pulling carts with solid wheels. The zebus’ hooves, the people’s feet waded in golden sand, so that almost the only sounds were creaks and shush, shush, shush. (P 207)

Bishop intertwines audible and visual imagery to beautiful effect. The “ritual” rain damps the sounds of carts and feet, and we enter an ancient land of ritualized movement; the white zebus look blue in the light, mirroring the blue and white tiles, the azulejos mentioned earlier. Their “down-curved horns and hanging ears” pull our attention to the golden sands and the feet and hooves that have walked across them for centuries. Blue is a Stevensian color in this poem, signifying, as Susan McCabe has noted, “the ‘mystic blue’ of meditation and imagination”:42 the zebus appear blue in the afternoon light; the pharmacy described later in the poem is blue; and, finally, the auditory and the visual come together in blue’s homonym, “blew” (when the “ship’s whistle blew,” and the speaker is called back to the boat). In McCabe’s reading of “Santarém,” which she pairs with Bishop’s elegy for Lowell, “North Haven,” blue/blew is also the “valedictory signal” of elegy. The speaker cannot stay, just as “Lowell has ‘left / ​for good.’ ”43 Such a reading is compelling because it speaks to the loss and desire underlying the poem: “I really wanted to go no farther; / ​more than anything else I wanted to stay awhile.” And then, when the whistle blows, “I couldn’t stay.” This does have the feel of a late poem, “a form of farewell,” to quote both Stevens and the title of Charles Berger’s study of Stevens’s late elegies, especially if we compare it to the Riverman’s also palpable desire.44 But the Riverman’s desire is not to stay or return; his desire is to dwell. His desire is his ambition to be a great sacaca. It is the ambition of the beginning of a great career, very much written in the moment of that

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stage of Bishop’s career in Brazil. Another blue also appears in the poem, however, that of the “occasional blue eyes,” a reminder of the hybrid mixing produced as a result of slavery in the region. This blue troubles the waters, as it were, of the mystical blues. It is where Bishop parts ways with Stevens. For the opening of the next stanza again emphasizes conflux, but this time that of commerce and people, introducing a certain degree of randomness and changeability that influences human behavior: Two rivers full of crazy shipping—people all apparently changing their minds, embarking, disembarking, rowing clumsy dories. (P 208)

Bishop breaks the line after people, not shipping, thereby joining the two inextricably: “shipping—people,” which is precisely what is happening and what has happened. Literally, Southern slave families shipped their slaves here “after the Civil War” and left behind them “occasional blue eyes, English names, / ​and oars” (P 208). Missionaries who arrived in the seventeenth and eighteenth century shipped in religion, and they continue to arrive, as we are reminded in the next lines where “A dozen or so young nuns, whitehabited / ​waved gaily from an old stern-wheeler” (P 208). They are “—off to their mission, days and days away,” the speaker tells us, “up God knows what lost tributary” (P 208). The slaveholders brought slaves because they thought it was their birthright; the missionaries had a Divine right, “God knows.” Joining the procession on the river, in a characteristically carnivalesque moment, a cow stands up in one of the dugouts, “quite calm,” “chewing her cud while being ferried, / ​tipping, wobbling, somewhere, to be married” (P 208). This strikes me as a wonderful Brazilian detail. The rhyme “ferried . . . ​to be married” is good enough for the carnival sambas composed every year that Bishop loved, with their irreverence and ability to make fun of the power structure—as we all head out with the cow to the church to be married. The waving nuns, the cow, and the church all become part of the irreverent carnival strand that runs through these two stanzas—what better way to shake up the binaries than with carnival. Bishop’s rhetorical riff on the church, “(Cathedral, rather!),” is now more insistent as we move into the next stanza. It is the coup de grâce, as it were, to this carnival riff when the speaker finds that the Cathedral had just been struck by lightning “a week or so before” and “one tower had / ​a widening zigzag crack all the way down. / ​It was a miracle” (P 208). The voice here is recognizably that of someone else, who is not the lyric speaker, someone speaking on shore, perhaps, narrating the event

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and its significance as “miracle” based on the Catholic framework that gave Bishop the “shudders” in her letter to Lowell. And “the priest’s house right next door / ​had been struck, too, and his brass bed / ​(the only one in town) galvanized black. / ​Graças a deus—he’d been in Belém” (P 208). Vidyan Ravinthiran notes that by making the priest’s bed in a parenthetical “the only one in town,” Bishop “is poking fun at that obsession with unique one-off events which lyric poetry shares with the most mundane forms of gossip.”45 It also gestures back to that stroke of meaning that has the power to resolve the paradoxes in literary interpretation. Bishop records no such conversation in her unpublished account. What she does record is a conversation that leads back to “The Riverman.” As Bishop writes, they spoke to a woman who was standing in the doorway of her house and who invited them in. Here the variation on the priest’s story from the poem involves the “flood of ’53,” which came “right through” the woman’s house, and, as Bishop writes, “I think she said a boto [dolphin] swam through it.”46 Bishop’s religious spin on such stories serves her poetic purposes more completely. Throughout “Santarém,” Bishop has emphasized the human transactions and interactions that have shaped the region, the town, and its inhabitants, and so the poem ends with another kind of transaction, but this time one that is quite personal: In the blue pharmacy the pharmacist had hung an empty wasps’ nest from a shelf: small, exquisite, clean matte white, and hard as stucco. I admired it so much he gave it to me. Then—my ship’s whistle blew. I couldn’t stay. Back on board, a fellow-passenger, Mr. Swan, Dutch, the retiring head of Philips Electric, really a very nice old man, who wanted to see the Amazon before he died, asked, “What’s that ugly thing?” (P 208–9)

This exchange and the object itself has been the source of much critical commentary. Gray rightly locates the nest in the topos of choosing/not choosing that was introduced early in the poem with the poet’s desire to stay, the two rivers, and the binaries of literary interpretation. Gray reads the end as an epilogue to the poem and a “concession to binaries” that up to this point the poem has “strenuously rejected.”47 The poet’s decision to carry the nest

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on board ship reinitiates the “ ‘here’-versus-’there’ opposition” that up to this point, Gray argues, “she has assiduously avoided.”48 In making this decision, Gray notes, the poet “places her whole conception of beauty and value in home’s context,” home being the context of Mr. Swan in Gray’s reading.49 Mr. Swan certainly represents a particular idea of home, that of the Western capitalist. He’s “Dutch, the retiring head of Philips Electric,” after all. He is not American, but he could easily represent American interests in Brazil, which were primarily economic. American foreign policy when Bishop was living there was focused on ensuring Brazil’s anti-Communist position and fostering democratic capitalism. Many of Bishop’s letters to Lowell, as Gillian White has recently argued, outline her concern that the United States was becoming more and more materialistic in its global approach.50 Mr. Swan is a representative of this corporate world, no doubt, but he is not at all out of place in this hybrid world of “crazy shipping.” The poem appears at this point to come down to two sets of values, the poet’s and Mr. Swan’s, and since we are undoubtedly aligned with the poet, we are disappointed in Mr. Swan. In other words, the wise reader is forced into a position of choosing between them. Hence, Gray’s astute point about this ending being a “concession to binaries.” We can only guess what Mr. Swan might have found beautiful as an aesthetic object, but we might assume that it would be something costly. In that sense, Bishop merely flips the binary opposition, asking us to value the natural object over whatever Mr. Swan might choose. Aesthetic choices are always going to reflect the values brought to bear on that choice, in other words. It cannot be avoided. These choices also lead to Kant’s problem of the aesthetic claim that Ravinthiran sees dramatized in “Santarém.” When one stakes an aesthetic claim, one is opening oneself up to the possibility of one’s choice being rejected, bringing with it the loss characteristic of such a transaction. As Ra­ vin­thiran argues, Bishop “is touching on the experience alluded to by the ­ordinary-​­language philosopher Stanley Cavell, when he remarks [that] ‘the feature of the aesthetic claim, as suggested by Kant’s description, [is] a kind of compulsion to share a pleasure.’ ”51 It is in this way “ ‘tinged with an anxiety that the claim stands to be rebuked.’ ”52 It is, therefore, “ ‘a condition of, or threat to, that relation to things called aesthetic, that something I know and cannot make intelligible stands to be lost to me.’ ”53 The ending of “Santarém,” as Ravinthiran reads it, represents just such an aesthetic transaction. Ravinthiran’s reading is sharp and attentive to poetic form, showing how Bishop weaves her aesthetic argument right into the fabric of the poem.

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But what of the fact that this transaction takes place in Brazil, on the Ama­zon, with an object that is common to the region? And what is this object doing in the pharmacy? To my knowledge no one has asked these questions about this object. McCabe brushes up against the question. She notices in her reading that the “blue pharmacy” is a strangely surreal space where the “empty wasps’ nest” seems more natural here than medicines would.54 What McCabe and other readers of this poem have missed, however, is that the wasps’ nest is medicine and so its presence in the pharmacy is perfectly explainable. It might be an aesthetic object to Bishop, but to the pharmacist it is undoubtedly there because of its use in Brazilian medicine. The use of insects (and their houses) has a long tradition in Brazilian folk medicine and, indeed, in making drugs in modern medicine. In his review of the practice for the journal Human Ecology, the Brazilian entomologist Eraldo Medeiros Costa-Neto notes that “in Brazil, insects have been medicinally used by indigenous society for millennia and by descendants of the European settlers and African slaves for the last five centuries.”55 Mud Wasp nests are melted in water and applied for the treatment of mumps; Paper Wasp nests are used to make tea or treat asthma; these nests are also burned, and the smoke is inhaled “to heal stroke.”56 It is not surprising that readers have missed the status of the wasps’ nest as medicine.57 Bishop doesn’t give any indication in the poem that the speaker knows about its use in healing. But it is likely that Bishop herself knew about it. For me, knowing this about the object changes its meaning dramatically and links this poem more profoundly to the Riverman, who wants to heal his people. It is also important that the poet’s interaction with the pharmacist is a privileged one in Bishop’s poetic universe, since the nest is a “gift,” not a purchase. What does it mean that this gift is given by a Brazilian in the Amazon but rejected by the representative from the West? If “The Riverman” represents an ecological ethic to respect the river and use its resources to sustain and support his community, what are the ethical values operating in the transactions at the end of “Santarém”? Since Bishop raises the question of aesthetic value here and in “Crusoe in England,” then it seems fair to ask this question. In “Crusoe in England,” it is Crusoe’s knife that “reek[s] of meaning, so much so that it is “like a crucifix” (P 186). But that poem rejects the aesthetic claim. The knife only “reeked of meaning” for Crusoe because of its use value. When the local museum wants to collect it, Crusoe asks, “How can anyone want such things?” That is a question that should be asked of Bishop’s speaker in “Santarém” and indeed is by Mr. Swan.

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Bishop leaves the question unanswered, but she might have explained the use value of this object. And yet, she’s taking it home, not melting it in water to cure her asthma. What separates Bishop at this point from those eighteenth- and nineteenth-​century travelers who brought such objects back to add to their own cabinets of curiosities? Or from the museum curators in “Crusoe”? One answer to that question is nothing. She may be no different from those other travelers at this point, despite all the critical irony brought to bear on the traveler’s perspective earlier in the poem. Like Marianne Moore, Bishop loved these kinds of “exotic” objects: she was incredibly excited about an oar that she had managed to purloin from one of the canoes during her trip to the Amazon, which resulted in the boy on the boat having to paddle down the river with his hands.58 Moreover, like those European travelers, Bishop can occupy the smug position of understanding these objects and finding them beautiful in the face of disapproval from her fellow Europeans (such as Mr. Swan). Whatever its symbolic value, the nest does share something with that oar in its status as a curiosity. The obvious precursor to this object in Bishop’s work is the house that Jeronímo describes in Bishop’s Key West poem as his “gray wasps’ nest,” leading to one interpretation of the object as another “signature of a constructed” and fragile home, which, as McCabe has argued, is partly an effort by the poet to “locate comforting spaces for psychic habitation.”59 Bishop’s draft poem “On the Amazon,” which was published in Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box, might be seen as an early attempt to capture in its final stanza “the precariousness of the houses,” as Brett Millier puts it,60 as well as the fragility of the broader idea of home: A bar on stilts, a bird on stilts a boy on stilts— stem the river with straws or toothpicks stick a straw in the water for security the neat palm thatch the sitting hen on her individual platform— the delicate hammocks— (EAP 125)

But another precursor from Bishop’s Amazon writing casts a different slant of light on the object in “Santarém.” In her travel piece “A Trip to Vigia,” which included the road trip I referred to in chapter 2, Bishop describes

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a side trip she took from Belém to see the famous baroque church in the ­seventeenth-century town of Vigia. In addition to sharing language with “Santarém”—the white zebus, the “dazzling” white of the church—it, too, like “Santarém,” moves toward a central object. In “Santarém,” the object is the wasps’ nest. In Vigia, it is the skull of one of the church’s priests (PPL 467). After taking it out and showing the skull to his visitors, Bishop writes, the sacristan placed the skull back into the “bare cupboard”—itself a curiosity cabinet if ever there was one. Bishop conveys the mysterious import of this skull in her final assessment of the object: “It was the most wonderful thing in Vigia” (PPL 467). Like the skull in the church in Vigia, the wasps’ nest in “Santarém” serves as a memento mori, a reminder of the loss the poem, as elegy, circles around, the loss, perhaps, of Brazil itself. These reminders of death were common to cabinets of curiosity. But like the twentieth-century boxes of Joseph Cornell, whom Bishop admired, “A Trip to Vigia” and “Santarém” feature a modern commentary on such cabinets. In Bishop’s version, the reader is made aware of the cultural transaction that is at the center of any valuation of the object. It is this transaction that becomes the center of our focus, not the object itself. The narrator of Bishop’s much earlier art-​ appreciation poem, “The Monument,” would have explained very calmly to Mr. Swan that “that ugly thing” is, in fact, “The Wasps’ Nest.” She would have explained how it was constructed, of what it was made, and why it might be worth considering as an object worthy of Mr. Swan’s attention. She might have explained its healing properties, its use as medicine. She would “teach” him to appreciate it. “Santarém,” however, calls our attention to the transactions involved in “appreciation”—whether it be our appreciation of other places, cultures, the natural world, or the arts. Moreover, the wasps’ nest as memento mori, perfectly balances the statement about Mr. Swan, “who wanted to see the Amazon before he died.” He does not want to be reminded of his death while he is there. Therefore, he must reject it. Such is the logic of the modern traveler for whom such memento mori have gone out of fashion. In that sense, he shares the desire of the poem’s traveler who doesn’t want to leave, who “more than anything else” wants to stay awhile. “Santarém” is about encounters and cultural exchange, and in the end, those encounters ultimately become very personal. The wasps’ nest at the end of “Santarém” is a complex gift to Bishop’s readers, fusing death and life, a poetics of loss with one of survival. Though it no longer buzzes with life, it once hung in the pharmacy (who knows how long before the poet arrives) as a symbol of folk medicines that have been

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used in the Amazon for healing, but they may also be forgotten in time. The speaker of Bishop’s poem admires the nest and receives it as a gift. It was once a home but now is one no longer. In June of 2011, I made the journey by river boat from Manaus to Santarém with three friends and fellow Bishop lovers. We boarded the Nelio Correa at two in the afternoon prepared for the two-and-a-half-day trip down the Amazon (fig. 7). Passengers on our three-decker river boat sling hammocks on deck very much as they would have done when Bishop took a similar journey on a similar boat more than fifty years earlier, but now passengers hang their hammocks on all three decks, and everyone mixes. But as in Bishop’s day, a few of the wealthier passengers (that’s us) pay extra for tiny cabins with bunks at the bow of the boat on the top and middle floors. These boats are still the way the local people get from place to place on the river. The menagerie of traveling animals on Bishop’s boat has been replaced on ours by one small puppy, wearing a diaper. The bar is open from eight in the morning until well into the night and early morning, blasting Brazilian popular music continuously, or, one night, a soccer game, prompting a great deal of shouting and fist pounding on plastic tables and, at one point, a frantic scramble by one crew member to adjust the satellite dish on top of the boat when the image cut out at a crucial moment during the game. It seems overly noisy at first, but then you adjust and the boat becomes enjoyably its own world. Life on the river proceeds at its own pace, and there is nothing to do on board but read, drink, eat, talk, and gaze at the river and the jungle stretching out on either side of the largest river network in the world. We read “Santarém” and excerpts of Bishop’s letters to Lowell to each other to pass the time. Houses on stilts dot the distant shores, and canoes and motorboats carrying the local fishermen and also tourists interact on the vast river. Birds of seemingly every kind and color fly past—flocks of parrots and macaws, herons. In the tributaries, with their huge Victoria lilies like rubber platforms webbed enough to hold a small child, the cassowary guards its clutch of eggs. Bishop said once in a letter that Brazilian birds were a subject that she had “barely approached,” because “There are too damn many species, of everything” (OA 343). And this was three years before she took her trip to the Amazon. Too many waterfalls. Too many species of birds. The “unbelievably impractical” scenery (OA 234). Out here on the Amazon, I am aware of the incredible abundance of life, of the excess—a natural excess to surpass the

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Figure 7. The author’s riverboat, the Nelio Correa, on the Amazon. (Author photo 2011)

cultural one of the opera house, the exuberance of this tapestried landscape, and the vast, vast distances. As Bishop knew so well, traveling by boat immerses one in a time and space that is suspended and, therefore, rich with the possibility of observation and experience. These suspended spaces became a major trope of Bishop’s life and work, dating back to her earliest writing days. In her memoir of Marianne Moore, “Efforts of Affection,” Bishop describes the Brooklyn apartment that Moore shared with her mother at 260 Cumberland Street as “otherworldly—as if one were living in a diving bell from a different world, let down through the crass atmosphere of the twentieth century” (PPL 484); in her studio in Samambaia, Bishop is suspended above the waterfall. Here on the boat, time is suspended, and the rhythm and pace of the river become the guiding principles of one’s existence. As Bishop wrote in an early attempt to capture the dominance of the river in her draft poem, “On the Amazon,” “Air was never necessary—just water / ​and a little sun, / ​and a gentle acquiescent world—” (EAP 124). Although we can’t see them from the middle of the river, we know the

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three-toed sloths are hanging upside down, making their own hammocks in the rainforest canopy, because we had seen them the day before on a long river trip to explore some of the tributaries of the river that bring you closer to the jungle. As we had heard them at Samambaia, we can hear the monkeys of the Amazon now—howler, squirrel, and mico. The day before we had also seen dolphins, their fins cresting the river and then disappearing, only to reappear several meters further along. Bishop had apparently brought out a ball to play with them when she had traveled this same route more than fifty years before.61 Wasp nests like the one in the pharmacy hang from the trees. At night on the Amazon, the huge dome of the Southern Hemisphere meets the river, surrounding us on all sides with a tapestry so thick with stars that the whole of the sky blazes with billions of pinpoints of light, and the Milky Way, finding no city lights to interfere with it, splashes lavishly across the velvety black canvas of the Amazon night. The shore line is deeply dark with only the glow of a yellowish light here and there to mark a dwelling in the rainforest. As I read these words now, Bishop’s own words come back to me: “More than anything else I wanted to stay awhile / ​in that conflux of two great rivers, Tapajós, Amazon, / ​grandly, silently flowing, flowing east.”

Notes

Prologue 1.  Since 2006, the following new volumes of Bishop’s poetry and prose have been published: Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments, edited by Alice Quinn (2006); the Library of America’s Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters, edited by Robert Giroux and Lloyd Schwartz (2008); Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, edited by Thomas Travisano with Saskia Hamilton (2008); Poems and Prose (2011); and Elizabeth Bishop and the “New Yorker,” edited by Joelle Biele (2011). These new editions “have expanded Bishop’s published oeuvre by more than one thousand pages and have placed before the reading public a ‘new’ Elizabeth Bishop whose complex dimensions were previously familiar only to a small circle of scholars and devoted readers” (Cleghorn, Hicok, Travisano, introduction to Elizabeth Bishop in the Twenty-First Century, 1). 2.  Critics have long recognized the importance of Bishop’s time in Brazil to her poetic career even while she was still alive. Astute early readers of Bishop in Brazil include Ashley Brown, who visited Bishop in Brazil, and Lloyd Schwartz, who also knew the poet well. Lorrie Goldensohn’s 1992 Elizabeth Bishop: The Biography of a Poetry was the first book-length study to treat Brazilian subjects in Bishop’s work. Excellent work on Bishop’s Brazil has also appeared in a handful of articles by Brazilian and North American critics, such as Regina Przybycien, Elizabeth Neely, Barbara Page and Carmen Oliveira, and Kim Fortuny. Maria Lúcia Milléo Martins’s book-length study Duas Artes (UFMG, 2006) is an excellent comparative study of two great artists, Bishop and the Brazilian poet she translated, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, and a starting point for understanding Bishop’s cross-cultural dialogue with Brazil through her translations. George Monteiro’s Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil and After: A Poetic Career Transformed (McFarland, 2012) makes a useful contribution to our understanding of

148  Notes to Pages 4–15 Bishop’s Brazilian sources and influences and provides insight into how Bishop used her knowledge of Portuguese to layer meaning into her poetry. The rise in critical activity on the subject from writers with a foot in both countries indicates the interest and the need for a more thorough, book-length scholarly study on the transformative effect that Brazil had on Bishop’s work and the contribution her work has made to the intellectual conversation between Brazil and the United States in the middle of the twentieth century. 3.  Benjamin Moser called Bishop’s Brazil book a bit of “hackery” that she took up—as most writers must—for the money in his New Yorker essay “Elizabeth Bishop’s Misunderstood ‘Brazil.’ ” 4.  “Bishop’s Brazilian Politics” was published in a new book of essays on Bishop, Elizabeth Bishop in the Twenty-First Century: Reading the New Editions (University of Virginia Press, 2012), that I coedited with Thomas Travisano and Angus Cleghorn. 5.  Current usage in Brazil omits the circumflex on Ouro Prêto, so it is often written as Ouro Preto, but I have kept it here and throughout the book, except when it is omitted by others in a quotation, in order to represent how it would have been written (and is still often written today) when Bishop was living in Brazil. Her poem “Under the Window: Ouro Prêto” uses the circumflex.

One.  Samambaia and the Architecture of Class 1.  Hess, Casa Modernista, 17. 2.  Petrópolis was the winter residence (Brazil’s summer) of many of the emperors of Brazil in the nineteenth century before Brazil became a republic. The palace has since been turned into the Imperial Museum, which has become the big draw of the town for tourists. 3.  Hess, Casa Modernista, 11. 4.  Ibid. 5.  Ibid., 304. See also Skidmore, Brazil, 118. 6.  Fountain and Brazeau, Remembering Elizabeth Bishop, 143. 7.  Hess, Casa Modernista, 11, 16. 8.  Ibid., 18. 9.  Ibid. 10.  Ibid., 12. 11.  Ibid. 12.  Ibid. 13.  Ibid., 87. 14.  Fountain and Brazeau, Remembering Elizabeth Bishop, 145. 15.  See Frances Stonor Saunders’s excellent and thorough account of the CCF in The Cultural Cold War. 16.  Fountain and Brazeau, Remembering Elizabeth Bishop, 266. 17.  Ibid., 139. 18.  I describe the “diacritical significance” of Bishop’s north–south aesthetic axis before she left for Brazil in “Becoming a Poet: From North to South,” in the Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Bishop.

Notes to Pages 16–29  149 19.  Divorce did not become legal in Brazil until 1978 (Goode, World Changes in Divorce Patterns, 188). 20.  Mary Stearns Morse is described as “Lota’s companion before Bishop” in Fountain and Brazeau, Remembering Elizabeth Bishop, 129. 21.  The fact that Macedo Soares left her property to Morse and Bishop, rather than her sister or any other family member, led to lawsuits that plagued Bishop during the end of her years in Brazil. 22.  Skidmore, Brazil, 143. 23.  Ibid., 144. 24.  Fountain and Brazeau, Remembering Elizabeth Bishop, 131. 25.  Ibid., 130. 26.  Bishop marks the passage in this 1963 translation of Gilberto Freyre’s book The Mansions and the Shanties, published by Knopf, which is among the books in the recently catalogued collection of Bishop’s library at Vassar, but she probably also read it in the original Portuguese, Sobrados e Mucambos. 27.  For a thorough discussion of George Herbert’s influence on Bishop’s work, see Merrin, Enabling Humility. 28.  T. S. Eliot makes this point about metaphysical poets in several essays, including his 1921 “Andrew Marvell,” in which he says of Marvell that “wit is not only combined with, but fused into, the imagination,” which contributes to the intensity of the effect, the surprise (rpt. in Annotated Waste Land, 150). 29.  The poem was first published in the New Republic in 1955 and then as the last poem in her 1956 volume A Cold Spring. 30.  The square brackets indicate places where Quinn has restored a section of text in a draft that Bishop crossed out (EAP xix). 31.  Bhabha, Location of Culture, 13. 32.  Ibid. 33.  Ibid. 34.  Letter to Katherine White, Elizabeth Bishop and the “New Yorker,” 235. 35.  Angus Cleghorn notes the lack of “personal electricity” in this poem in “Bishop’s ‘Wiring Fused,’ ” in Cleghorn, Hicok, and Travisano, Elizabeth Bishop in the ­Twenty-​ First Century, 75. 36.  Costello, Questions of Mastery, 75. 37.  Roosevelt, Through the Brazilian Wilderness, 58. 38.  Monteiro, “Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazil and Vice Versa,” 95. 39.  Skidmore, Brazil, xiii. 40.  Ibid. 41.  Fountain and Brazeau, Remembering Elizabeth Bishop, 141. 42.  Ibid. 43.  Letter to Katherine White, Elizabeth Bishop and the “New Yorker,” 165. 44.  Ibid., 162. 45.  Green, “Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil and the New Yorker,” 815. In this useful article, Green places “Manuelzinho” and other poems of Bishop’s Brazil years in the mid-century context of the New Yorker and its readers.

150  Notes to Pages 29–39 46.  Ibid. 47.  Ibid. 48.  MacMahon, Elizabeth Bishop: A Bibliography, 155. 49.  Barbara Page and Carmen Oliveira, for instance, refer to “the favela’s specklike ‘Squatter’s Children’ ” in their essay “Foreign-Domestic,” published in Elizabeth Bishop in the Twenty-First Century, 119. 50.  Anhembi 22, no. 65 (April 1956): 288–89. 51.  Letter to Katherine White, Elizabeth Bishop and the “New Yorker,” 147. 52.  Ibid., 148. 53.  Ibid., 192. 54.  A draft of “Gypsophilia” was published for the first time in Edgar Allan Poe in 2006. 55.  Samuels, Deep Skin, 182. 56.  Ibid. 57.  Ibid. 58.  Ibid., 184. 59.  Fountain and Brazeau, Remembering Elizabeth Bishop, 186–87. 60.  Qtd. in Millier, Life and the Memory of It, 384. 61.  The series published under the title Rainy Season; Sub-Tropics features three animal vignettes—“Giant Toad,” “Strayed Crab,” and “Giant Snail”—dating from the period when Bishop and Macedo Soares got together again briefly at Samambaia. These oversized and misplaced creatures are obvious alter egos for the poet and her art. “This is not my home,” says the Strayed Crab. “How did I get so far from water?” (PPL 134). They demonstrate a temporary return to the more insular creatures of Bishop’s early poetry, such as “The Man-Moth,” albeit ones transposed into the tropics. 62.  “Elegy,” VC 40.7. 63.  In a 1969 letter to Lowell, Bishop writes that she is “trying now . . . ​to sell this beautiful house” in Ouro Prêto: “My piece o[f] Ouro Prêto,” she writes, “changes every day and gets bitterer & bitterer” (WIA 659).

Two.  Letters from the Road 1.  Skidmore, Brazil, 145. 2.  Ibid., 146. 3.  Ibid. 4.  Ibid. 5.  “A Trip on the Rio Sao Francisco,” two drafts of eight pages each, VC 55.3 and 55.4. As usual, Bishop’s selection of details from the Brazilian touring magazine Quatro Rodas speaks to her own quirky interests. Speaking of the river town of Pirapora, the magazine (in Bishop’s translation) advises, “One should get there on a Sunday afternoon” in order to watch the town’s “favorite sport of canary-fighting.” Bishop is relieved she has missed it by arriving on Monday. The magazine also recommends “Arigó, a miracle worker, who never fails to put on a good show” and “the bodega of Dona Bela, for the best and oldest cachaça in the region.” My point in quoting

Notes to Pages 39–48  151 this here is that Brazil’s popular touring magazines were as insipid as American ones might have been about the local flora and fauna of this particular town on the river. 6.  See Holloway, “Immigration in the Rural South,” 143. 7.  Unpublished account of the trip by car from Rio de Janeiro to Samambaia, VC 54.2, p. 1. 8.  Ibid. 9.  Bishop misspells favela with a double l throughout this entry. 10.  Ibid. 11.  This word is difficult to make out. 12.  The “g” is missing in Bishop’s account. 13.  Unpublished account, VC 54.2, pp. 1–2. 14.  Nossa Senhora da Penha. 15.  Unpublished account, VC 54.2, p. 2. 16.  Ibid. 17.  Ibid. 18.  Bishop identifies him only as Ruy in the story. Born in Santarém in 1920, Ruy Barata was a poet, journalist, lawyer, professor, and politician. 19.  Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 8. 20.  Bishop’s anecdote is strongly reminiscent of an anecdote that Jacques Lacan tells in Four Fundamental Concepts to illustrate how the gaze operates in our interactions with others to expose difference and the central “lack” at the heart of subjectivity. Lacan (the young intellectual) tells the story of being on a fishing boat. The men on the boat are amused by him, and at one stage one of the men points to a sardine can floating in the water, glinting in the sunlight. “Do you see that can?” asks one of the men. They all laugh. “Well, it doesn’t see you.” The purpose of the sardine can story is to show that Lacan is excluded from the picture of the fishermen and the industry of which they are part. His own inadequacy as a subject is revealed by the joke, the exposure at the heart of the story; he looks like “nothing on earth.” Lacan writes, “What determines me at the most profound level, in the visible, is the gaze that is outside. It is through the gaze that I enter light and it is from the gaze that I receive its effects. Hence it comes about that the gaze is the instrument through which light is embodied and through which . . . ​I am photo-graphed” (106). 21.  “Farewell, Teresa,” VC 54.1 [n.d.]. 22.  “On the Way,” VC 54.11 [n.d.]. 23.  Bishop’s letter to Moss at the New Yorker, in Elizabeth Bishop and the “New Yorker,” 158–59. “Filling Station” was first published in the New Yorker in 1955 (MacMahon, Elizabeth Bishop: A Bibliography, 155). 24.  Monteiro, Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil and After, 47. 25.  Ibid. 26.  Skidmore, Brazil, 236. 27.  Bishop to Katherine White at the New Yorker, in Elizabeth Bishop and the “New Yorker,” 255–56. 28.  Monteiro, Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil and After, 47.

152  Notes to Pages 50–59 29.  Pascal, Pensées, 38. 30.  Fortuny, Elizabeth Bishop: The Art of Travel, 77. 31.  Ibid., 68. 32.  From Ashley Brown, “Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil,” originally published in Southern Review 13 (October 1977), rpt. in Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art, 231. Brown does not use the accent in Petrópolis. 33.  Ibid. 34.  Fortuny, Elizabeth Bishop: The Art of Travel, 72. 35.  Fortuny notes that “in 1962” Portuguese immigrants “numbered 17,000 a year” and “made up a large part of the labor class” in Brazil (ibid., 74). 36.  Ibid., 75. 37.  Ibid. 38.  Ibid., 79. 39.  First published in Portuguese in 1936 as Sobrados e Mucambos. 40.  Freyre, The Mansions and the Shanties, 257. I quote from the marked copy from Bishop’s library, now housed and catalogued at Vassar. 41.  Ibid., 257–58. 42.  One of Bishop’s favorite Brazilian poets, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, whose work she translated, also wrote of the changes in Ouro Prêto in a poem recently translated by Thomas Colchie, “Death of the Houses of Ouro Prêto”: “Over rooftops, over time / ​the rain washes. And walls / ​that had watched men die / ​seen the gold slip away / ​known an empire’s passing / ​(mutely comprehended) / ​crumble now; to die as well.” 43.  The gold of the region got the name of black gold because it was covered with a black mineral (Brazil: Knopf Guides, 184). 44.  Ibid. 45.  See Bishop’s poem “(For the window-pane),” published for the first time in 2006 in Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box, 126. 46.  Bishop’s letters to Lilli at Vassar College show an interesting progression from warm friendship to something approaching obsession and erotic passion. There seems to be a shift in the letters in about June 1965. Bishop has returned home to Samambaia (or perhaps Rio) after a visit to Ouro Prêto. She writes in a letter dated simply June 17th that she sees Lilli’s face and the image of her doing things and then writes repeatedly: “darling darling Lililililili” (VC112.2). In a January 1966 letter, which Bishop wrote to Lilli from Seattle when she was teaching at the University of Washington, she is full of plans for her house in Ouro Prêto and affection for Lilli: “Oh—these pictures of the men working on my house make me homesick—I want to be there—I have so many plans for [a] hard-working (writing, that is) peaceful future with many months spent up there with you my lovely lovely sweet-faced darling” (VC112.4). Brett Millier has noted that Lilli “had had only lesbian relationships” since her husband’s death in 1955 in order to “preserve his memory,” Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It, 368. 47.  Brazil: Knopf Guides, 189. 48.  Bishop’s letter to Moss, 281. 49.  Ibid.

Notes to Pages 59–68  153 50.  Ibid. 51.  Lowell had started seeing Anny Baumann, Bishop’s New York doctor. 52.  From Bishop’s poem “The Bight,” which ends with the lines: “All the untidy activity continues, / ​awful but cheerful” (P 59). 53.  Brown, “Interview with Elizabeth Bishop,” 291.

Three.  Bishop’s Brazilian Translations 1.  Rohter, Brazil on the Rise, 135. 2.  Read, “Manners of Mistranslation,” 299. 3.  To name just two examples of the recent use of Bishop’s translations, see her translations of Carlos Drummond de Andrade in Twentieth-Century Latin American ­Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology, edited by Stephen Tapscott (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 165; and her translation of Clarice Lispector’s story “Marmosets” in Literatures of Asia, Africa, and Latin America: From Antiquity to the Present, edited by Willis Barnstone and Tony Barnstone (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1999), 1841–43. 4.  Pérez Firmat, “Introduction,” 3. 5.  Building a dialogue between Americanists and Latin Americanists is a worthy project but difficult. When I participated in a month-long NEH seminar on Brazilian literature held in São Paulo, Brazil, in 2010, I was the only “Americanist” in a group of fifteen Latin American scholars, and David Foster, who has run the seminar on several occasions, told me that my participation was a unique case. Bishop scholarship seems a good place to begin to more fully initiate this cross-cultural dialogue. 6.  Pérez Firmat, “Introduction,” 2. 7.  Milléo Martins published an early version of her argument in a short essay written in English. See “Elizabeth Bishop and Carlos Drummond de Andrade.” 8.  Nogueira Diniz, “Imagens do Brasil,” 74. 9.  Ibid., 70. 10.  Bishop called herself three-fourths Canadian in letters to Anne Stevenson (PPL 852). 11.  Read, “Manners of Mistranslation,” 299. 12.  Ibid. 13.  Thomas Travisano called Bishop a poet of three nations in a paper he delivered at the Global Studies Conference in Rio de Janeiro in 2011. 14.  Quoted in Machado, “Elizabeth Bishop’s Translation of The Diary of ‘Helena Morley,’ ” 124. 15.  Pritchett, “A Brazilian Diamond,” 566, 568. 16.  Boddy, “Forgotten Treasure from Brazil.” 17.  Athill, “Great Escape.” Athill also wrote the enthusiastic introduction to the Virago republication of the book in 2008: “Why I Love The Diary of ‘Helena Morley.’ ” 18.  Ibid. 19.  Ibid. 20.  In Elizabeth Bishop: Her Poetics of Loss, Susan McCabe argues that, in “inaugurating Bishop’s serious work in translation, [“Helena Morley”] also has special

154  Notes to Pages 69–75 a­ ttractions—in highlighting the making of experience in memory as a kind of translation itself” (16). 21.  Morley, Minha vida de menina, 124. 22.  I am drawing from Jean-Paul Vinay and Jean Darbelnet’s classic essay “A Methodology of Translation,” first published in 1958. 23.  I would like to thank Neil Besner for his input concerning the nuances of Brazilian Portuguese and race. 24.  Morley, Minha vida de menina, 125. 25.  Ibid., 178. 26.  Pilgrim, “Picaninny Caricature.” 27.  Ibid. 28.  Ibid. 29.  Diawara, “Blackface Stereotype.” 30.  Only the second sentence was shortened slightly by the Life editors to read: “And yet to any liberal-minded South African or North American, for example, it comes as a revelation to hear, as one can in Brazil, a black cook calling her elderly, white mistress minha negrinha, ‘my little nigger,’ as a term of affection” (114). 31.  Moser, “Elizabeth Bishop’s Misunderstood ‘Brazil,’ ” n.p. 32.  Skidmore, Brazil, 16. 33.  Ibid., 103. 34.  Although better written than this version published in the Life book, Bishop’s manuscript version does not vary significantly in sense, although she includes anti-​ Semitism, which broadens the umbrella of prejudicial thinking. Here is the version published in Prose: “Brazilians are proud of their fine record in race-relations. Rather, their attitude can best be described by saying that the upper-class Brazilian is usually proud of his racial tolerance, while the lower-class Brazilian is not aware of his; he just practices it. The occasional anti-Negro, or racista (and this applies equally well to the occasional anti-semite), usually proves to be one of two types: the unthinking member of ‘society’ who has got into anti-Negro or anti-Jewish ‘society’ in his travels, and has lost his native Brazilian tolerance, or, sadder still—the European emigrant who comes to Brazil, having suffered in his own country because of his race or poverty, and (probably unaccustomed to Negroes, anyway) despises and is rude to them” (Pr 230). 35.  Rohter, Brazil on the Rise, 70. 36.  In “Elizabeth Bishop’s Translation of The Diary of ‘Helena Morley,’ ” Maria ­Teresa Machado writes that “what bothers [her] is not so much that the translator plays fast and loose with the source text . . . ​but . . . ​that the translated diary’s reader is never warned, either in Bishop’s Introduction or elsewhere in the edition, of such an extensive ‘pruning’ of the original text” (129). 37.  Fountain and Brazeau, Remembering Elizabeth Bishop, 147. 38.  Page and Oliveira, “Foreign-Domestic,” 123. 39.  Paz, “Translation: Literature and Letters,” 152. 40.  Millier, Life and the Memory of It, 319. 41.  Moser, Why This World, 124. 42.  Ibid., 125.

Notes to Pages 75–86  155 43.  Ibid., 10. 44.  Ibid. 45.  I would like to thank Dave Hoak for drawing my attention to these letters when we were in the archives together. While discussing the contents of these letters and their importance would take me beyond the scope of this book and into entirely different territory, I would call the reader’s attention to a good descriptive article on the letters published by Lorrie Goldensohn in the Yale Review, “Approaching Elizabeth Bishop’s Letters to Ruth Foster.” 46.  Moser, Why This World, 25. 47.  Ibid., 28. 48.  Ibid., 308. 49.  Bishop letter qtd. in Moser, Why This World, 256–57. 50.  Mann, Magic Mountain, 118. 51.  Ibid., 75. 52.  Ibid., 120. 53.  Moser, Why This World, 227. 54.  Lispector, Family Ties, 89. 55.  Peixoto, Passionate Fictions, 24. 56.  Ibid., 36. 57.  In Giovanni Pontiero’s translation of Clarice Lispector’s story “A Hen” from Family Ties (49). While Pontiero’s translation of this phrase is more literal than Bishop’s, his translation of Lispector’s title is less so. He translates it as “The Chicken.” 58.  Moser, Why This World, 233. 59.  Ibid. 60.  Goldensohn noted the linguistic link between Bishop’s poem and Lispector’s story in Elizabeth Bishop: The Biography of a Poetry, 205. 61.  Lispector, Laços de família, 78. 62.  MacMahon, Elizabeth Bishop: A Bibliography, 157. 63.  Nabokov, “Problems of Translation,” 127. 64.  Bishop, “Remarks on Translation—(Of poetry, mostly)” (VC 54.12). 65.  Venuti, Translation Studies Reader, 71. 66.  Ibid. 67.  Peggy Kamuf’s article “Passing Strange: The Laws of Translation” was one of a number of essays that grew out of the 2009 MLA presidential forum, “The Tasks of Translation in the Global Context,” that were subsequently reprinted in MLA’s Profession 2010. 68.  Ibid., 66. 69.  Ibid, 65–66. 70.  Venuti, Translation Studies Reader, 111. 71.  Ibid., 114. 72.  “Remarks on Translation” (VC 54.12). 73.  Ibid. I have silently corrected obvious misspellings and typos in Bishop’s draft. 74.  Ibid. 75.  MacMahon, Elizabeth Bishop: A Bibliography, 157–58.

156  Notes to Pages 86–92 76.  Cabral took his first posting in 1947 as Brazilian vice-consul in Barcelona. See Richard Zenith’s introduction to his translation of a superb selection of João Cabral de Melo Neto’s work, Education by Stone, n.p. 77.  Ibid. 78.  Ibid. 79.  Ibid. 80.  Ibid. 81.  Curran, Brazil’s Folk-Popular Poetry, 1. 82.  Ibid., 16. 83.  From João Cabral de Melo Neto’s “Morte e Vida Severina,” published in Bishop and Brasil, Anthology of Twentieth-Century Brazilian Poetry, 128. 84.  Ibid. 85.  Skidmore, Brazil, 19. 86.  Ibid. 87.  Menendes Motta, “Sesmarias in Brazil,” 2. 88.  Skidmore, Brazil, 20. 89.  Ibid., 19–20. 90.  Here I quote from Milléo Martins’s brief essay in English on the same subject, “Elizabeth Bishop and Carlos Drummond de Andrade,” 232. 91.  Milléo Martins, Duas Artes, 12. 92.  Drummond’s poem “Infância” contains the following scene of reading: “A small boy alone under the mango trees, / ​I read the story of Robinson Crusoe, / ​the long story that never comes to an end” (Bishop’s translation, in Bishop and Brasil, Anthology of Twentieth-Century Brazilian Poetry, 87). The Crusoe reference further underscores their affinity, since Bishop’s poem “Crusoe in England” was completed at around the same time as her translations of Drummond. 93.  Carlos Drummond de Andrade, “Family Portrait,” in Bishop and Brasil, Anthology of Twentieth-Century Brazilian Poetry, 91. 94.  Ibid., 93. 95.  Ibid., 91. 96.  “One Art” was written in the wake of Bishop’s concern that she might be losing the final partner of her life, Alice Methfessel. But its imagery overlaps significantly with the loss of Brazil, her home there, and Macedo Soares, including “a gesture I love” and “the joking voice,” which come from the language of her draft elegies for Lota. 97.  Lee Edelman provides the most thorough cultural analysis of this poem as “gendered” identity crisis in the context of Bishop’s reading in “Geography of Gender.” 98.  Carlos Drummond de Andrade, “Travelling in the Family,” in Bishop and Brasil, Anthology of Twentieth-Century Brazilian Poetry, 57. 99.  Ibid. 100.  Ibid., 59. 101.  VC 58.12. 102.  Drummond, “Seven-Sided Poem,” in Bishop and Brasil, Anthology of ­Twentieth-​ Century Brazilian Poetry, 62.

Notes to Pages 93–101  157 103.  Ibid., 63. 104.  Drummond, “Poem of Seven Faces,” Williams’s translation, 297. 105.  Drummond, “Seven-Sided Poem,” 62. 106.  Ibid., 63. 107.  Williams’s translation of Drummond, “Poem of Seven Faces,” 297. 108.  Williams, Introduction to Poets of Brazil, 9. 109.  Burns, “Bishop, Translator of Drummond,” 106. 110.  Ibid., 107. 111.  Ibid. 112.  Ibid., 112. 113.  I have Neil Besner to thank for this very important further point about the complexity of rendering this particular verse into English and why every translator has essentially failed to capture its comic and nuanced elements. 114.  Besner, “Translating North and South,” 318. In this piece, Besner discusses the choices he made as a translator of Carmen Oliveira’s Flores raras e banalíssimas. 115.  Ibid., 319.

Four.  Bishop’s Brazilian Politics 1.  In 1992, when the Georgia Review first published the poem, Thomas Travisano, who discovered it in the archives, noted that it “represents a category for which examples exist only in Bishop’s unpublished oeuvre: the political poem” (qtd. in EAP 310). 2.  Skidmore, Politics in Brazil, 124. 3.  Bishop’s correspondence with Anne Stevenson, 1963–65 (Pr 440). 4.  Skidmore, Politics in Brazil, 124, 200. Bishop, incidentally, knew Skidmore. She mentions him in a letter to Anne Stevenson. The U.S. Cultural Attaché introduced her to Skidmore in 1963 (Pr 409). 5.  Ibid., 301. 6.  Millier, Life and the Memory of It, 319. 7.  Fountain and Brazeau, Remembering Elizabeth Bishop, 163. 8.  In Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic Development, Travisano notes that Bishop’s “early phase provided training for the later one” (18). James Longenbach argues, in “Elizabeth Bishop’s Bramble Bushes,” that Bishop, as early as her college writing, began developing a theory of poetry that valued “hermeneutic indeterminacy” (Modern Poetry, 24). See also my discussion of Bishop’s college essays and poetic development in “Con Spirito, Improvisation, and the Poetry of the 1930s,” in Degrees of Freedom. I argue that Bishop developed sophisticated ideas of writing in prose essays first and then put those ideas into practice as she developed her art. 9.  Bishop’s draft features these slightly indented opening four lines in the first stanza, reprinted in Poems exactly as they appear in the manuscript. 10.  Gray, Mastery’s End, 26. 11.  Bishop spells “Brazil” with an s consistently in this poem and in her letters, as Brazilians would spell it, and I have kept her spelling in cases of direct quotation. In other references to “Brazil” and “Brazilian,” I have kept the z, which is the preferred American spelling. The capital of Brazil, Brasília, is always spelled with an s.

158  Notes to Pages 102–113 12.  Skidmore, Politics in Brazil, 167–68. 13.  Ibid., 164. 14.  Ibid., 167. 15.  Ibid., 167–68. 16.  Ibid., 168. 17.  This placement, it should be noted, was also typical of the location of slave quarters underneath the main house, as it was in Bishop’s Ouro Prêto house. 18. Bishop spells the name of this tribe incorrectly as Uialapiti. James Olson lists the tribe’s name as Iaualapití (sometimes written as Yawalapití) in his ethno-historical dictionary, The Indians of Central and South America. 19.  In an interesting footnote to this story, the New Republic published a review of Huxley’s novel Island in the same issue in which Bishop’s letter to the editor defending Carlos Lacerda, which I will discuss shortly, appeared. The reviewer called Huxley’s Island “a curiously distasteful book. The paradise is unreal, uninviting and a bit too much like an experimental clinic with imported Indian overtones in Southern ­California. . . . ​You are left with a mysticism without God, a love without understanding and a compassion without heart” (18) (see O’Donovan, “Aldous Huxley’s Island Paradise”). 20.  The Morning Mail, a daily newspaper in Brazil at the time. 21.  Longenbach, Modern Poetry after Modernism, 30. 22.  Gray, Mastery’s End, 36. 23.  Ibid., 25. 24.  Ibid., 39. 25.  Levine, Historical Dictionary of Brazil, 214. 26.  Skidmore, Politics in Brazil, 201. 27.  Ibid. 28.  Ibid. 29.  Ibid. 30.  The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, owns the original painting, which is listed under the title Angst in the gallery’s catalogue. 31.  Samuels, “Elizabeth Bishop and Paul Klee,” 547. 32.  Ibid. 33.  Jacqueline Vaught Brogan calls “Bishop’s use of poetic convention . . . ​one of her primary vehicles for making biting social commentaries” (“ ‘An Almost Illegible Scrawl,’ ” 240). 34.  Elizabeth Bishop and the “New Yorker,” 257. 35.  Hardwick, “Some Chapters of Personal History: A Brilliant Study of a Mexican Family Probes the Lives of the Unknown Poor” (a review of The Children of Sanchez by Oscar Lewis), New York Times Book Review (August 27, 1961). 36.  Skidmore, Politics in Brazil, 295. 37.  Brogan, “Naming the Thief in ‘Babylon,’ ” 515. 38.  Ibid, 522. 39.  Merrill, Collected Prose, 11. 40.  Ibid.

Notes to Pages 113–119  159 41.  Ibid. 42.  Rose, Unpast, 235–36. 43.  Ibid., 236. 44.  Ibid. 45.  Ibid., 233–34. 46.  Ibid., 240. 47.  Ibid., 241. 48.  Ibid. 49.  Ibid. 50.  The lines in Bishop’s first draft of the poem (probably dating from 1962) have spaces and illegible words, but the idea is already in place: “I hear they’re throwing . . . ​ beggars . . . ​they are murdering the . . . ​beggars” (VC 73.3). 51.  Translated and quoted by Neely, “Cadela Carioca,” 107. 52.  Qtd. in Pinheiro, “Political Transition,” 196–97. 53.  Bishop, letter to the editor, New Republic, April 30, 1962: 22. 54.  Ibid., 19. 55.  Ibid., 22. 56.  Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro notes that Lacerda’s “proposal to remove . . . ​urban favela dwellers” was at least in part a matter of “urban land use, since the favelas were often on valuable real estate in the South Zone of Rio, and the desire was to move these mostly Black and poor populations far away from mostly white affluent and ­middle-​class neighborhoods” (“Political Transition,” 196). Pinheiro explains that “several favelas were moved, over the strong resistance of their residents, to housing blocks far from the city, with precarious, only partially implemented transportation. Favela dwellers were stigmatized as criminals” (196). Bryan McCann notes that “La­ cerda’s public works, such as the creation of parks in middle-class neighborhoods and the forced resettlement of shantytown residents to public housing in far-flung suburbs, appeased his middle-class supporters and insulated them from the poor” (“Carlos Lacerda,” 692–93). 57.  Bishop, letter to the editor, 22. 58.  Ibid. 59.  Ibid. 60.  Elizabeth Bishop and the “New Yorker,” 256. 61.  The lines in the first draft were “Get dressed! get dressed! Dance at Carnival!” (VC 73.3). 62.  Cariocan is the name for residents of Rio. 63.  Neely is quoting Larry Rohter here (“Cadela Carioca,” 103). 64.  Ibid. 65.  Ibid. 66.  Ibid. 67.  George Monteiro places Bishop’s poem in the tradition of “ ‘the spectator poem celebrating the passing woman,’ ” a line Monteiro traces back to Dante’s La Vita Nuova. 68.  Neely, “Cadela Carioca,” 103.

160  Notes to Pages 120–126 69.  Ibid. 70.  Bellos, “Movie Palace.”

Five.  Amazon Worlds 1.  Janet Chernela, “Anthropology of Amazonia,” 203. 2.  Regina Przybycien, however, does make a brief but important connection between the two poems in her essay “Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil,” a point I will return to shortly. See also Neil Besner’s beautiful piece on memory, return, and the convergence of these two poems, “Where Rivers Meet,” published in the March 22, 2012, issue of the online magazine Berfrois. Besner’s piece discusses these poems in the context of the trip we took together in 2011, along with Thomas Travisano and Dave Hoak, when we all traveled by river boat from Manaus to Santarém. 3.  Clifford, Routes, 22. 4.  Several critics have discussed Bishop’s role as an ethnographer and traveler in Brazil, including Jeffrey Gray in Mastery’s End and Regina Przybycien, whose work I noted above. 5.  Clifford, Routes, 23. 6.  Ibid. 7.  Ibid., 22. 8.  Ibid. 9.  Ibid., 25. 10.  Ibid., 23. 11.  Ibid. 12.  Chernela, “Anthropology of Amazonia,” 203. 13.  Wagley, Amazon Town, xvii; Chernela, ibid. 14.  Chernela, ibid. 15.  I am not the first Bishop scholar to note Bishop’s use of this source. Both Lorrie Goldensohn in The Biography of a Poetry (1992) and Susan McCabe in Elizabeth Bishop: Her Poetics of Loss (1994) discuss Wagley’s influence, but their emphases are quite different from my own argument here. Goldensohn focuses more on the doubling between the subject of Bishop’s dramatic monologue “The Riverman” and “the voice of the poet herself” who is “exploring her own disconnections and powers” (209). McCabe sees “The Riverman” as a political poem in the spirit of “Manuelzinho” in that it argues powerfully “for the place of the marginal, peripheral figure, and also for respect for the natural as powerful Other” (176). 16.  Wagley, “Amazon Town,” 233. 17.  Ibid., 233, 225–26. 18.  Ibid., 229. 19.  Ibid., 232. 20.  Przybycien, “Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil,” 67. 21.  Ibid. 22.  Boschman, In the Way of Nature, 172. 23.  Ibid. 24.  Ibid.

Notes to Pages 126–140  161 25.  Wagley, “Amazon Town,” 228. 26.  Ibid., 232. 27.  Ibid. 28.  Ibid., 227. 29.  Boschman, In the Way of Nature, 172. McCabe also notes, “An essential aspect of the Riverman’s spirituality is his relationship to nature. Bishop’s poem is as much about respect for the environment and ecological balance as it is about otherness” (Her Poetics of Loss, 175). 30.  Lévi-Strauss, Tristes tropiques, 44. 31.  “Trip on the Amazon,” VC 55.2, nine pages. Bishop titles this typescript “On the ‘Lauro Sodré.’ ” 32.  These are the cities Bishop lists in her account, allowing us to map her progress down the river (VC 55.2). In some cases I have corrected spelling and added accents. 33.  Fortuny, Elizabeth Bishop: The Art of Travel. 34.  Fountain and Brazeau, Remembering Elizabeth Bishop, 165. 35.  The word mamalucos—actually mamelucas—refers to people of mixed American Indian and Portuguese descent, as Bishop notes here, while caboclos is of mixed white and American Indian descent. 36.  Lourenço, “Amazonia,” 255. 37.  Ibid., 256. 38.  “Trip on the Amazon,” VC 55.2. 39.  Bishop was disturbed by Catholicism in Brazil at a personal level. In this same letter she relates a story to Lowell about borrowing a nightgown from a friend that she knew was Catholic “but intelligent” only to find pinned to the inside of the nightgown’s bosom the words “Angus Dei” (WIA 319). As she told Lowell, “The church [in Brazil] keeps giving me deep Protestant shudders” (WIA 318). 40.  Gray, Mastery’s End, 56. 41.  Bishop makes an early attempt at the ideas conveyed in these lines in “On the Amazon.” In that early fragment, the world “has dissolved at last,” “the river / ​erases it all.” She achieves the sense of peace but not the tension, richness and complexity of “Santarém” (EAP 124). 42.  McCabe, Her Poetics of Loss, 249. 43.  Ibid. 44.  Berger, Forms of Farewell. 45.  Ravinthiran, “Prose-rhythm and the Aesthetic Claim,” n.p. 46.  “Trip on the Amazon,” VC55.2. 47.  Gray, Mastery’s End, 58. 48.  Ibid., 59. 49.  Ibid. 50.  In “Words in Air and ‘Space’ in Art,” Gillian White argues that Bishop’s response to the excesses of American consumer culture amounted to a political stance in the 1950s and ’60s. 51.  Ravinthiran, “Prose-rhythm and the Aesthetic Claim.”

162  Notes to Pages 140–146 52.  Ibid. 53.  Ibid. 54.  McCabe, Her Poetics of Loss, 220. 55.  Medeiros Costa-Neto, “Use of Insects in Folk Medicine,” 247. 56.  Ibid., 256–57. 57.  I have Robin Schultze to thank for pointing out the medicinal connection. 58.  Fountain and Brazeau, Remembering Elizabeth Bishop, 165. 59.  McCabe, Her Poetics of Loss, 221. 60.  Millier, Life and the Memory of It, 308. 61.  Rosinha Leão, with whom Bishop traveled, reports this anecdote in Remembering Elizabeth Bishop, 165.

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Athill, Diana. “The Great Escape.” Guardian Online, June 22, 2007. ———. “Why I Love The Diary of ‘Helena Morley.’ ” In The Diary of ‘Helena Morley’, by Helena Morley, translated by Elizabeth Bishop, vii–xi. London: Virago, 2008. Bellos, Alex. “Movie Palace.” Guardian, January 14, 2006. Berger, Charles. Forms of Farewell: The Late Poetry of Wallace Stevens. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985. Besner, Neil. “Translating North and South: Elizabeth Bishop, Biography, and Brazil.” In Canadian Cultural Exchange: Échanges culturels au Canada, edited by Norman Cheadle and Lucien Pelletier, 307–21. Waterloo, Ontario, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2007. ———. “Where Rivers Meet.” Berfrois, March 22, 2012. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994. Bishop, Elizabeth. Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters. Edited by Robert Giroux and Lloyd Schwartz. New York: Library of America, 2008. ———. Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments. Edited by Alice Quinn. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. ———. Letter to the editor. New Republic, April 30, 1962: 22. ———. One Art: Elizabeth Bishop Letters. Edited by Robert Giroux. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994. ———. Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. ———. Prose. Edited by Lloyd Schwartz. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. ———. “Squatter’s Children.” Anhembi 22, no. 65 (April 1956): 288–89. Bishop, Elizabeth, and Emanuel Brasil, eds. An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Brazilian Poetry. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1972. Bishop, Elizabeth, and Robert Lowell. Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence ­between

164  Bibliography Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. Edited by Thomas Travisano with Saskia Hamilton. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. Bishop, Elizabeth, and the Editors of Life. Brazil. Life World Library. New York: Time Incorporated, 1962. Bishop, Elizabeth, and the New Yorker. Elizabeth Bishop and “The New Yorker”: The Complete Correspondence. Edited by Joelle Biele. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. Boddy, Kasia. “Forgotten Treasure from Brazil.” Telegraph, July 5, 2008. http://www​ .telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/non_fictionreviews/3555785/Forgotten-treasure​ -from-Brazil.html. Boschman, Robert. In the Way of Nature: Ecology and Westward Expansion in the Poetry of Anne Bradstreet, Elizabeth Bishop and Amy Clampitt. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009. Brant, Alice Dayrell. The Diary of “Helena Morley.” Translated by Elizabeth Bishop. New York: Ecco Press, 1977. Brazil: Knopf Guides. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005. Brogan, Jacqueline Vaught. “ ‘An Almost Illegible Scrawl’: Elizabeth Bishop and Textual (Re)Formations.” In Elizabeth Bishop in the Twenty-First Century: Reading the New Editions, edited by Angus Cleghorn, Bethany Hicok, and Thomas Travisano, 239–54. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012. ———. “Naming the Thief in ‘Babylon’: Elizabeth Bishop and ‘the Moral of the Story.’ ” Contemporary Literature 42, no. 3 (Fall 2001): 514–34. Brown, Ashley. “An Interview with Elizabeth Bishop.” In Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art, edited by Lloyd Schwartz and Sybil P. Estess, 289–302. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983. ———. “Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil.” In Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art, edited by Lloyd Schwartz and Sybil P. Estess, 223–40. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983. Burns, Tom. “Bishop, Translator of Drummond.” In The Art of Elizabeth Bishop, edited by Sandra Regina Goulart Almeida, Gláucia Renate Gonçalves, and Eliana Lourenço de Lima Reis, 102–12. Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG, 2002. Cabral de Melo Neto, João. Education by Stone: Selected Poems. Translated by Richard Zenith. New York: Archipelago Books, 2005. Kindle edition. Chernela, Janet M. “Anthropology of Amazonia.” In Envisioning Brazil: A Guide to Brazilian Studies in the United States, edited by Marshall C. Eakin and Paulo Roberto de Almeida, 203–40. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005. Cleghorn, Angus. “Bishop’s ‘Wiring Fused’: ‘Bone Key’ and ‘Pleasure Seas.’ ” In Elizabeth Bishop in the Twenty-First Century: Reading the New Editions, edited by Angus Cleghorn, Bethany Hicok, and Thomas Travisano, 69–87. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012. Cleghorn, Angus, Bethany Hicok, and Thomas Travisano. Introduction to Elizabeth Bishop in the Twenty-First Century: Reading the New Editions, edited by Angus Cleghorn, Bethany Hicok, and Thomas Travisano, 1–7. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012.

Bibliography  165 Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Coniff, Michael L., and Frank D. McCann, eds. Modern Brazil: Elites and Masses in Historical Perspective. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991. Costello, Bonnie. Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Curran, Mark J. Brazil’s Folk-Popular Poetry—“A Literatura De Cordel”: A Bilingual Anthology in English and Portuguese. Victoria, BC: Trafford, 2010. Diawara, Manthia. “The Blackface Stereotype.” www.blackculturalstudies.org/m​_diawara/​ blackface.html. Drummond de Andrade, Carlos. “Death of the Houses of Ouro Prêto.” Translated by Thomas Colchie. Paris Review, no. 97 (September 1985): 26–28. ———. “Poem of Seven Faces.” In Poets of Brazil, A Bilingual Selection: Poetas do Brasil, uma seleção bilíngüe, translated by Frederick G. Williams, 296–97. New York: Luso-​Brazilian Books, 2004. Edelman, Lee. “The Geography of Gender: Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘In the Waiting Room.’ ” In Elizabeth Bishop: The Geography of Gender, edited by Marilyn May Lombardi, 91–110. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993. Eliot, T. S. “Andrew Marvell.” In The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose, edited by Lawrence Rainey, 146–57. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005. Fortuny, Kim. Elizabeth Bishop: The Art of Travel. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2003. Fountain, Gary, and Peter Brazeau. Remembering Elizabeth Bishop: An Oral Biography. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994. Freyre, Gilberto. The Mansions and the Shanties. New York: Knopf, 1963. Goldensohn, Lorrie. “Approaching Elizabeth Bishop’s Letters to Ruth Foster.” Yale Review 103, no. 1 (January 2015): 1–19. ———. Elizabeth Bishop: The Biography of a Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. Goode, William J. World Changes in Divorce Patterns. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993. Gray, Jeffrey. Mastery’s End: Travel and Postwar American Poetry. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005. Green, Fiona. “Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil and the New Yorker.” Journal of American Studies 46, no. 4 (2012): 803–29. Heidegger, Martin. Poetry, Language, Thought. Translated by Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper Perennial, 1971. Hess, Alan. Casa Modernista: A History of the Brazil Modern House. New York: Rizzoli, 2010. Hicok, Bethany. “Becoming a Poet: From North to South.” In The Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Bishop, edited by Angus Cleghorn and Jonathan Ellis, 111–23. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. ———. “Bishop’s Brazilian Politics.” In Elizabeth Bishop in the Twenty-First Century:

166  Bibliography Reading the New Editions, edited by Angus Cleghorn, Bethany Hicok, and Thomas Travisano, 133–50. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012. ———. Degrees of Freedom: American Women Poets and the Women’s College, 1905–1955. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2008. Holloway, Thomas H. “Immigration in the Rural South.” In Modern Brazil: Elites and Masses in Historical Perspective, edited by Michael L. Coniff and Frank D. McCann, 140–60. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991. Kamuf, Peggy. “Passing Strange: The Laws of Translation.” MLA Profession 2010: 64–71. Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. New York: W. W. Norton, 1978. Levine, Robert M. Historical Dictionary of Brazil. Latin American Historical Dictionaries, vol. 19. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1979. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Tristes tropiques. Translated by John and Doreen Weightman. New York: Penguin, 1992. Lispector, Clarice. Family Ties. Translated by Giovanni Pontiero. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1972. ———. Laços de família. Rio de Janeiro: Livraria José Olympio, 1982. Longenbach, James. Modern Poetry after Modernism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Lourenço, José Seixas. “Amazonia: Past Progress and Future Prospects.” In Brazil: A Century of Change, edited by Ignacy Sachs, Jorge Wilheim, and Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro, 253–70. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. Machado, Maria Teresa. “Elizabeth Bishop’s Translation of The Diary of “Helena Morley.” In The Art of Elizabeth Bishop, edited by Sandra Regina Goulart Almeida, Gláucia Renate Gonçalves, and Eliana Lourenço de Lima Reis, 124–31. Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG, 2002. MacMahon, Candace W. Elizabeth Bishop: A Bibliography, 1927–1979. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1980. Mann, Thomas. The Magic Mountain. Translated by John E. Woods. New York: Vintage, 1996. McCabe, Susan. Elizabeth Bishop: Her Poetics of Loss. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994. McCann, Bryan. “Carlos Lacerda: The Rise and Fall of a Middle-Class Populist in 1950s Brazil.” Hispanic American Historical Review 83, no. 4 (November 2003): 661–96. Medeiros Costa-Neto, Eraldo. “The Use of Insects in Folk Medicine in the State of Bahia, Northeastern Brazil, with Notes on Insects Reported Elsewhere in Brazilian Folk Medicine.” Human Ecology 30, no. 2 (June 2002): 245–63. Menendes Motta, Marcia Maria. “The Sesmarias in Brazil: Colonial Land Policies in the Late Eighteenth-Century.” e-JPH 3, no. 2 (Winter 2005): 1–12. Merrill, James. Collected Prose. Edited by Stephen Yenser. New York: Knopf, 2004. Merrin, Jeredith. An Enabling Humility: Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and the Uses of Tradition. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990. Milléo Martins, Maria Lúcia. Duas Artes: Carlos Drummond de Andrade e Elizabeth Bishop. Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG, 2006.

Bibliography  167 ———. “Elizabeth Bishop and Carlos Drummond de Andrade: ‘Opening of tin trunks and violent memories.’ ” In “In Wooster Massachusetts”: Essays on Elizabeth Bishop: From the 1997 Elizabeth Bishop Conference at WPI, edited by Laura Jehn Menides and Angela G. Dorenkamp, 225–33. New York: Peter Lang, n.d. Millier, Brett C. Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Mindlin, Henrique. Modern Architecture in Brazil. New York: Reinhold, 1956. Monteiro, George. “Bishop’s Brazil and Vice Versa.” In “In Wooster Massachusetts”: Essays on Elizabeth Bishop: From the 1997 Elizabeth Bishop Conference at WPI, edited by Laura Jehn Menides and Angela G. Dorenkamp, 93–98. New York: Peter Lang, n.d. ———. Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil and After: A Poetic Career Transformed. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012. Morley, Helena. Minha vida de menina. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1998. Moser, Benjamin. “Elizabeth Bishop’s Misunderstood ‘Brazil.’ ” New Yorker, December 5, 2012. http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/elizabeth​-bishops​-mis​ under​stood​-brazil. ———. Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Nabokov, Vladimir. “Problems of Translation: Onegin in English.” In Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida, edited by John Biguenet and Rainer Schulte, 127–43. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Neely, Elizabeth. “Cadela Carioca: Bishop’s ‘Pink Dog’ in its Brasilian Cultural Context.” South Central Review 31, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 99–113. Nogueira Diniz, Thaís Flores. “Imagens do Brasil na Poesia de Elizabeth Bishop.” Cader­nos de tradução 6, no. 2 (2000): 67–75. O’Donovan, Patrick. “Aldous Huxley’s Island Paradise.” New Republic, April 30, 1960: 17–18. Oliveria, Carmen L. Rare and Commonplace Flowers: The Story of Elizabeth Bishop and Lota de Macedo Soares. Translated by Neil K. Besner. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003. Olson, James S. The Indians of Central and South America: An Ethnohistorical Dictionary. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1991. Page, Barbara. “Home, Wherever That May Be: Poems and Prose of Brazil.” In The Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Bishop, edited by Angus Cleghorn and Jonathan Ellis, 124–40. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Page, Barbara, and Carmen Oliveira. “Foreign-Domestic: Elizabeth Bishop at Home/ Not at Home in Brazil.” In Elizabeth Bishop in the Twenty-First Century: Reading the New Editions, edited by Angus Cleghorn, Bethany Hicok, and Thomas Travisano, 117–32. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012. Pascal, Blaise. Pensées. Edited and translated by Roger Ariew. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2004. PDF e-book. Paz, Octavio. “Translation: Literature and Letters.” In Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida, edited by John Biguenet and Rainer Schulte, 152–62. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

168  Bibliography Peixoto, Marta. Passionate Fictions: Gender, Narrative, and Violence in Clarice Lispector. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Pérez Firmat, Gustavo. “Introduction: Cheek to Cheek.” In Do the Americas Have a Common Language?, edited by Gustavo Pérez Firmat, 1–5. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990. Pilgrim, David. “The Picaninny Caricature.” Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia at Ferris State University. www.ferris.edu/htmls/news/jimcrow/picaninny. Pinheiro, Paulo Sérgio. “Political Transition and the (Un)rule of Law in the Republic.” In Brazil: A Century of Change, edited by Ignacy Sachs, Jorge Wilheim, and Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro, 174–215. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992. Pritchett, V. S. “A Brazilian Diamond.” New Statesman, October 25, 1958: 566, 568. Przybycien, Regina. “Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil: Traveler, Ethnographer, and Castaway.” In The Art of Elizabeth Bishop, edited by Sandra Regina Goulart Almeida, Gláucia Renate Gonçalves, and Eliana Lourenço de Lima Reis, 62–73. Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG, 2002. Ravinthiran, Vidyan. “Prose-rhythm and the Aesthetic Claim: A New Reading of Elizabeth Bishop’s Santarém”.” U.S. Studies OnLine 18 (Spring 2001): Article 4. Read, Justin. “Manners of Mistranslation: The Antropofagismo of Elizabeth Bishop’s Prose and Poetry.” New Centennial Review (Michigan State University Press) 3, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 297–327. Rohter, Larry. Brazil on the Rise: The Story of a Country Transformed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Roosevelt, Theodore. Through the Brazilian Wilderness. First published 1914 by Charles Scribner’s Sons. Kindle edition. Rose, R. S. The Unpast: Elite Violence and Social Control in Brazil, 1954–2000. Latin America Series, no. 44. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005. Samuels, Peggy. Deep Skin: Elizabeth Bishop and Visual Art. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010. ———. “Elizabeth Bishop and Paul Klee.” Modernism/Modernity 14, no. 3 (2007): 543–68. Saunders, Frances Stonor. The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters. New York: New Press, 1999. Schwartz, Lloyd. “Elizabeth Bishop and Brazil.” New Yorker, January 30, 1991: 85–97. Skidmore, Thomas E. Brazil: Five Centuries of Change. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. ———. Politics in Brazil, 1930–1964: An Experiment in Democracy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Travisano, Thomas. Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic Development. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1988. ———. Midcentury Quartet: Bishop, Lowell, Jarrell, Berryman, and the Making of a Postmodern Aesthetic. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999. Venuti, Lawrence, ed. The Translation Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 2000.

Bibliography  169 Vinay, Jean-Paul, and Jean Darbelnet. “A Methodology of Translation.” Translated by Juan C. Sager and M.-J. Hamel. In The Translation Studies Reader, edited by Lawrence Venuti, 128–37. New York: Routledge, 2000. Wagley, Charles. Amazon Town: A Study of Man in the Tropics. New York: Macmillan, 1958. White, Gillian. “Words in Air and ‘Space’ in Art: Bishop’s Midcentury Critique of the United States.” In Elizabeth Bishop in the Twenty-First Century: Reading the New Editions, edited by Angus Cleghorn, Bethany Hicok, and Thomas Travisano, 255–73. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012. Williams, Frederick G., trans. Poets of Brazil, a Bilingual Selection: Poetas do Brasil, uma seleção bilíngüe. New York: Luso-Brazilian Books, 2004.

Index

Italicized page numbers refer to illustrations. aesthetic choices, 140–41 Aleijadinho, 57 Alliance for Progress, 48 Alves, Manuelzinho, 26–30, 32–33 Amazon, 7, 25–26, 44, 121–46; anthropological studies of, 122, 123, 124, 130; author’s travel on, 144–46, 160n2; Bishop’s travel account of trip, 131, 161nn31–32; and Brazilian medicine, 141; as cross-cultural contact zone, 122, 133, 135, 146; historic background of, 122; “On the Amazon,” 121, 142, 145, 161n41; riverboat travel, 5, 131, 144–46; and “The Riverman,” 122, 123, 124, 125–30, 139, 141, 160n15; and “Santarém,” 7, 121, 122, 123–24, 130–41, 142–44, 161n41; and “A Trip to Vigia,” 43–45, 142–43 American foreign policy, 140 anthropology, 6, 101, 122, 123, 124–25, 130 anti-America critique, 49 anti-Semitism, 154n34 Architecture Biennial (1951), 11 armadillos, 25–26 Ashbery, John, 113 astrological imagery, 18–19, 24, 32

Athill, Diana, 153n17 automobiles, 37, 39–40, 43, 46 ballad form, 66, 110–13. See also folk balladry Bandeira, Manuel, 4, 64, 66, 73–74 Barata, Ruy, 151n18 Barker, Ilse and Kit, 24, 33 Baumann, Anny, 33, 124, 153n51 Belém, 43, 45, 131–33, 143 Bellos, Alex, 120 Berger, Charles, 137 Bernardes, Sérgio, 9, 11, 17 Berryman, John, 65 Besner, Neil, 3, 95, 154n23, 157nn113–114; “Where Rivers Meet,” 160n2 Bhabha, Homi, 6, 20–21, 22 Biele, Joelle, ed., Elizabeth Bishop and the “New Yorker,” 147n1 Bishop, Elizabeth: in Brazil from 1951 to 1966, 1, 33; childhood and family of, 75–76; connecting prose to poetics of, 99, 157n8; as cultural ambassador, 13; decision to stay in Brazil, 14–17; duration of stay in Brazil, 8; as ethnographer, 123–24, 160n4; gaps between

172  Index Bishop, Elizabeth (continued) works on similar themes, 130; photograph of, 16; and politics, 106, 109–10, 116; repeat visits to Brazil from 1966 to 1974, 1, 33; theory of poetry of, 157n8; theory of translation, 82–86. See also travel, Bishop’s —correspondence of: with Ilse and Kit Barker, 24, 33, 37, 76; with Anny Baumann, 33, 51, 124; on Brazilian birds, 144; with Lilli Correia de Araújo, 152n46; with Ruth Foster, 76; with Pearl Kazin, 19, 39, 57, 98; with Lota de Macedo Soares, 121, 131–32; on Macedo Soares’s suicide, 36; with Mari­ anne Moore, 19; with New Yorker, 28, 47, 48–49, 58, 109, 117, 121; Samambaia described in, 14, 51; with Anne Stevenson, 153n10, 157n4. See also Lowell, Robert: Bishop’s correspondence with —translations by, 2, 4, 64–96; Anthology of Twentieth-Century Brazilian Poetry (with Brasil), 64, 89–90; Cabral’s poetry, 82, 86–90; in context of translation theory, 4, 83–86, 95; and cross-cultural dialogue, 147n2; The Diary of “Helena Morley,” 7, 61, 65, 66–73, 95, 96, 154n36; Drummond’s poetry, 90–95, 153n3; and Lispector’s relationship with Bishop, 74–78; Lispector’s stories, 4, 75, 78–82, 153n3; Modern Brazilian Architecture (with Mindlin), 4; and Nabokov on translation, 82–83, 88; names in, 95; poetry, 4, 82–96; and travel, 84–85 —works by: “Apartment in Leme,” 113; “The Armadillo,” 6, 10, 23–26, 59; “Arrival at Santos,” 4–5, 38, 40, 47, 49–50, 56, 63; “At the Fishhouses,” 14–15, 55, 128–29; “Aubade and Elegy,” 34–37; “Brasil, 1959,” 104; “Brazil, January 1, 1502,” 54, 79, 80–81, 99, 104, 105, 111; “The Burglar of Babylon,” 1, 29, 41, 86, 87, 109–14, 120; “Chemin de Fer,” 112; A Cold Spring, 128, 149n29; “Crusoe in England,” 112, 141–42, 156n92; Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments (Quinn, ed.), 19, 33, 34, 79, 99, 121, 142, 147n1,

149n30, 150n54, 152n45; “Efforts of Affection,” 145; “Electrical Storm,” 10, 20–21, 23; “Elegy,” 34; Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters (Giroux & Schwartz, eds.), 147n1; Elizabeth Bishop and the “New Yorker” (Biele, ed.), 147n1; “Farewell, Teresa,” 45; “Filling Station,” 46–49, 151n23; films based on, 3; “The Fish,” 62, 63; “Foreign-Domestic” draft poem, 3, 10, 19–20; “For Grandfather,” 92; “(For the window-pane),” 152n45; Geography III, 91; “Going to the Bakery (Rio de Janeiro),” 113–14; “Grandmother’s Glass Eye,” 34; “Gypsophilia,” 10, 26, 31–33, 62, 150n54; “In the Village,” 31, 39; “In the Waiting Room,” 90–92, 113; “Leaving Rio,” 40; Life World Library’s Brazil, 2, 3–4, 11, 16, 25, 30, 54, 99, 102, 109, 110, 112, 154n30; “The Man-Moth,” 129–30, 150n61; “Manuelzinho,” 10, 26–29, 149n45, 160n15; “The Monument,” 143; “A New Capital, Aldous Huxley, and Some Indians,” 100–105; “New Year’s Letter as Auden Says—,” 14; “North Haven,” 137; “One Art,” 33, 91, 156n96; “On the Amazon,” 121, 142, 145; “On the Way,” 46; “Pink Dog,” 1, 99, 109, 114–20; Poemas do Brasil (Britto, transl.), 66; Poems, Prose, and Letters (Library of America ed.), 43, 79, 99; Poems and Prose, 79, 99, 147n1; Questions of Travel, 2, 30, 46, 59, 110–11; “Questions of Travel,” 6, 47, 49, 50–56, 84; Rainy Season; Subtropics, 150n61; “Remarks on Translation,” 84–85; “The Riverman,” 59, 122, 123, 124, 125–30, 139, 141, 160n15; “Santarém,” 7, 50, 63, 121, 122, 123–24, 130–41, 142–44, 161n41; “The Shampoo,” 10, 17–19, 32, 35, 149n29; “Song for the Rainy Season,” 10, 20–23, 31; “Squatter’s Children,” 10, 26, 29–31; “Suicide of a Moderate Dictator,” 10, 97, 99–100; “To Manuel Bandeira, With Jam and Jelly,” 74; translations of, 65–66, 73–74, 116; travel account of car trip from Rio to Samambaia, 40–43; travel account of trip down Rio São

Index  173 Francisco, 33, 39, 150n5; travel account of trip to Amazon, 131, 161nn31–32; “A Trip to Vigia,” 43–45, 121, 142–43; “Twelfth Morning; or What You Will,” 60–61, 86; “Under the Window: Ouro Prêto,” 56, 58–63, 148n5 (prologue); “Visits to St. Elizabeths,” 110 Blake, William, 118–19; “Holy Thursday,” 118–19; “Human Abstract,” 20; influence of, 31 Borges, J. L., 77 Botsford, Keith, 14 Brasil, Emanuel, 4, 64, 89–90 Brasília, 11, 43, 46, 79, 99, 101–3, 105, 157n11 Brazil: demographics and culture of, 2; family life in, 16–17, 29–31, 47, 149n19; as home for Bishop, 7; importance to Bishop, 147n2; insects, medicinal use of, 141; map of, xiv; modern architecture in, 10–12; spelling of, 157n11; study of Bishop in, 65. See also class structure of Brazil Britto, Paulo Henriques, 66, 116 Brogan, Jacqueline Vaught, 111, 158n33 Brown, Ashley, 53, 63, 147n2, 152n32 Burle Marx, Roberto, 13, 58 Burns, Tom, 94–95 Cabo Frio, 60, 60–61, 86 Cabral de Melo Neto, João, 4, 64; background of, 86–87, 156n76; “Morte e Vida Severina” [“The Death and Life of a Severino”], 82, 86–89, 156n83; translations by Bishop, 82, 86–89 cafuné (head-rubbing), 17 Calder, Alexander, 12, 32 Callado, Antônio, 104 Camões, Luís de, 72, 73, 87 Camus, Marcel, 120 Carnival, 116, 117–20 Casa Modernista: A History of the Brazil Modern House (Rizzoli), 10 Catholicism, 124, 139, 161n39 Cavalcanti, Guido, 83 Chernela, Janet, 124 Chirico, Giorgio de, 75 chronotope of culture, 123–24

church and religion, 44–45, 54, 57, 124–25, 136, 138–39, 161n39 CIA, 13–14 Clark, Kenneth, Landscape into Art, 81 class structure of Brazil, 3, 10, 26–33, 36– 37; and architecture, 10–11; Bishop’s consciousness of, 37, 45; and Cabral’s poetry, 86–88; and city planning and Brasília, 103; from colonial era, 17; and Portuguese immigrants, 54, 152n35; in translations of Bishop’s works, 66; and travel, 43, 46 Cleghorn, Angus, 149n35 Clifford, James, 6, 122–24; “Traveling Cultures,” 123 Colchie, Thomas, 152n42 Cold War, 13–14, 98, 111, 140 colonialism, 17, 24, 39, 53, 54, 71, 75, 88, 89, 105, 106, 111, 133 community life, 41 conflux, 7 Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), 13–14 contact zones. See cross-cultural contact zones Copacabana Beach (Rio de Janeiro), 2, 118 Corbière, Tristan, 85 cordel literature. See literatura de cordel Corey, Mary, 29 Cornell, Joseph, 143 Correia de Araújo, Lilli, 57–59, 152n46 Correia de Araújo, Pedro Luiz, 58 Correio da Manha (newspaper), 104 corruption, 107 Costa, Lúcio, 11 Costello, Bonnie, 25 cross-cultural contact zones, 2; Amazon as, 122, 133, 135; architects and others coming to Samambaia, 12–13, 16–17; and Brazilian literature, 153n5; and ethnography, 123–24; export of Brazilian culture into North America, 3–4; New Yorker’s role, 29; north–south axis, 65, 130, 148n18; series of cross-cultural moments captured in Bishop’s work, 6, 120; and translations, 64–66, 82, 147n2; and travel around Brazil, 44–46, 49 Crusoe, Robinson, 112, 141, 156n92

174  Index Cunha, Euclides da, 122 Curran, Mark, 87 death squads, 114–16 Democratic National Union Party [União Democrática Nacional, UDN], 107 Derrida, Jacques, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” 84 diminutives, use of, 27 Donne, John, 18 Drummond de Andrade, Carlos, 4, 64, 90–95, 147n2; Burns’s analysis of Bishop’s translations of, 94–95; compared to Bishop, 92; “Death of the Houses of Ouro Prêto,” 152n42; “Infância,” 156n92; “Poema de Sete Faces” [­“Seven-Sided Poem”], 90, 92–93; “Retrato de familia” [“Family Portrait”], 90; in Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology (Tapscott, ed.), 153n3; “Viagem na familia” [“Traveling in the Family”], 92, 96; Williams vs. Bishop translations of, 87, 89, 94 economic development, 38–39, 47–48, 102; and inflation, 104–5 Edelman, Lee, 91, 156n97 Eliot, T. S., 18, 75, 149n28; Waste Land, 23 environmental concerns, 24–26, 59, 62, 89, 161n29 ethical questions, 4, 50, 59, 84, 95, 114, 122, 129, 136, 141 ethnography, 123–24, 160n4 European influences, rejection of, 12–13 family life, 16–17, 29–31, 47, 90, 149n19 favelas (slums), 29, 41–42, 66, 109, 110, 117, 120, 150n49, 151n9, 159n56 films based on Bishop’s work, 3 folk balladry, 1, 87, 110–11 folk medicine, 141, 143–44 Fortuny, Kim, 50, 52, 53, 54, 131, 147n2, 152n35 Foster, David, 153n5 Foster, Ruth, 76 Freudian analysis, 20, 53 Freyre, Gilberto: The Mansions and the Shanties, 17, 54–55, 149n26, 152n40; The Masters and the Slaves, 89

gaze, 78, 151n20 gender roles, 78–79, 91, 110, 125 Georgia Review, 157n1 Ginsberg, Allen, 113; “America,” 3 “Girl from Ipanema, The” (popular song), 118, 119 Giroux, Robert, and Lloyd Schwartz (eds.), Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters, 147n1 Global Studies Conference (2011), 5 gluttony, 52 Goés, Marta, A Safe Harbour for Elizabeth Bishop (Hahn, transl.), 3 Goldensohn, Lorrie: “Approaching Elizabeth Bishop’s Letters to Ruth Foster,” 155n45; Elizabeth Bishop: The Biography of a Poetry, 147n2, 155n60, 160n15 Goulart, João, 98, 107, 109 Gray, Jeffrey, 100–101, 105, 136, 139–40, 160n4 Green, Fiona, 29, 149n45 Grupo de Diligências Especiais [Special Diligence Group, GDE], 115 Guevara, Che, 107 Guggenheim Fellowship, 34 guilt and sin, 42, 81 Gypsophila, 32 Hardwick, Elizabeth, 109 head-rubbing, 17 Heidegger, Martin, 9, 22 Herbert, George, 18, 149n27 Hess, Alan, Casa Modernista, 9, 10, 11 Hicok, Bethany: Amazon travel of, 144–46, 160n2; “Becoming a Poet: From North to South,” 148n18; “Con Spirito, Improvisation, and the Poetry of the 1930s,” 157n8; Elizabeth Bishop in the Twenty-First Century: Reading the New Editions (Cleghorn, Hicok, and Travisano, eds.), 99, 148n4 (prologue), 149n35, 150n49 hiding and fear of exposure, 21–23 Hitchcock, Henry-Russell, 103 Hoak, Dave, 155n45 home: Bishop’s description of, 51; search for a, 7, 33–37; staying at home instead of traveling, 55–56, 143; threats to, 26;

Index  175 “unhomeliness” and displacement, 20–21 homogenization of culture, 56 House Un-American Committee, 74 Hughes, Ted, 3 Huxley, Aldous, 11, 79, 99–104; Island, 104, 158n19 Iaualapití, 103–4, 158n18 “imaginary,” 76 indigenous peoples, 25, 75, 80–81, 99, 101, 105–6; Iaualapití, 103–4, 158n18; mamalucos, 133, 161n35; and Manaus opera house, 134; spiritual life of, 124 individual identity, loss of, 61 inheritance and property owning, 30 insects, medicinal use of, 141 irony, 4, 88, 101, 102 Ivo, Lêdo, 75 Jarrell, Randall, 65 Jesuits, 54 Jobim, Antonio Carlos, 118 Jordan, June, 64 Kamuf, Peggy, 84; “Passing Strange: The Laws of Translation,” 155n67 Kant, Immanuel, 140 Kazin, Pearl, 39, 57, 98 Kenyon Review, 65, 75 Kerouac, Jack, 38, 55 Kubitschek, Juscelino, 38, 98, 99, 102, 107 Lacan, Jacques, Four Fundamental Concepts, 151n20 Lacerda, Carlos, 4, 17, 75, 80, 97–98, 99– 100, 107, 109, 111, 113, 114–17, 158n19, 159n56; Depoimento [Testimony], 116 Leão, Rosinha, 131, 162n61 Le Cocq de Oliveira, Milton, 114 Le Corbusier, 10 Lermontov, Mikhail, A Hero of Our Time (Nabokov, transl.), 83 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 124; Tristes tropiques, 101, 130 Lewis, Oscar, The Children of Sanchez, 109 Life World Library’s Brazil. See under Bishop, Elizabeth: works by

Lispector, Clarice, 4, 65; The Apple in the Dark, 75; childhood and family of, 76; “A Hen,” 78–79, 155n57; Laços de família [Family Ties], 78; in Literatures of Asia, Africa, and Latin America: From Antiquity to the Present (Barnstone and Barnstone, eds.), 153n3; Near to the Wild Heart, 75, 79; relationship with Bishop, 74–82, 105; “The Smallest Woman in the World,” 79, 80–82 literatura de cordel, 87, 89 Lockean influence, 31 Longenbach, James, 105, 157n8 Lowell, Robert: Baumann as doctor of, 153n52; as Bishop’s contemporary, 65; Bishop’s elegy for, 137; on Bishop’s “The Riverman,” 129–30; on Bishop’s “Under the Window,” 62–63; “For the Union Dead,” 49; Imitations, 83; as political poet, 106, 110; as translator, 83, 85; visit to Brazil, 14 —Bishop’s correspondence with, 79; on Amazon, 121, 132–33; on Bandeira, 73; on Bishop’s development as poet, 131; on Brazil visit planning for Lowell, 14; on Cabral translations by Bishop, 82, 86; on Correia de Araújo’s home, 57; on driving, 39; on favelas, 29; on “In the Waiting Room,” 91; on Lacerda, 98; on Life World Library’s Brazil, 3, 112; on Lispector translations by Bishop, 80; on local culture, 56; on Macedo Soares as subject of Bishop’s writing, 34; on Manaus, 5, 134; on negative periods in Bishop’s life, 5, 35; on Ouro Prêto, 59, 150n63; on politics, 97, 106–7, 109–10, 113, 117; on religion, 139, 161n39; on Samambaia house, 11–12, 14, 15–16, 19; on slavery, 57; on translations of Bishop’s works, 73; on translation theory, 4, 82–85; on U.S. foreign policy, 140; in Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (Travisano, ed.), 147n1 Macedo Soares, Lota de: bequests at death of, 17, 149n21; in Bishop’s poetry, 17–19, 34–37; class background of, 2, 11, 13,

176  Index Macedo Soares, Lota de (continued) 17, 26; Morse as former partner of, 17, 149n20; photograph of, 60; and politics, 23, 98, 101, 107; pronunciation of English by, 19, 63; relationship with Bishop, 1–3, 14, 76, 156n96; relationship with Lacerda, 98, 111; in Rio, 74–75, 98, 106; study with Portinari, 10; suicide of, 10, 33–34, 62, 91; travel with Bishop from Rio to Ouro Prêto, 39–43. See also Samambaia (home of Macedo Soares) Machado, Maria Teresa, 154n36 Manaus, 131, 132, 133–34; opera house, 5, 133, 134 manioc factory, 44 Mann, Thomas, The Magic Mountain, 77 Marvell, Andrew, 149n28 maternal images, 14–15, 35, 79 McCabe, Susan, 137, 141, 142, 153–54n20; Elizabeth Bishop: Her Poetics of Loss, 160n15, 161n29 McCann, Bryan, 159n56 McCarthy, Senator Joseph, 74 Medeiros Costa-Neto, Eraldo, 141 medicine, folk, 141, 143–44 Menendes Motta, Marcia Maria, 89 Merrill, James, 14, 64, 65; “The Education of the Poet,” 113 Merwin, W. S., 64 metaphysical poets, 18, 149n28 Methfessel, Alice, 156n96 Milléo Martins, Maria Lúcia, 65, 90, 92; Duas Artes, 65, 147n2; “Elizabeth Bishop and Carlos Drummond de Andrade,” 153n7, 156n90 Millier, Brett, 142, 152n46 mimicry, 25 Mindlin, Henrique, 4; Modern Architecture in Brazil, 9, 65 missionaries, 56, 130, 138 modern architecture, 10–12, 21 modernism, 75 Monteiro, George, 48–49, 118, 159n67; Eliza­beth Bishop in Brazil and After: A Poetic Career Transformed, 26, 147–48n2 Moore, Marianne, 19, 65, 75, 92, 109, 142, 145 Moraes, Vinícius de, 4, 118; Orfeu da­ Conceição, 120

Morpho butterfly, 62 Morse, Mary, 17, 26, 149n20 Moser, Benjamin: “Elizabeth Bishop’s Misunderstood ‘Brazil,’ ” 148n3 (prologue); on Lispector, 75, 76, 77 Moss, Howard, 28, 47, 58–59, 121 Museum of Modern Art, 10–11 music, 19–20. See also sambas Nabokov, Vladimir, 82–83, 88 native flora and fauna, 13, 25, 36, 62, 144, 151n5 Neely, Elizabeth, 116, 118, 147n2 Nelio Correa (riverboat), 144, 145 Neruda, Pablo, 49; “Anaconda Copper,” 49; “Standard Oil,” 49; “United Fruit Company,” 49 New Republic, 116, 158n19 New Yorker, 14, 20, 21, 28, 29, 30, 32, 39, 49, 65, 67, 79, 82, 86, 105, 111, 113, 122, 124, 148n3 (prologue), 149n45, 151n23; rejections of Bishop’s work from, 19, 99, 104; translations of Bishop’s work in, 65. See also under Bishop, Elizabeth: correspondence by New York Times, 65, 67; Book Review, 109 Niemeyer, Oscar, 11, 102–3 Nogueira Diniz, Thaís Flores, 66 north–south axis, 65, 130, 148n18 Nova Scotia, 1, 56, 75–76 Oliveira, Carmen, 3, 147n2, 150n49; Besner as translator of, 157n114; Flores raras e banalissimas [Rare and Commonplace Flowers] (Besner, transl.), 3, 157n114 Olson, James, 158n18 Orfeu Negro [Black Orpheus] (film), 120 orphan, 75 “other,” encounters with, 4, 101, 133 Ouro Prêto, 5, 11, 33–34, 39, 56–59, 58, 92, 148n5 (prologue), 152n42, 158n17 outsiders, 4, 76, 87, 125 Page, Barbara, 147n2, 150n49 parody of “The Girl from Ipanema,” 118, 119 Partisan Review, 19 Pascal, 51, 54, 55; Pensées, 50 patroa (landowner), 17, 27, 37

Index  177 Paz, Octavio, 74 Peixoto, Marta, 78 Pérez Firmat, Gustavo, 65 Petrópolis, 2, 10, 46, 148n2 (ch. 1) Pinheiro, Paulo Sérgio, 159n56 Pirapora, 150–51n5 plantation system, 89, 133 Plath, Sylvia, 3 politics, 97–120; in Bishop’s poetry, 97, 157n1; in Bishop’s response to consumerism, 161n50; and Brasília, 101–4, 106; Brazilian coup (1964), 76, 98, 111; and “The Burglar of Babylon,” 109–14, 120; as connecting thread in Bishop’s prose and poetics, 99; and death squads, 114–16; and Huxley, 99–104; and indigenous peoples, 99, 101, 103–6; Lowell on, 106–7; and “Pink Dog,” 99, 109, 114–15, 116–20; role of poet and intellectual in, 4, 23; and travelers, 55; in United States, 74. See also Lacerda, Carlos Pontiero, Giovanni, 79, 155n57 Portinari, Candido, 10 Portuguese immigrants, 54, 152n35 Portuguese language, 43, 63, 148n2 (prologue) Pound, Ezra, 83, 110, 113 poverty, 4, 45–46, 86, 114, 117, 154n34 Pratt, Mary Louise, 6, 44 Przybycien, Regina, 125, 147n2; “Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil,” 160n2, 160n4 Pulitzer Prize, 19 Quadros, Jânio, 98, 106, 107, 109, 116, 117 Quatro Rodas [Four Wheels] magazine, 39, 150n5 Quinn, Alice (ed.), Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments, 19, 33, 34, 79, 99, 121, 142, 147n1, 149n30, 150n54, 152n45 race and racism, 4, 45–46, 86, 154n34 Ravinthiran, Vidyan, 139, 140 Reaching for the Moon [Flores raras] (film), 3 Recife, 55 religion. See church and religion Ribeiro, Amado, 115

Rimbaud, 83, 85 Rio de Janiero, 55; bequests at death of Macedo Soares’s property in, 17, 149n21; Carnival in, 116, 117–20; Ministry of Education and Culture building, 10; poetry set in Leme district of, 109, 113; as starting point of trip to Brasília with Huxleys, 101 riverboat travel, 5, 131, 144–46 Rohter, Larry, Brazil on the Rise, 64 Roosevelt, Teddy, 6; Through the Brazilian Wilderness, 25–26, 122 Rose, R. S., 115 Rouault, Georges, 41 St. John’s Day (June 24), 23–24 Samambaia (home of Macedo Soares), 2, 5, 9–37, 116; architecture of modernist house, 2, 9, 10, 11–12, 12, 16, 21; bequests at death of Macedo Soares, 17, 149n21; Bishop’s descriptions of, 14–16, 24, 51; Bishop’s poetry set at, 17–26; Bishop’s studio at, 14, 15; and class structure, 26–33; and elegy for Macedo Soares, 33–37; household library in, 6; household members and structure at, 16–17, 22, 26–27, 31; Lacerda at, 98, 117; photograph of Bishop at, 16 sambas, 1, 65, 111, 118, 120, 138 Samuels, Peggy, 32 San Salvador, 55 Santarém, 7, 131, 132, 134–35 Saunders, Frances Stonor, 13, 148n15 Schultze, Robin, 162n57 Schwartz, Lloyd, 118, 147n2 search for home, 7, 33–37 Seixas Lourenço, José, 133 servants, 2, 12, 26–29, 33, 63, 68 Sexton, Anne, 19 Shakespeare, William: As You Like It, 61; The Tempest, 23 shamanism, 124 sin. See guilt and sin Skidmore, Thomas, 17, 26, 29, 38, 48, 71, 89, 98, 102, 107, 157n4 slavery, 57, 138, 158n17 Sledge, Michael, The More I Owe You, 3 “slow/fast” binary, 18

178  Index slums. See favelas (slums) social justice, 7 social structure. See class structure of Brazil source material, 6 Stevens, Wallace, 65, 75, 137, 138 Stevenson, Anne, 153n10, 157n4 Strand, Mark, 64 Swift, Jonathan, 120; “Modest Proposal,” 117 Teatro Amazonas, 133 Thompson, Francis, “The Hound of Heaven,” 42 Time-Life, 3 Time magazine, 3, 56 travel, Bishop’s, 38–63; to Amazon, 121, 123; automobiles, freedom afforded by, 39–40, 46; from Belém to Vigia, 43–45; Bishop’s writing about, 40–49; to Brasília with Huxleys, 100–104; coming home, 57–58; and ethnography, 123; from Rio to Ouro Prêto, 39–43, 151n7; and small-town life, 57–63; staying at home instead of traveling, 55–56, 143; transition from tourist to traveler, 49–56; and translation, 84–85. See also Amazon Travisano, Thomas, 153n13, 157n1; Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic Development, 157n8; Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (ed.), 147n1

Última Hora (newspaper), 115, 116 UNESCO World Heritage Site designation, 57 “unhomeliness,” 20–21 utopian view of Brasília, 99, 101–4, 106 Vargas, Getúlio, 10, 97, 98, 100, 107 Venuti, Lawrence, 83, 84 Vigia, 43–45, 143 Villas Boas, Claudio, 103–4 Vinay, Jean-Paul, and Jean Darbelnet, “A Methodology of Translation,” 154n22 Wagley, Charles, 122, 123–25, 127, 160n15; Amazon Town, 122, 124 White, Gillian, 140, 161n50 White, Katherine, 21, 30, 48 Wilbur, Richard, 64 Williams, Frederick, 87, 89, 94 Williams, William Carlos, 113 Wiznitzer, Louis, 116–17 Wolfe Video, 3 women’s role, 78–79. See also gender roles wooden clogs, 53–55 Yeats, W. B., “The Ballad of Moll Magee,” 110 Zenith, Richard, 86, 156n76