Elizabeth Bishop's Brazil

By Bethany Hicok

When the American poet Elizabeth Bishop arrived in Brazil in 1951 at the age of forty, she had not planned to stay, but her love affair with the Brazilian aristocrat Lota de Macedo Soares and with the country itself set her on another course, and Brazil became her home for nearly two decades. In this groundbreaking new study, Bethany Hicok offers Bishop’s readers the most comprehensive study to date on the transformative impact of Brazil on the poet’s life and art. Based on extensive archival research and travel, Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazil argues that the whole shape of Bishop’s writing career shifted in response to Brazil, taking on historical, political, linguistic, and cultural dimensions that would have been inconceivable without her immersion in this vibrant South American culture.

Hicok reveals the mid-century Brazil that Bishop encountered--its extremes of wealth and poverty, its spectacular topography, its language, literature, and people--and examines the Brazilian class structures that placed Bishop and Macedo Soares at the center of the country’s political and cultural power brokers. We watch Bishop develop a political poetry of engagement against the backdrop of America’s Cold War policies and Brazil’s political revolutions. Hicok also offers the first comprehensive evaluation of Bishop’s translations of Brazilian writers and their influence on her own work. Drawing on archival sources that include Bishop’s unpublished travel writings and providing provocative new readings of the poetry, Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazil is a long-overdue exploration of a pivotal phase in this great poet’s life and work.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Apr 29, 2016
• ISBN: 9780813938554

Book preview

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

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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

List of Abbreviations

Prologue

One    Samambaia and the Architecture of Class

Two    Letters from the Road

Three  Bishop’s Brazilian Translations

Four   Bishop’s Brazilian Politics

Five    Amazon Worlds

Notes

Bibliography

Index

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 homemade 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

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 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 arrangement. 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 Oliveira, 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 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, 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, 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 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