Elizabeth Bishop’s nearly twenty-year relationship with Brazil began accidentally, with a cashew fruit. In December of 1951, the American poet stopped over in Rio de Janeiro as part of a sea journey down the coast of South America to the Tierra del Fuego, a long-imagined destination that she would never see. At the mountain retreat of acquaintance Lota de Macedo Soares, a Brazilian socialite and self-taught architect, Bishop bit into the unfamiliar red-orange fruit and suffered an allergic reaction that would delay her in Brazil for several weeks. Her host became her nurse, and by the end of her convalescence, Bishop and Lota had begun an affair that would develop into a long-term love (though it may seem strange to refer to one by her last name and the other by her first, this choice reflects the divergent pulls of American and Brazilian conventions, in which the latter tends to use first names).
Bishop would publish two collections of poetry and win the Pulitzer Prize while living in Brazil, which she visited for the last time in the early 1970s, after having settled in Boston following Lota’s suicide. In the years since Bishop’s death in 1979, her literary reputation has grown steadily, spurring Edgar Allen Poe and the Juke-Box (2006), a collection of previously unpublished work, as well as this year’s Library of America edition of her poems, prose, and letters. Brazilian interest in Bishop has also surged in the past fifteen years, marked by: three translated collections of Bishop’s poetry, translations of her letters and prose, several dissertations, a biography of her life with Lota, a play first staged throughout Brazil and later translated into English for an off-Broadway production, and a Brazilian director’s current film project about Bishop’s life.
This past summer, I traveled around the southwestern region of Brazil to better understand how Bishop’s experience of Brazilian landscapes, cultures, and social relations shaped her writing but also to understand the nature of Brazilian interest in Bishop. My projected dissertation will look at representations of Brazil as they occur in the foreign literary imagination but also as they are formulated in national explorations of Brazilian identity. While my scholarly training and practice have tended toward close reading of literary texts, I have begun to move toward integrating a wider contextual approach that looks at how literature and culture inform each other within and across national boundaries and how these overlapping spheres interact with political, historical, and economic currents. This trip, then, was especially valuable as a way for me to experiment with different modes of research, so not just conducting archival searches at Rio’s Biblioteca Nacional but also coordinating site visits to Bishop’s former homes, whose settings appear in her poetry and prose, and conducting interviews with Brazilians associated with Bishop.
One of the most intriguing aspects of my research was to trace how a relatively reticent and solitary figure, the poet, can become a cultural mediator and translator between two countries, and two languages, as Bishop did between the U.S. and Brazil, English and Portuguese. Bishop in particular valued her privacy and practiced a certain poetic discretion that filtered biography and personal opinion through the oblique imagery and well-wrought phrases of her poetry. Nevertheless, she assumed the role of unlikely, and partially unintentional, cultural representative through her unique position as a major American poet with intimate access to a country and culture that few of her peers shared.
In exploring published Brazilian responses to Bishop’s Brazil as expressed in her poetry, journalistic and literary prose, and translations of Brazilian writers into English, I noted sharper critiques of Bishop’s stance toward Brazil and the Portuguese language, often characterized as condescending or under-informed, that seemed to resonate with larger narratives of U.S. cultural and economic dominance. In an article defending Bishop against the charge of “packaging the landscape for foreign consumption,” Brazilian professor Maria Lúcia Milléo Martins highlights the complexity of Bishop’s position in Brazil in her passage from tourist to a familiar outsider, citing the crucial questions: “What is the appropriate response when one is a guest in a foreign country and finds oneself in a social situation of which one disapproves? At what point does one stop being a guest?”
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The house that Lota de Macedo Soares built with a writer's studio for Elizabeth Bishop in the mountain town of Petrópolis, north of Rio de Janeiro.
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Just as Bishop’s accidental encounter would change the course of a life and a poetry, my travels, though on a smaller and much less dramatic scale, opened up a series of unforeseen yet fruitful exchanges that will continue to produce new insights as I enter into my dissertation. In Rio, meeting with Bishop’s translator Paulo Henriques Britto led me to some unpublished dissertations on Bishop and Brazil and highlighted the importance of Bishop’s letters in One Art (translated into Uma Arte) and also of American scholarly attention in influencing Brazilian interest in the poet. We also discussed the translation choices he made, negotiating the gaps in rhythm, gradations of meaning, and affective tendencies between the two languages and that reflect the influence of Brazilian concrete poetry on an art of translation that privileges formal structure.
In São Paulo, my interview with Marta Góes, who wrote the one-woman play based on Bishop’s letters and poetry, Um Porto para Elizabeth Bishop (2001, A Safe Harbor for Elizabeth Bishop), opened up another angle on what Bishop’s engagement with Brazil means for contemporary Brazilians. For Marta, the play is equally about a certain trajectory of Brazilian history that Bishop witnessed, spanning the Vargas era through the coup that would install a twenty-year dictatorship. She recalled Brazilian audience’s pleasure in recognizing their own mixed sentiments in Bishop’s praises of and frustrations toward Rio and Brazilian society. She also identified a certain “thirst to have a northern gaze turned toward us” among cosmopolitan Brazilians more used to a one-way reception of North American or European culture. Marta put me into contact with the Brazilian director Bruno Barreto, who is currently in the pre-production stages of a film based on Bishop’s life. While Marta’s play focuses on Bishop’s relationship to Lota and Brazil, Bruno’s more globalized, film industry outlook caused him to emphasize his movie as about neither Brazil nor Bishop the poet in particular but rather telling a more universal story about “the art of losing,” quoting the first line of Bishop’s famous poem “One Art.” I have maintained contact with Bruno, sending him poetry and essay recommendations despite his stated focus, and am curious to see how his film will impact how Bishop is viewed.
While coordinating visits to Bishop’s two former residences—Lota’s modern rainforest glass-and-wood structure in Petrópolis and the 18th-century colonial house in the mining town of Ouro Preto that Bishop purchased and restored on her own—I wondered what exactly I would gain beyond a kind of tourist indulgence. A line from Bishop’s poem “Questions of Travel” kept unfolding across my mind: “Is it lack of imagination that makes us come / to imagined places, not just stay home?” My visit to Casa Mariana in Ouro Preto quelled these doubts by becoming one of the trip’s most memorable experiences. When I called Linda Nemer, Bishop’s close friend and current owner of the house, to arrange a visit, she invited me to stay there with her. At first, I doubted my Portuguese comprehension, but her ready hospitality after I arrived convinced me otherwise. The days I spent conversing with Linda, who spoke no English, gave me a fuller picture of how Bishop lived and composed, of the importance of letter-writing for her as a mode of communication but also as an art form, and of her need for a certain anonymity and simple, everyday relationships that she found in Brazil and that are echoed in the subjects and manner of her poetry. I also found several interesting Bishop-related materials in Linda’s small library, including a poem that Bishop had given to Linda’s artist brother who made it into an engraving and that had found its way into Marta’s play through a mutual friend. My subsequent visit to Bishop’s home in the Samambaia neighborhood of Petrópolis, north of Rio, was more cursory, but it also gave me a better sense of the poet’s time in Brazil as a kind of double refuge, both in its distance from the American literary scene but also as withdrawn from the noise and grit of Brazilian urban life.
Perhaps it is true that much of what I learned factually in Brazil could have been discovered through library research, but I also found that the accidental and at times indeterminate knowledge gained from these firsthand encounters can suddenly light up one’s imagination and call attention to elements one may not have been previously attuned to in an often overwhelming wash of textual information.
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The view from the balcony at Casa Mariana, Bishop's 18th-century home in the interior mining town of Ouro Preto.
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