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Content ELIZABETH BISHOP’ S HEMISPHERE
t y
Josef Raab
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(English)
May 1993
Copyright 1993 Josef Raab
UM I Number: DP23183
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iii
Acknowledgements
For the completion of this project I was glad to be able to rely on the advice,
assistance, and encouragement of so many friends and scholars. First of all, I
would like to thank Professor Jay Martin for suggesting my topic, for
assisting me with advice whenever I needed it, and for being a never-
ending source of information and inspiration. I am also grateful to
Professors Ronald Gottesman, Roland Hagenbiichle, Luther Luedtke, Beth
Miller, and David St. John, who, all in their own special ways, have been of
great help and have encouraged me when I thought that this project was too
overwhelming. Moreover, I would like to thank the Department of English
at the University of Southern California for awarding me a Mellon
Dissertation Fellowship that enabled me to devote myself more fully to this
project. For help with Elizabeth Bishop's manuscripts and for the liberal
granting of photocopying requests I am endebted to Nancy MacKechnie,
Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts at Vassar College Library. For
checking my translations from the Portuguese I am grateful to Maria Lucia
Milleo Martins. Numerous friends have provided me with the emotional
support necessary to complete this dissertation. Particular thanks to Chris
Lippard, Dana Loewy, and especially Jessica Johnston. Last, I would like to
thank my family for all the financial and emotional help they have given
me. I am deeply grateful and I know that I could not have finished this
project by myself.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Nations, Cultures, the Western Hemisphere, and
Elizabeth Bishop
Chapter I: The Unity of the Western Hemisphere
A. Hemispheric Theories in History and Anthropology
1. Herbert E. Bolton and His Followers
2. Arthur P. Whitaker, Darcy Ribeiro, Gilberto Freyre
B. The Literature of the Western Hemisphere
1. Exemplary Writers of the Western Hemisphere
a. William Cullen Bryant
b. Walt Whitman
c. Jose Marti
d. Ruben Dario
e. Pablo Neruda
f. Carlos Fuentes
g. Jorge Luis Borges
2. Toward a Literature of the Western Hemisphere
Chapter II: At Home in the Western Hemisphere: The Life of
Elizabeth Bishop
Chapter III: Geography and Outsiders: Elizabeth Bishop's Early Poems
Chapter IV: At Home With the Exotic
A. Present and Past: Brazilian Essays and Nova Scotian Stories
B. "Driving to the Interior": Questions of Travel and The Complete
Poems
Chapter V: Bringing the Other Americas Home: Elizabeth Bishop's
Translations
l
A. Theories of Translation
B. The Diary of Helena Morlev
C. Stories by Clarice Lispector
D. Carlos Drummond de Andrade and An Anthology of
Twentieth-Centurv Brazilian Poetry
E. Octavio Paz
F. Bishop's Choices for Cultural Transmission
Chapter VI: "That Watery, Dazzling Dialectic": Home Internalized
A. Retrospect, Reconciliation, Representation: Geography III
B. Beyond Dichotomy: "Santarem" and "Sonnet"
Conclusion: Elizabeth Bishop, Voice of the Americas
i
| Works Cited
1
Introduction: Nations, Cultures, the Western Hemisphere, and Elizabeth
Bishop
In his 1882 lecture at the Sorbonne, "What Is a Nation?," Ernest Renan
defined nation as follows:
A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Two things,
which in truth are but one, constitute this soul or
spiritual principle. One lies in the past, one in the
present. One is the possession in common of a rich
legacy of memories; the other is present-day consent,
the desire to live together, the will to perpetuate the
value of the heritage that one has received in an
undivided form. (Renan 19)
This view of a nation as being constituted when a group shares a common
past and the will to continue this common past is rather general, but a more
exact definition might be difficult to give.
What is a nation? What are its characteristics and how is one nation
distinguished from another? In view of the similarities between different
nations, would it be more appropriate to speak not of nations but of larger
entities? And in view of the common history and similar national
experiences of the countries in the New World, would it be more
appropriate to speak not of various North, Central and South American
nations but of a larger unit, which might be called the Western
Hemisphere? Questions of this nature repeatedly came to my mind in my
study of the literatures of Anglo- and Latin-America.
Is the literature of the United States of America closer to that of Great
Britain or to that of other American countries? This question invites
generalities and it may therefore be more appropriate to attempt answers
2
only on the basis of individual writers instead of making sweeping
statements. Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, Walt Whitman, Jose Marti, Pablo
Neruda, Jorge Luis Borges, Vinfcius de Moraes, Octavio Paz, or Gabriel
Garcia Marquez certainly consider themselves writers in American
traditions. But the closeness of other American authors to European models
could be supported through figures like Phillis Wheatley, Andres Bello,
Emily Dickinson, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Henry James, Ezra
Pound, T.S. Eliot, or Sylvia Plath. Centered around the work of Elizabeth
Bishop, this dissertation will assume that there are good grounds for
postulating the existence of an entity to be called the Western Hemisphere
and that within this entity there is a possibility for its disparate parts to
communicate with each other, if not to flow together. I will present
Elizabeth Bishop as a poetic voice trying to overcome divisions of nation,
race, class, gender, and culture, and I will demonstrate how she participates
in a conflux of various parts of the Americas by acting as a cultural
mediator.
American nations, like most nations, are problematic entities because in
them different cultures and ethnic groups co-exist, are interwoven, and
often merge. The boundaries of a nation do not coincide with those of a
culture or an ethnic group. In fact, the concept of a nation is a fairly new one
in history. Ancient Egypt and China, for example, were in no way nations.
They had no national citizens. Instead, clans or republics formed various
kinds of confederations. Arguably, the Roman Empire was the first huge
association or confederation, but it did not constitute a homogeneous
nation. Only when the Germanic peoples imposed dynasties and a military
3
aristocracy did the populations within each of the Germanic states
assimilate and fuse, thus distinguishing itself from that of other states. It is
commonly asserted that these were the first nations. But scientific
definitions of nation are problematic, if not impossible.
The numerous ambiguities of the concept are one cause for its
elusiveness. Homi K. Bhabha adds another reason: "despite the certainty
with which historians speak of the 'origins' of nation as a sign of the
modernity' of society, the cultural temporality of the nation inscribes a
much more transitional social reality" (Bhabha, "Introduction" 1). Its
uncertain and temporary nature accounts for the ambivalence of nation.
Literature and culture, which are often used to define nation, nationness
and nationality, are similarly unfit categories for clear-cut delineation. As
Bhabha writes,
The locality' of national culture is neither unified nor
unitary in relation to itself, nor must it be seen simply
as 'other' in relation to what is outside or beyond it.
The boundary is Janus-faced and the problem of
outside/inside must always itself be a process of
hybridity, incorporating new 'people' in relation to the
body politic, generating other sites of meaning and,
inevitably, in the political process, producing
unmanned sites of political antagonism and
unpredictable forces for political representation.
(Bhabha, "Introduction" 4)
Since national and cultural boundaries are growing increasingly
indistinct, the location and definition of a national or cultural Other
becomes difficult. To mention an example: is a citizen of the United States
who was born and grew up in Nicaragua and who is now living and
(working in East Los Angeles, where she preserves her native language and
4
traditions, a member of the U.S. nation but of Nicaraguan culture, which, is
itself a conglomerate of indigenous and Iberian cultures and which, in the
case of this immigrant, has been altered through its contact with and
transposition to another country? Improved communication and more
intense migration lead to a growing number of cases of the above sort and
make the distinctions between different nations and cultures increasingly
artificial. As the nation becomes transnational, writes Bhabha, "The 'other'
is never outside or beyond us" (Bhabha, "Introduction" 4). Therefore
Bhabha considers Western nations "an obscure and ubiquitous form of
living the locality of culture" and calls "nationness" "a form of social and
textual affiliation" (Bhabha, "DissemiNation" 292). Narration and literature,
he asserts, are used to strengthen a sense of nationness and to shape the
image and self-image of nations.1
Writing about America, by which he means mainly Latin America, the
Mexican poet Alfonso Reyes, in his 1939 essay "Thoughts on the American
Mind" plays down the connections of American cultures to European ones
and stresses instead the inter-American nature of what he calls the
"American mind." Reyes sees the nations of the Western Hemisphere as
united by a variety of characteristics. In America, he writes,
1 With regard to the nations of Latin America, for example, Doris Sommer
has argued that Latin-American romances were used in the construction of
-nations and national identities. She surmises "that the pretty lies of
national romance are . . . strategies to contain the racial, regional, economic,
and gender conflicts that threatened the development of new Latin
American nations. After all, these romances were part of a general
jbourgeois project to hegemonize a culture in formation" (Sommer 92)
5
there are clashes of races, problems of miscegenation,
attempts at adaptation and absorption. . . . [In terms of
race,] Every tone of the scale is present. In the
everboiling melting-pot of America these
heterogeneous elements are little by little becoming
fused, and today there is already a distinctive American
mankind, an American spirit. (Reyes 34)
But Reyes overlooks that these characteristics may not be purely American,
but might also apply to parts of Africa, for example. In his view, an
"American spirit" unites the nations of the Western Hemisphere and
distinguishes them from those of other parts of the world. Reyes also
believes that while the nations of Latin America are definitely more closely
related to each other than they are to the United States, there is a strong
possibility of a "gracious junction" of South and North because of similar
histories and characteristics (Reyes 39).
In his essay "The Position of America" (1942), Reyes expands on his
views of the Western Hemisphere. Here he writes that although in other
parts of the world there is a division into different cultures, "It seems rather
that it is culture’ s duty, at least theoretically, to be one. And just because of
this hope of unification America appears a possible laboratory for this
attempt at synthesis" (Reyes 47). Reyes defines culture as "a sum of
emotions, norms, and ideas, whose result and whose criterion of evaluation
are human behavior: awareness of life, standards with which to answer life,
knowledge that is the result of all this and that in turn acts upon it all"
(Reyes 48). In these respects he envisions a union of the various parts of the
Americas. Reyes believes that the homogeneity of the Americas outweighs
their heterogeneity and this situation creates the possibility of a "continental
harmony" in the New World (Reyes 53).
6
While Reyes' views may be overly optimistic and not well-founded
enough to be valid, it is not necessary to assume any degree of homogeneity
if we want to consider the Western Hemisphere as one entity. To make an
analogy to what Walter Benjamin has written about translation: the
different parts of the Americas are fragments of the same vessel. "Fragments
of a vessel which are to be glued together must match one another in the
smallest details, although they need not be like one another," Benjamin
postulates (Benjamin 79). Original and translation, he writes, must be
"recognizable as fragments of a greater language, just as fragments are part
of a vessel" (Benjamin 79). In the same way, the different parts of the
Americas need not be like one another in order to all from part of a larger
vessel, which I will call the Western Hemisphere.
Reyes’ belief in the possibility of a "continental harmony" and my belief
in the Western Hemisphere as a heterogeneous entity, although held by
many, are certainly arguable. But so is the validity of the concept of nation,
as has been pointed out above. Does what I refer to as the Western
Hemisphere really exist as an entity, multi-facetted as it may be? There is no
definitive answer to this question. But relying on Hans Vaihinger’ s
philosophy of "as if" I will assume that even if there may not really be such
an entity, its theoretical conception is useful in exploring and interpreting
the works of Elizabeth Bishop.
In his influential work Die Philosophie des "Als ob" (The Philosophy of
"As if"), which first appeared in 1911, Hans Vaihinger argues that
theoretical constructs, or acting and thinking as if something unprovable
was true, are indispensable for understanding the world. Impressed by
Immanuel Kant's discovery of the contradictions with which human
thought is faced when it ventures into the realm of metaphysics, Vaihinger
developed the concept of as-if propositions. His work is based mainly on
Kant, Fichte, Forberg, Lange, and especially on Nietzsche s Will to Illusion.
In the introduction to his book Vaihinger writes,
I called this work, The Philosophy of "As i f because it
seemed to me to express more convincingly than any
other possible title what I wanted to say, namely that
"As if," i.e. appearance, the consciously-false, plays an
enormous part in science, in world-philosophies and in
life. I wanted to give a complete enumeration of all the
methods in which we operate intentionally with
consciously false ideas, or rather judgments. I wanted to
reveal the secret life of these extraordinary methods. I
wanted to give a complete theory, an anatomy and
physiology so to speak, or rather a biology of "As if." For
the method of fiction which is found in a greater or
lesser degree in all the sciences can best be expressed by
this complex conjunction "As if." (Vaihinger xli)
While hypotheses are propositions whose truth can be verified, ficta, or
fictions, "are never verifiable, for they are hypotheses which are known to
be false, but which are employed because of their utility" (Vaihinger xlii).
The theoretical construction of something to be called truth, for example,
is such a useful fiction. It cannot be verified that truth really exists and even
if it exists there will be different views of what it is. But without the fiction
of truth’ s existence communication would be impossible, justice (another
fiction) could not be administered, and there would be utter chaos
everywhere. Truth is therefore a useful fiction and one that is necessary to
make ordered human lives possible. An example of a useful fiction in a
8
mathematical context is the concept of infinity. Infinity may not exist, but it
is nonetheless useful and even indispensable for numerous calculations.
Vaihinger writes that while philosophical analysis leads to sensations,
strivings, or actions, scientific analysis leads to matter and the smallest
constituents and motions of matter. Vaihinger holds that "it is impossible
for the mind as such to bring these two spheres of reality into a rational
relation, although in intuition and experience they form a harmonious
unity" (Vaihinger xlv). Assuming the validity of Nietzsche’ s Will to Live
and his Will to Power, Vaihinger concludes that we have a desire to figure
out this relation between sensation and matter. We have an intuition that
there is a relation and we aspire to qualify this relation logically or
scientifically. But since the relation does not permit a direct approach, we
investigate it indirectly, thinking and acting as if something else which will
help our solution of the original problem were true. Since the means are
less important than the end, Vaihinger justifies the use of unprovable as-if
propositions:
Many thought processes and thought-constructs appear
to be consciously false assumptions, which either
contradict reality or are even contradictory in
themselves, but which are intentionally thus formed in
order to overcome difficulties of thought by this
artificial deviation and reach the goal of thought by
roundabout ways and by-paths. These artificial thought-
constructs are called Scientific Fictions, and
distinguished as conscious creations by their "As if"
character.
The "As if" world, which is formed in this manner,
the world of the "unreal" is just as important as the
world of the so-called real or actual (in the ordinary
sense of the word); indeed it is far more important for
ethics and aesthetics. (Vaihinger xlvi-xlvii)
Following Friedrich Schiller's maxim, "Know this, a mind sublime puts
greatness into life, yet seeks it not therein," Vaihinger believes in the power
of as-if propositions to lead to a deeper understanding of life and of the
world. He calls his philosophy "positivist idealism or idealistic positivism"
(Vaihinger xlvii).
Vaihinger, like deconstruction and postmodernism after him, maintains
that the human mind cannot know objective reality absolutely; it can only
infer it. Therefore thought constructs need not be objective and absolute;
they have fulfilled their purpose, writes Vaihinger, when they have
"produced such a world that objective happenings can be calculated and our
behaviour successfully carried out in relation to phenomena" (Vaihinger 3).
We lay most stress on the practical corroboration, on
the experimental test of the utility of the logical
structures that are the product of the organic function of
thought. It is not the correspondence with an assumed
"objective reality" that can never be directly accessible to
us, it is not the theoretical representation of an outer
world in the mirror of consciousness nor the theoretical
comparison of logical products with objective things
which, in our view, guarantees that thought has
fulfilled its purpose; it is rather the practical test as to
whether it is possible with the help of those logical
products to calculate events that occur without our
intervention and to realize our impulses appropriately
in accordance with the direction of the logical
structures. (Vaihinger 3)
Since reality and the world we live in cannot be known directly, fictions, or
thought constructs, can help us deduce some of its aspects indirectly. Even if
these fictions may well be false, what counts most is their usefulness in
enabling us to attain deeper knowledge and understanding. As Vaihinger
puts it, "the logical function introduces these hybrid and ambiguous
10
thought-structures, in order with their help to attain its purpose indirectly,
if the material which it encounters resists a direct procedure" (Vaihinger 12-
13).
The thought structure or fictum I will use in this dissertation is the
concept of the Western Hemisphere as one entity. I am relying
on the practical usefulness of the assumption that there is a unit which we
can call the Western Hemisphere, that the parts of this unit share
characteristics and are related though their histories and cultures, and that
this unit is distinct from other units, be they called the Old World, Europe,
the Eastern Hemisphere, the Northern Hemisphere, or the Southern
Hemisphere. Absolute scientific proof can be furnished neither for nor
against the existence of an entity to be called the Western Hemisphere
(unless that "entity" is conceived in terms of an objective constituent like
land masses). Nor is there scientific proof for the existence of any of the
other entities just mentioned. But the assumption that the Western
Hemisphere as an entity exists will be useful in enlightening the work of
Elizabeth Bishop, a poetic voice emerging from, reflecting on, and trying to
unite this entity.
The fiction that the Western Hemisphere exists as an entity is of course
not original with me. My first chapter will discuss some of the earlier views
on the unity of the Americas, expressed especially in the fields of history,
the history of ideas, and anthropology . Herbert E. Bolton, professor of
history at the University of California at Berkeley and former president of
the American Historical Association, founded Hemispheric approaches to
the history of the Americas in the 1920s. His views became increasingly
important in the 1930s and led to the publication of several volumes of
essays that were inspired by his theories. But Bolton’ s approach was largely
abandoned in the 1960s. With regard to theories in the history of ideas and
in anthropology that parallel Bolton's Hemispheric approach, I will
examine selected works by Arthur P. Whitaker, Darcy Ribeiro, and Gilberto
Freyre. The connections that historians and anthropologists have seen
between and within the Americas also extend into other fields, most notably
into that of literature. Numerous writers of North, Central, and South
America could be considered as exemplifying a Hemispheric outlook or as
having a Hemispheric impact. From a long list of possible exemplary writers
1 chose William Cullen Bryant, Jose Marti, Walt Whitman, Ruben Dario,
Pablo Neruda, Carlos Fuentes, and Jorge Luis Borges. Using these seven
writers as examples, I will advance a second as-if proposition, namely that of
the existence of a literature of the Western Hemisphere.
Having thus established the theoretical background for my approach to
one writer of the Western Hemisphere, the rest of my dissertation will
concentrate on Elizabeth Bishop. Chapter II will sketch some of the most
important steps in the life of this poet. Bishop will emerge from this
biographical overview as a lifelong outsider looking for a home.2 With this
characterization in mind, I will then approach the poetry and prose of
Elizabeth Bishop. My discussions will center on her expressions of a will to
2 Because of the 1993 publication of an Elizabeth Bishop biography by the
University of California Press chapter II of my dissertation will concentrate
only on the steps of Bishop’ s life which I see as closely related to her feeling
of being a displaced outsider and to her problematization of the concept of
home. For a more comprehensive discussion of Bishop's life, see Brett C.
Millier’ s Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It.
12
overcome boundaries, of empathy with outsiders, of connectedness in
general, and of the connectedness of the Western Hemisphere in particular.
My analysis of Bishop's first two collections of poems, North & South (1946)
and A Cold Spring (1955), in chapter III will spotlight Bishop's early concern
with America, geography, the concept of home, desire, as well as the
empathy with outsiders and children.
From the discussion of these concerns in a North American context I will
then follow Bishop's path and move, in chapter IV, toward enlarging the
sphere in which these topics are played out. With Questions and Travel
(1965) and Bishop’ s first Complete Poems (1969) the arena of her life,
thought, and work increasingly comes to include other parts of the Western
Hemisphere, especially Brazil and Nova Scotia. These other Americas
become more like each other as Bishop more strongly moves her
descriptions from the exterior of a setting to the interior of the onlooker's
reactions to this setting. Her poetic loci become inner landscapes. In this
way, Bishop mediates between various Americas, bringing, for example,
Brazil closer to her readers in the United States and Canada and attempting
to make them share her understanding and love for other Americas and
American Others.
In the following chapter, I will shed light on another aspect of Elizabeth
Bishop’ s mediations between the Americas, namely her translations. These
cultural mediations have so far been neglected in Bishop criticism. My
overview of theories of translations will help classify Bishop as a translator
who is intent on preserving the effect of the original text and who is
hesitant to make any but the most necessary changes as she transposes a text
13
into English. She does not Anglicize Brazilian culture, for example, but
instead tries to Brazilianize her Anglo-American audience by
demonstrating that there is a common ground shared by these two
countries and cultures as well as by other parts of the Americas. As she once
told an interviewer, "I'd like to make Brazil seem less remote and less an
object of picturesque fancy. It's not really so far from New York" (Brown,
"Interview" 302). Bishop is of course not speaking geographically here. Her
translations include Alice Brant's diary Minha Vida de Menina. of three
stories by Clarice Lispector, of thirteen poems by Carlos Drummond de
Andrade and other Brazilian poets of the first half of the twentieth century,
as well as of five poems by the Mexican Octavio Paz. They are attempts at
mediating between several cultures of the Western Hemisphere and at
finding a common ground for this hemisphere.
Further attempts at showing this common ground in her own poetry
follow in Geography III (1976) and in the four poems Bishop published in
The New Yorker after this last collection. These late works are characterized
by a retrospective conflux. Some of the spheres that are coming together
here are North and South, present and past, life and art. These confluxes
complement the conflux of the Americas, of which Bishop saw numerous
manifestations, which she had experienced in her own life, and to which
she wanted to contribute. In these retrospective poems she is reconciling
herself with her outsider position and her losses. The concept of home is
still a powerful presence. But home has now been internalized: it is no
longer spatially determined but has instead become a state of mind. In the
"watery, dazzling dialectic" of which she speaks in "Santarem," there is also
a conflux of the remembered past place, the poet's present place, and her
emotional responses to both. In this way, the interior takes precedence over
the exterior.
With Bishop the Americas are internalized and then become text. As
Homi Bhabha has written, this process
also attempts to alter the conceptual object itself. [In
Bishop's case, this object is the Western Hemisphere.] If
the problematic 'closure' of textuality questions the
'totalization' of national culture, then its positive value
lies in displaying the wide dissemination through
which we construct the field of meanings and symbols
associated with national life. (Bhabha, "Introduction" 3)
While remaining aware of them, Bishop moves beyond nation and
national life. She is an example of Caliban having found a powerful voice, a
voice that is no longer only that of one person, one culture, or one nation.
Elizabeth Bishop's voice is a voice of the Americas.
15
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
— Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
Chapter I: The Unity of the Western Hemisphere
A. Hemispheric Theories in History and Anthropology
While a hemispheric approach to America in terms of its literature is still
relatively recent, this approach has been practiced with varying degrees of
success for almost two centuries in other disciplines. Nonetheless, in the
field of history, a concentration on the United States of America— and
particularly on New England— has long prevailed. Frederick Jackson Turner
may have been the most influential American scholar in establishing a
view of American history that centered on the United States and that
9
basically assumed an East-West movement of settlement and civilization.
For Turner there was one American frontier and this frontier ran North-
South and was gradually being pushed west until, as Turner writes, the
settlement of the West was completed in the 1890s. Indeed, in his
concentration on North America, Turner is not only symptomatic of his
generation of American historians but also of the generations before and
after his own. Connections between the U.S. and other parts of the Americas
are commonly ignored or played down by many historians. This
concentration on Anglo-America, however, has competed with a radically
different perspective, namely the idea of the Western Hemisphere as as an
16
entity that is distinguished more by what it shares than through its
geography. Arthur P. Whitaker writes in his overview of the
conceptualization of the Western Hemisphere that "at an early date a large
cluster of related ideas, social and cultural as well as politico-geographical,
and mystical as well as rational, began to grow up about it" (Whitaker,
W estern 2).
One of the first to proclaim the idea of the Western Hemisphere as a
separate entity was Thomas Jefferson. In 1813, he declared "that the unity of
the American peoples extended to all their 'modes of existence'" (quoted in
Whitaker, Western 2). Two years earlier Jefferson had written to Alexander
von Humboldt, who was, among other things, an expert in Spanish
America,
The European nations constitute a separate division of
the globe; their localities make them part of a distinct
system; they have a set of interests of their own in
which it is our business never to engage ourselves.
America has a hemisphere to itself. It must have a
separate system of interest which must not be
subordinated to those of Europe. The insulated state in
which nature has placed the American continent
should so far avail it that no spark of war kindled in the
other quarters of the globe should be wafted across the
wide oceans which separate us from them, (quoted in
Whitaker, Western 29)
But Jefferson’ s view of the interconnectedness of the Americas and of their
separateness from Europe remained in constant competition with the
conception of either the United States as separate from the rest of the world
or of the United States and the Americas as extensions of European
civilization.
17
Among historians, for example, a nationalistic view, which was
unfavorable toward the societies and cultures of South America, was
w idespread at the beginning of the nineteenth century. North American
history was thought of primarily as a continuation of European history
instead of being considered part of a pan-American development. Only
toward the middle of the nineteenth century were there first signs of a more
just consideration of Latin America. But it was not until 1895 that the first
course on "Spanish-American History and Institutions" was taught at the
University of California at Berkeley.
One of Frederick Jackson Turner’ s students and a longtime professor of
history at UC Berkeley, Herbert Eugene Bolton, was the first historian who
challenged Turner's theories as well as the predominant concentration on
the United States. Bolton broke away almost entirely from the methods of
presenting American history which were in vogue during his student days.
He was among the first to discard the narrowly national methods of
historical analysis and to argue for a fundamental unity in the
developments of the New World. With Bolton, American history was no
longer the story of thirteen English colonies and the nation into which they
made themselves. Instead, a more correctly proportioned narrative of the
Western Hemisphere and its interconnectedness was offered. Bolton’ s 1920
textbook on The Colonization of North America, 1492-1783. for example,
emphasizes non-English colonies far more than it does New England.
Without calling it such, Herbert E. Bolton developed, in the field of history,
the as-if proposition of the New World as an interconnected entity. The
18
same idea has received attention in other fields, like those of sociology and
political science.
1. Herbert E. Bolton and His Followers
The course on which he embarked with The Colonization of North
America. 1492-1783 was to remain characteristic of Herbert Bolton's work
and was to establish him as the founder of a Hemispheric study of
American literature. Bolton believed that in the 1920s and 1930s the
Americas were in the process of growing more closely together. In the
preface to his History of the Americas, the textbook for a freshman survey
course which was first published in 1928, he writes,
Most present-day political boundary lines in America
are of recent origin; culture and commerce quite
generally ignore them. . . . The increasing importance of
inter-American relations makes imperative a better
understanding by each of the history and culture of all.
(History iii)
This belief in the interconnectedness of the Americas informs Bolton's
whole book and it represents the justification for the Hemispheric approach
which he was taking to American history.
While Bolton's History of the Americas does deal with subjects like the
European inheritance and the planting of colonial societies in the New
World, which conventional histories of New England also consider, these
subjects are examined in the wider context of the Western Hemisphere.
And the treatment of aspects like the influence of native civilizations
19
clearly marks Bolton's approach as revisionist. Also, Bolton does not speak
of a War of Independence in English America but instead of Wars of
Independence in English and Hispanic America; he speaks not merely of the
founding of the United States of America but also of the founding of the
United States of Mexico as well as that of other independent American
nations. Bolton does not give priority to the U.S.A. Instead, he considers all
American countries, their relations with each other and w ith the rest of the
world.
Very generally, Herbert Bolton sees American history as characterized by
three centuries of colonialism, one century of nationalism (the 19th
century), and a broader outlook as well as growing internationalism in the
twentieth century. Under these general topics Bolton revises some of the
conventional teachings of American history. Instead of concentrating on
Massachusetts Bay, Jamestown, and Plymouth Plantation, for example, he
starts colonial American history earlier and further to the South, recounting
Cortes' conquest of Tenochtitlan in 1521. Tenochtitlan, which is now
known as Mexico City, became the first colonial center of the New World
and it is from there that the Spanish conquest spread simultaneously into
N orth and South America. "Colonial Spanish America was by no means
devoid of culture," writes Bolton, "In Mexico and Lima high society was
m odeled on court life in Madrid. Till near the end of the eighteenth century
jMexico was the leading city in the Western Hemisphere" (History 71).
Mexico City was also the site of the first university in the New World,
which was established in 1551.
20
In contrast to Spain, Portugal, and France, Bolton calls Great Britain a
"late comer" among European nations in the settlement of America. The
gradual westward expansion of English colonies created a moving Western
frontier: "Through expansion a part of society was constantly returning to
frontier conditions. The frontier was a laboratory for social experimentation
and a melting pot for newcome Europeans. An outstanding tendency of the
frontier was toward democracy" (History 132). It is this frontier spirit of
democracy that led to the independence of the colonies.
Throughout his book, Bolton seems intent on setting the record straight.
While the westward movement of the frontier in North America is
important in his eyes, he differs from Turner in suggesting that it is only
one of a vast number of simultaneous occurrences. More important, in
Bolton's opinion, are events in the parts of America that were occupied by
the Spanish and the Portuguese. "In population, wealth, and commerce
Hispanic America still led its rivals in the eighteenth century. Mexico
continued to be the first city of America" (History 145). And while the
English colonies were the first to achieve their independence, most other
American nations followed the same paths during the five decades after
1776. In Bolton’ s account of the history of the Americas, George
W ashington is no more important than Simon Bolivar. While he does not
see only similarities in the development of the English, Spanish, and
(Portuguese colonies in America, Bolton considers their history as part of a
greater whole. With regard to the achievement of national independence in
Anglo and Latin America, he writes,
In the two cases there were various similarities and
many contrasts. The causes were in many respects alike.
In both cases independence was achieved through
outside aid. The area and population involved in the
latter case were many times larger than in the former.
In Hispanic America there were vastly greater obstacles
to united action than in English America. Mountains
and distance gave much greater isolation. There was
lack of political experience and of social solidarity. As a
consequence there were separate revolutionary
movements in the various areas, and several nations
resulted. (History 229)
Elsewhere he argues, "Washington and his associates merely started the
American Revolution; Miranda, Bolivar, San Martin, Hidalgo, Morelos,
and Iturbide carried it through" (Horizons 66). In spite of their different
situations, Bolton considers Anglo and Spanish America as strands of the
same phenomenon. Therefore he calls Bolivar the "Washington of South
America" (History 236). Bolton also mentions the Monroe Doctrine of 1823,
which rejects the efforts of European countries to colonize America, as a
uniting factor of the Americas.
In Canada, which was founded as the Dominion of Canada in 1867,
Bolton perceives— as he does in other parts of the Western Hemisphere— a
mixture of various traditions. He writes. "Culturally Canada combines the
influences of an old French stock, close touch with England and the United
States, and frontier experience" (History 322). While this mixture of
traditions is unique in the Western Hemisphere, it is at the same time
reminiscent of the cultural and civilizational mixtures of other American
countries. Chiefly among the other American countries that particularly
interest Bolton are the ABC powers (Argentina, Brazil, and Chile). In the
22
1920s, Bolton sees them and their development as closely related to that of
the U.S.A. and Canada.
Not alone in the United States and Canada have
consolidation and expansion been the keynote of recent
development; parts of Hispanic America have been
traveling rapidly along the same road. The last half-
century has been remarkable for the rise of Argentina,
Brazil, and Chile. . . . Brazil was the first to acquire
stability . . . [and it] is the second power in America.
(History 328)
Herbert Bolton definitely thinks more highly of the Latin American nations
than the majority of U.S. historians did in the 1920s. He believes that "In art,
architecture, and music, Hispanic America now as always leads English
America. Historians and literary men of high rank are not lacking" (History
329).
After disseminating his views on the connectedness of the Western
Hemisphere in his textbooks as well as in articles Herbert Bolton used the
forum of the 1932 annual conference of the American Historical Association
in Toronto for his most powerful expression of his hemispheric theory. His
presidential address, "The Epic of Greater America," is collected in his most
influential book, Wider Horizons of American History (1939). In his preface
to this collection of four long essays, Bolton points out that in the same way
as the Western European cultures are varied and interconnected so are the
American cultures which derived from them. American cultures are not
isolated from each other. "Only in connection with the neighbors, and in
connection with the common environment, can their structure be studies
in its full detail" (Horizons xiii). Because of this situation, writes Bolton,
"there is need for a study of the whole, greater than the sum of its parts,
23
which is the history of the Americas" (Horizons xiii-xiv). In Bolton's view,
a pan-American background is needed for the study of any individual
American nation's history or culture and for an understanding of inter-
American relations.
In "The Epic of Greater America" Bolton presents the panorama of
Western Hemisphere history as a whole, cutting across national boundaries
and pointing out unities, contrasts, and interrelations between the different
portions of the continent. Since he perceives, in 1932, an "increasing
importance of inter-American relations," Bolton believes that "a better
understanding by each of the history and the culture of all" is imperative.
"A synthetic view is important not alone for its present-day political and
commercial implications; it is quite as desirable from the standpoint of
correct historiography," writes Bolton (Horizons 2). He believes that
There is need for a broader treatment of American
history, to supplement the purely nationalistic
presentation to which we are accustomed. European
history cannot be learned from books dealing alone
with England, or France, or Germany, or Italy, or
Russia; nor can American history be adequately
presented if confined to Brazil, or Chile, or Mexico, or
Canada, or the United States. (Horizons 3)
To support his views on the connectedness of the Western Hemisphere,
Bolton concentrates on historic developments that are shared by different
parts of the Americas. He starts out with the colonial past of all American
countries, in which transplanted European cultures came to adapt
themselves to the new scene. As he had done in his earlier work, Bolton
mentions that the ensuing process of political independence is "common to
most portions of the entire Western Hemisphere" and should therefore not
24
be treated as an isolated event in the history of one particular country
(Horizons 3).
Bolton also goes against Frederick Jackson Turner's views of westward
expansion. According to Bolton, the movement of European settlers from
the Atlantic coasts of the Americas to the interior was not always a
westward movement. In his opinion, a westward push from New England
was complemented by and in competition with a northward push from
Mexico City. And as Bolton writes in "The Black Robes of New Spain," the
large number of Spanish Jesuits missionizing in all directions from Mexico
City were, for example, a counterweight to the French and Spanish Jesuits in
Canada and in the Mississippi Valley." Because of the Spanish Jesuits and
numerous other factors, writes Bolton, "The spread of European civilization
in North America was not by any means wholly a westward movement"
(Horizons 158).
In both Latin and Saxon colonies, contact with the frontier environment
tended to modify the Europeans and their institutions. And colonial
expansion often involved international rivalry, especially between Brazil
and her Spanish neighbors. "The Brazilian drive toward the Andes," Bolton
points out, "strongly resembles the westward movement in the United
States and Canada" (Horizons 12).
After independence from the European mother countries has been
achieved in most parts of the Western Hemisphere the similarities
continue:
The nations had come into being. The outline of the
map had been essentially completed. The territorial
bases for the national system had been laid. The next
25
phase was the filling in of the spaces with people,
national unification, and economic growth. Like all the
earlier phases, this, too, was not confined to one
American nation, but was hemisphere wide. (Horizons
41)
Bountiful natural resources, foreign immigration, foreign capital, and
expanding markets were, for example, characteristic of most American
countries in the nineteenth century. And at the beginning of the twentieth
century, Bolton perceives especially the ABC powers as following the path
of immigration, industrialization, and improved transportation which the
United States and Canada had taken earlier. Similar developments have led
to similar convictions and Bolton sees in the role of the Americas in the
First World War an indicator of "emphatic Western Hemisphere solidarity"
(Horizons 49).
Bolton's view of Latin America in 1932 is very enthusiastic. It is here that
he sees the future of the Americas:
The Americas have developed side by side. In the past
their relations have been close; in the future they may
or may not be closer. In the colonial period Latin greatly
outweighed Saxon America. In the nineteenth century
the balance tipped decisively in the other direction. But
it is swinging back. The importance of Hispanic
America as an economic unit and as a political factor is
becoming greater from day to day. It is one of the great
reservoirs of raw materials. It continues to attract
foreign capital and foreign immigration (Horizons 49-
50).
While Bolton's optimistic predictions for an economic and political rise of
Latin America have only come true in part so far, recent developments like
the impending Free Trade Agreement between Canada, the United States,
and Mexico and the planned expansion of this agreement, as the Bush
26
adm inistration called it, "from Alaska to Argentina" suggest that Bolton's
predictions may still come to pass after all.
In his search for what connects the Western Hemisphere, borderlands are
areas of particular interest to Bolton. It is in the borderlands that he can best
demonstrate the similarities of adjacent countries or territories, which helps
him overcome the Turner thesis. In his essay "Defensive Spanish
Expansion and the Significance of the Borderlands," which is also contained
in W ider Horizons of American History. Bolton examines what he calls the
Spanish Borderlands, i.e. the Southern fringe of the United States. He
considers these areas "the meeting place of two streams of European
civilization" (Horizons 55). Through such meeting places models are
transferred from one country and culture to another: some such models
which Bolton mentions are the vaquero as an example for the cowboy, or
the development of Mexican silver mining towns from camp to city to state
capital, which was so often repeated in the North.
In the process of moving the English frontier westward, Bolton recounts,
there were conflicts at the Anglo-Spanish borders in the Caribbean, Georgia,
Florida, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, and California. The Anglo-
American advance stopped in each case when it reached the line of effective
Spanish colonization so that Spain lost mainly the borderlands and outposts
to England and to the United States. Through intermarriage between
Anglos and Hispanics the borderlands fused different Americanized
European cultures and Anglo Americans in the borderlands, because of
their mixed heritage, "have the strongest historical bonds with our Latin
neighbors" (Horizons 106).
27
These and other theories of the basic unity of the Western Hemisphere
were being discussed, among others, by American historians in the 1930s,
especially after Bolton had used the forum of his 1932 presidential address to
help spread them. Through his work Bolton hoped to unite the Americas
politically, to improve inter-American relations through better mutual
understanding, and to give an impetus to pan-American research.
However, his hemispheric theory also has numerous shortcomings: since it
tries to cover such a vast and diverse area, the approach, by its nature, has to
generalize and oversimplify. Also, while, as a historian, Bolton concentrates
on similarities in the history of the Americas, he rarely touches on cultural
similarities and dissimilarities and he omits literature altogether. Especially
a consideration of the history of ideas and of the literature of the New
W orld w ith its North-South interconnections would certainly have lent
Bolton more credibility and could have increased his impact. But the way
things went, Bolton's approach never became prominent among U.S.
historians. The majority of his colleagues continued teaching American
history w ith a narrow emphasis on the United States.
However, the publication of several volumes of essays attests to at least
some degree of agreement among American historians that despite its
diversity the Western Hemisphere can and should be considered as one
entity. In 1932, for example, the University of California Press published a
two-volume collection of essays entitled New Spain and the Anglo-
American West. The essays in the first volume, which concentrate on
Mexico, New Mexico, and Louisiana, deal with the northward advance of
the frontiers of New Spain. The authors stress the importance of using
28
resources in Mexico and Spain to explain North American history. To this
end Herbert Bolton also translated many of the documents he found in
Mexican and Spanish archives to make them more widely available. The
second volume of this collection presents a counterpoint to the first one:
here the Anglo-American westward movement is the center of attention.
The essays also deal with the annexation of Texas and California as well as
with Native Americans.
Thirteen years later, in 1945, these two volumes were followed by
another University of California Press collection of "Essays in Honor of
Herbert Eugene Bolton." Like the earlier one, this collection, entitled
Greater America, was compiled and edited by former students of Bolton,
primarily by Adele Ogden and Engel Sluiter. Apart from twenty-seven
essays, the book also contains a twelve-page bibliography and cartography of
Bolton as well as a one-hundred-and-twenty-page "Bibliography of the
Historical Writings of the Students of Herbert Eugene Bolton." While the
contributions to New Spain and the Anglo-American West had dealt only
with North America, the essays in Greater America cover a wide range of
subjects and examine South America at least as much as North America.
Despite such efforts to spread Bolton’ s hemispheric approach, a
w idespread ignorance in the United States concerning Latin American
history continued. Similarly, many Latin American countries remained
uninterested in the history of other Latin American countries. Especially
Brazil saw itself in a position apart in view of its Portuguese heritage, its
different path to independence and its peaceful inter-racial history.
According to Lewis Hanke, one of Herbert Bolton's most prominent
29
students, many Brazilian historians insist "that English, Portuguese, and
Spanish-speaking peoples of America are fundamentally different from
each other despite certain political and social similarities" (Hanke 36). But
after 1946, and especially after 1952, opportunities increased significantly for
historians of the Americas to study each other's history, especially through
the work of the Pan American Institute of Geography and History, an inter-
American governmental institution, and its History of America program,
which was envisioned by Arthur Whitaker. Inspired by Bolton's theory and
the Spanish translation of his 1932 presidential address, the collaborators of
this program were "to provide a pattern for a general history of America"
(Hanke 193). One result of this international exercise in historiography has
been an increased attention to fields that invited a comparative treatment,
like frontiers and religious developments. Another effect has been a
stronger interest among philosophers to address inter-American problems.
Bolton's approach continued to be practiced by some historians, but there
were also many who rejected it. This situation prompted Lewis Hanke, who
was to publish a History of Latin American Civilization in 1967, to edit a
collection of essays, which he entitled Do the Americas Have a Common
History? (1964). Despite the efforts of Herbert Bolton and his students Hanke
sees the one-sided concentration on the United States and especially New
England, which Bolton had criticized thirty years earlier, continuing in his
time. It is therefore the purpose of his collection
to suggest that [what are considered broad phases of
American history] are but phases common to most
portions of the entire Western Hemisphere; that each
local story will have clearer meaning when studied in
the light of the others; and that much of what has been
30
written of each national history is but a thread out of a
larger strand. (Hanke 3-4)
In his defense of Bolton, Hanke clarifies that for Bolton a synthesis of the
different parts of the Americas never meant an equation. He stresses that a
hemispheric approach to history is concerned with presenting a
comprehensive view of the similarities, contrasts, and interrelations of past
experiences in the Americas as a means of providing a basis for a clearer
understanding of the local or national history of each of them.
Apart from supporting Bolton's hemispheric approach Hanke also tries
to explore the reasons for the resistance to the Bolton Theory. Especially
Latin American historians had criticized Bolton for concentrating on
material progress and neglecting cultural diversity, for failing to take into
account that the Spanish colonizers were far less organized and efficient
than the Anglo-Saxons, and for his neglect of literature as proof for his
thesis. The Mexican historian Edmundo O'Gorman points out what he
considers to be Bolton's failure to "demonstrate the essential [cultural] unity
of the Americas to justify his faith" in the theory of a Greater America
(Hanke 103). Another contributor, William C. Binkley, recalls that at the
1941 meeting of the American Historical Association, several of his
colleagues had spoken of generalizations in Bolton's theory, arguing that
"the colonial experience can hardly be said to have established either unity
or uniformity of the Americas" and that while "all of the American
colonies sprang from the broad background of Western European
civilization, . . . each of them [also] reflected . .. peculiar characteristics of the
mother country" (Hanke 113). Therefore, they had argued, "there are, in
31
effect, two Americas in this hemisphere," which are distinguished through
their heritage, culture, economy, and politics. (Hanke 113).
While Hanke's collection also contains articles that exemplify the
usefulness of an inter-American approach to American history, it seems
that Bolton's theory did not have a significant impact on American
historiography as a whole. Lewis Hanke concludes that although some
attention is being paid to Bolton's concept of Western Hemisphere unity,
"historians in the United States must [still] free themselves from excessive
emphasis upon the agrarian primitivism of Turner" (Hanke 44). Not much
seems to have changed in the two and a half decades since the publication of
Hanke's collection: the idea of the Western Hemisphere, although never
completely forgotten, remained on the back burner. But in the 1990s the
Western Hemisphere idea is gaining momentum. Several publications in
the field of literature and the new orientation of the American Studies
Association (as evidenced through its 1992 annual meeting on
"Exploration/Exploitation: The Americas") suggest that the isolationism of
the United States, which Bolton started to criticize in the 1920s may finally
be challenged more substantially.
2. Arthur P. Whitaker, Darcy Ribeiro, Gilberto Freyre
This challenge of United States isolationism is by no means limited to the
field of history, nor to the fields of American literature or American
32
Studies. It has also been ongoing in fields like the history of ideas and
anthropology. Selected works by Arthur P. Whitaker, Darcy Ribeiro, and
Gilberto Freyre will here serve as exemplary demonstrations of the
continuing resistance to a view of the United States as an entity best studied
in isolation.
In The Western Hemisphere Idea: Its Rise and Decline (1954) A rthur P.
Whitaker presents a historical overview of challenges to U.S. American
isolationism in the history of ideas. Whitaker defines the Western
Hemisphere idea as follows:
From its emergence in the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth century to the present, the core of the
Western Hemisphere idea has been the proposition that
the peoples of this Hemisphere stand in a special
relationship to one another which sets them apart from
the rest of the world. This core binds together
expressions of the idea otherwise so diverse as the
unilateral Monroe doctrine of 1823, the economic
corollary to that doctrine proposed by Argentine foreign
Minister Drago in 1902, and the evolving Pan American
movement since 1889. (Whitaker, W estern 1)
However, Whitaker does not mention literature and connections between
N orth and South American writers as part of this "special relationship"
within the Americas. But he calls the amount of research available on the
W estern Hemisphere idea "massive" (Whitaker, W estern v). Whitaker
concludes from his overview of the Western Hemisphere idea’ s
development that while the idea had never been the prevailing one since
its origination in the eighteenth century, it was, by the m iddle of the
twentieth century "in a state of crisis" (Whitaker, W estern vii).
33
This state of the Western Hemisphere idea by the time when Whitaker
was writing about it stands in stark contrast to the nineteenth century, when
the idea had been gaining momentum in the wake of the various American
independence movements. After the various wars of independence had
been concluded in Latin America and after several American nations had
evolved, the Mexican statesman Lucas Alaman declared in 1826 that while
nature had made the countries of America neighbors, "the similarity of
their political institutions has bound them even more closely together,
strengthening in them the dominion of just and liberal principles" (quoted
in Whitaker, W estern 2). This view of the Western Hemisphere as
characterized by revolutions that have led to independence and democracy
was later in the nineteenth century to be proclaimed by Walt Whitman and
was then to be echoed by his Latin American admirers.
Whitaker recounts that the main basis of the Western Hemisphere idea
was the assumption that all of America was in some way different from all
of Europe. This idea is expressed to a degree in the Monroe Doctrine of
1823.3 While, at first, Europe had considered the Americas as the other,
referring to them as the "New World," and thus giving rise to the idea of
the separateness of the Western Hemisphere, America's antagonism toward
Europe, which had been strengthened through the struggles for
independence, reinforced this idea of separateness. Sim6n Rodriguez, the
tutor of Simon Bolivar, described Europe, for example, as "a bright veil
3 Whitaker, however, takes a skeptical view of the Monroe Doctrine,
calling it "a hemispheric projection of the [U.S.] national policy of isolation
laid down in Washington's Farewell Address of 1796" (Whitaker, W estern
24).
34
covering the most horrible picture of misery and vice" (quoted in Whitaker,
W estern 2). But at the end of the nineteenth and in the twentieth century
the rejection of Europe gradually gave way to an increasing interplay
between America and Europe, which has come to push aside the interplay
w ithin the Americas.
But although the antagonism toward Europe diminished with time, the
idea of the Western Hemisphere retained its original characteristics into the
twentieth century. When President Wilson was working on his plans for a
Pan American Pact in December 1915, for example, his Secretary of State
Robert Lansing still based the Western Hemisphere idea on the three pillars
of "geographical isolation," "similar political institutions," and a "common
conception of hum an rights" (quoted in Whitaker, W estern 3). And in the
same year, John Foster Dulles, who was to become Secretary of State in 1953,
sounding the same note Thomas Jefferson had struck in 1811, proclaimed
that "there exists among the American States some sentiment of solidarity,
which sets them apart from other nations of the world" (quoted in
Whitaker, W estern 3).
Naturally, the Western Hemisphere idea had its ups and downs in the
two centuries of its existence. Whitaker writes that in the eighteenth
century, there was at first a fragmentation of America and a growth of
regionalism, as European settlers came to think of themselves no longer as
Europeans-in-America but as rooted in one part of the Americas. But in the
nineteenth century, this attitude gave way increasingly to an inter-
American stage, especially as trade increased between North and South
America, partly as a reaction against European perceptions of America as
35
inferior in all kinds of ways. The first inter-American conference ever held,
the Panama Congress, took place in 1826. Whitaker comments,
The Panama Congress of 1826 represented the
convergence of two ideas whose meeting promised for a
brief moment to prove a fruitful union. The first of
these, which came from the United States, was the idea
of the unity of the Western Hemisphere nations in
some rather vague and undefined way. Spanish
America then contributed the other idea, which was
that of rendering this hemispheric fraternity more
effective by international co-operation of a politico-
military character, whether through a league, a
confederation, or otherwise. (Whitaker, W estern 41)
But the congress did not yield any tangible results and so, as Whitaker
recounts, "the marriage of the two Americas ended in divorce before there
was even a honeymoon" (Whitaker, W estern 41).
But efforts for a greater unity of the Western Hemisphere continued.
Four decades after the failure of the Panama Congress the Western
Hemisphere idea was again revitalized by the Argentine president Domingo
Faustino Sarmiento and the U.S. Secretary of State James Gillespie Blaine.
Their efforts culminated in the first Pan American conference, which was
held in Washington in 1889-1890. And in December 1902, the Argentine
Foreign Minister Luis Maria Drago sent a note to Washington in which he
proposed to put a stop to "the use of armed force by any European power
against any American nation for the collection of a public debt" (Whitaker,
Western 87). This document was later expanded into the Drago Doctrine.
But from the beginning of the twentieth century to the Great Depression
in 1929 there was again a struggle for the definition of the Western
Hemisphere. The United States had risen to be by far the strongest
36
economic, military and political power in the Western Hemisphere and
therefore developed "the new concept of the civilizing mission of the
United States in the New World" (Whitaker, W estern 108). Latin American
nations reacted resentfully to this development and renewed schism
ensued.
In the 1930s, however, the Western Hemisphere idea rebounded. "By
1940 the underlying Western Hemisphere idea was more popular
throughout the Americas and apparently closer to realization than at any
previous period in its history," writes Whitaker. "One key to this success
story is the development of the United States' Good Neighbor Policy"
(Whitaker, W estern 132). Another factor was the identification of the
Western Hemisphere as a haven of peace when many other parts of the
world were waging wars or preparing to do so.
But another decline of the Western Hemisphere idea followed in the
1940s and 1950s, as the globe was increasingly being divided either into a
communist and a noncommunist part or into a Northern and a Southern
hemisphere rather than an Eastern and a Western half. Although North
America was strengthening its ties to Europe again, the Western
Hemisphere idea still retained a stronger presence in Latin America. In 1952,
for example, the Mexican writer and diplomat Luis Quintanilla told the Pan
Am ericanism o conference in Philadelphia,
We, in the Western Hemisphere, belong to a
community of neighbors. . . . Not only do geographical
closeness and similar historical backgrounds bring us
together, but we all share in common an idea about the
organization of society and of the world. In other words,
to face the fact of America is to glance at any map. From
37
pole to pole, from ocean to ocean, we are all in the same
boat, we were created to live together, (quoted in
Whitaker, W estern 4)
Although Whitaker had declared in 1954 that the Western Hemisphere
idea might not rebound from its crisis at that time, he continued working
on aspects of that idea. In 1979, for example, he wrote in his study on The
United States and the Southern Cone that the United States' hegemonic
role in the New World was continuing to strain the unity of the Western
Hemisphere. Whitaker quotes Secretary of State Henry Kissinger as saying
in 1976 about the United States' task in the world and in the Western
Hemisphere, "If we do not lead, there will be no leadership" (Whitaker,
Southern 430). This attitude is of course a major obstacle to any kind of
unity of the Western Hemisphere. It is also an attitude that is often taken in
other fields, including the study of U.S. American literature. But Whitaker's
pessimistic view for inter-American relations needs to be revised in view of
the European Community's increasing unity and of developments in
Eastern Europe in the late 1980s and in the 1990s, which are forcing the
United States to open itself up to its Northern and Southern neighbors
again.
As anthropologists have shown, the inter-American connections, which
Herbert Bolton and his students discuss with regard to historical
developments, which Arthur P. Whitaker examines w ith regard to the
history of ideas, and which I will address with regard to literature, have an
underlying basis in the civilizational development of the Americas. In 1968,
the Brazilian anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro, who had been exiled after
Brazil’ s political upheavals because of his post in the earlier government,
38
published, in Portuguese and in English, the first volume of his four-
volume study on the civilizations of the Americas. In this first volume,
entitled The Civilizational Process. Ribeiro offers a history of human
civilizations in general so that he can then enlighten "the process of
formation of the American peoples, the causes of their unequal
development, and the possibilities for self-advancement that are open to the
most backward among them" (Ribeiro, Process xi). With the general
framework of the civilizational process in mind, the second volume of
Ribeiro's study, The Americas and Civilization (1971), centers on the
W estern Hemisphere. Here Ribeiro undertakes "an anthropological
interpretation of the social, cultural, and economic factors that have
influenced the formation of the American national ethnic groups and an
analysis of the causes of their uneven development" (Ribeiro, Americas 11).
The third and fourth volume of his study have not been translated into
English. Volume III analyzes what Ribeiro calls the "dilemma of Latin
America," i.e. the relationships between the rich Americas and the poor
Americas and volume IV examines Brazil as an emerging American power
and the country's efforts to become a modern nation.
Leading his readers through seven revolutions (the Agricultural
Revolution, Urban Revolution, Irrigation Revolution, Metallurgical
Revolution, Pastoral Revolution, Mercantile Revolution, and the Industrial
Revolution), Ribeiro analyzes the stages of sociocultural evolution in
hum an societies. With regard to the Americas, he explains present
divergences out of the results of the encounter between different
indigenous and invading civilizations. The Mercantile Revolution, he
39
writes, led to "Salvationistic Mercantile Empires," one of which, "the
Iberians [,] expanded overseas and organized the first world empire based on
slavistic colonialism" (Ribeiro, Process 145). A technological revolution
resulted in "Capitalistic Mercantile Empires" and the Industrial Revolution
gave rise to the "Imperialistic Industrial Powers," which were divided into
ruling centers and areas of colonial domination or of former colonial
domination. Later, some former colonies became "Nationalistic
Modernizing States." But in the second half of the twentieth century,
Ribeiro perceives what he calls "the Thermonuclear Revolution, which can
be expected not only to homogenize the advanced societies, but also to
accelerate the progress and eliminate the backward status of other peoples
and to integrate them all into Future Societies" (Ribeiro, Process 146). The
Thermonuclear Revolution and the "tremendous acceleration of progress,"
he writes, "will homogenize and integrate all the peoples of the world into a
single Universal Civilization, which cannot be identified with any
individual race or cultural tradition" (Ribeiro, Process 148). But before such
a universalization can take place, Ribeiro believes that a "social revolution"
is necessary in Latin America (Ribeiro, Americas 45).
For the twentieth century, he groups American peoples into three
categories: the "Witness Peoples" (Mesoamericans and Andeans), the "New
Peoples" (Brazilians, Gran-Colombians, Antilleans, and Chileans), and the
"Transplanted Peoples" (Anglo-Americans and River Plate Peoples). These
distinctions between what he calls "neo-American societies" exist because,
in contrast to Anglo-Americans, Latin American peoples underw ent the
Industrial Revolution as "consumers of the products of alien
40
industrialization. These products were introduced in sufficient quantity to
enable their economies to produce raw materials more efficiently, but with
the ever-present intention of keeping those economies dependent" (Ribeiro,
Americas 21).
But Ribeiro rejects the theory that "the prosperity of the North
Americans and Canadians" is an anticipation of a development on which
other American countries are embarking and in the course of which "all
other peoples of the hemisphere" would adopt the "paradigms of
sociocultural evolution" of the United States and Canada (Ribeiro,
Americas 22). Ribeiro considers the less developed societies of the Americas
"not as replicas of past stages of the developed ones, but as counterparts
necessary to the maintenance of the system containing both" (Ribeiro,
Americas 27). Instead of Latin America being on its way to becoming like the
United States and Canada, Ribeiro sees the whole Western Hemisphere as
evolving toward a new, common stage.
Ribeiro s compatriot, Gilberto Freyre, centers his research on the
situation of Brazil, but also places Brazil in the larger framework of the
W estern Hemisphere. In his influential book Masters and Slaves (1946, rev.
1956), which Elizabeth Bishop cites in her Brazil book, Freyre sees the
relations between masters and slaves and those between different ethnic
groups— a feature of all parts of the Western Hemisphere— as more
conciliatory in Brazil’ s "tropical feudalism" than in other parts of the
Americas: "The absence of violent rancors due to race," he writes,
"constitutes one of the peculiarities of the feudal system in the tropics, a
system that, in a manner of speaking, had been softened by the hot climate
41
and by the effects of a miscegenation that tended to dissolve such
prejudices" (Freyre, Masters xii). Freyre believes that, unlike other parts of
the Western Hemisphere, Brazil does not see differences as negative: "We
Brazilians . . . do not possess that cult of uniformity and horror of
individual, family, and regional differences which are the accompaniments
of the equalitarian spirit throughout so large a part of the English-speaking
America. (Freyre, Masters xv).
For Freyre, Brazil is, as he writes in New World in the Tropics (1959), "a
European civilization in the Tropics" (Freyre, New 141). But at the same
time, like other American civilizations, it is distinct from Europe and
thereby closer to the rest of the Western Hemisphere: "In some respects it is
extra-European: it seeks to adapt itself to conditions and possibilities that are
not European but tropical: tropical climate, tropical vegetation, tropical
landscape, tropical light, tropical colors" (Freyre, New 145). Brazilians are
likewise at the same time similar to and different from other peoples of the
Americas. Their culture's duality of being both European and non-
European also applies to the other American civilizations and therefore is a
uniting factor among the nations and civilizations of the Western
Hem isphere.
Although necessarily cursory, the forgoing overview of the Western
Hemisphere idea's presence in fields other than literature has shown that
scholars in a variety of disciplines adhere to the idea of some kind of unity
in the Western Hemisphere. That this idea has been held for almost two
centuries and that it can be found in a variety of disciplines suggests that the
Western Hemisphere is indeed an entity of itself, diverse as it may be. The
42
common developments and characteristics of many nations in the Western
Hemisphere make it imperative that the literatures of these nations also be
examined in their interconnections. The remaining part of this chapter will
show some of these literary interconnections, which reflect, to a degree,
some inter-American connections in other fields, which were discussed in
the preceding pages.
B. The Literature of the Western Hemisphere
In The Symbolic Meaning (1923), D.H. Lawrence writes that American
literature should not be considered as a part of English literature but instead
as an entity in itself:
It is natural that we should regard American literature
as a small branch or province of English literature.
None the less there is another view to be taken. The
American art-speech contains a quality that we have
not calculated. It has a suggestive force which is not
relative to us, not inherent in the English race. This
alien quality belongs to the American continent itself.
(Lawrence 16)
Lawrence believes that when Europeans went to America they became a
new race: "they breathed a savage air, and their blood was suffused and
burnt. A new fierce salt of the earth, in their mouths, penetrated and altered
the substance of their bones" (Lawrence 29).
Lawrence's geographic and racial theory of what constitutes the literature
of the New World is still being used. Other theories may be thematically
43
oriented or may concentrate on literary movements, arguing, for example,
that Latin American m odernism o and North American M odernism are
related and are different from comparable movements in European
literatures. What exactly it is that constitutes the literature(s) of the Western
Hemisphere is a question that is likely to pose itself to critics and scholars of
Canadian, U.S. American, Spanish American, and Luso-Brazilian literature
for several decades to come. Indeed, it is a question to which there is
probably no definitive answer.
1. Exemplary Writers of the Western Hemisphere
Although it may be impossible to determine what exactly unites writers of
the W estern Hemisphere and what distinguishes their work from that of
European, African, or Asian literatures, I will present several writers of the
Western Hemisphere, whom I consider, like Elizabeth Bishop, to exemplify
some of the traits of Pan-American literature. The seven writers discussed
in the following pages are, of course, only some of the many writers of the
Western Hemisphere whose work can, in some way, be considered
representatively American.
I have chosen these seven authors because they exemplify various
characteristics of the Western Hemisphere and its literature. William
Cullen Bryant created with his writings about Niagara Falls the first emblem
of the Western Hemisphere and he was chosen mainly for this reason to
44
head the list of exemplary American writers. Bryant's reception in Latin
America also plays an important role in making him an exemplary figure in
the Western Hemisphere. With Walt Whitman, reception throughout the
Americas becomes an even more important factor, as W hitman is elevated
to the status of el gran viejo by some of the poets of Latin American
m odernism o. But what may be even more important to justify W hitman's
exemplary status are his attempts to create a truly American literature. In
these attempts and in his desire to embrace everyone and everything
Whitman was praised by Jose Marti, who tried to enlarge the scope of
W hitman's all-embracing democratic philosophy. While W hitman had
striven to unite in his poetry only the United States, Marti tried to apply
Whitman's vision to the whole Western Hemisphere. To some degree,
Ruben Dario is a Latin American counterpart to Walt W hitman in that
Dario's influence in the Americas was also overwhelming and in that this
Nicaraguan poet, too, took it upon himself to create a truly American
literary tradition.
In the twentieth century, the literary relations within the Western
Hemisphere intensify as more and more North and South American
writers are acquainted with each other's work. Pablo N eruda takes up the
revolutionary outlook of Jose Marti and others and adopts Whitman's spirit
of equality. Neruda's poetics of revolution give him an exemplary status
since revolution— beginning with the desire to be independent from the
mother countries— has been a constant of the literature of the Western
Hemisphere. Another constant has been the encounter of different cultures.
Starting w ith exploration reports and captivity narratives the co-existence of
45
various cultures in the Americas has found its way into the literature of the
Americas for five centuries. Therefore numerous works could have been
chosen to represent this strand. I chose Carlos Fuentes, and especially his
novel El gringo viejo. A somewhat different form of cultural mediation and
of the representation of the plurality of cultures and literary traditions in
the Western Hemisphere appears with Jorge Luis Borges. While Borges is
also exemplary for his impact on postmodern U.S. fiction, he will here be
considered mainly for contributing to a better mutual knowledge within the
Americas though his Introduccion a la literatura norteamericana.
All of these writers are cultural mediators in their own ways. Their
mediations will serve as a background for my discussion of Elizabeth
Bishop's attempts at bringing different parts of the Western Hemisphere
closer together.
a. William Cullen Bryant
One of the earliest American writers who can be considered in some way
exemplary for the Western Hemisphere is William Cullen Bryant.
Although he was taught a harsh Calvinism, according to which the Fall of
Man had brought about the Fall of Nature as well, Bryant is generally
credited by literary history with having found in his romantic poetry a way
of making American landscapes and subjects appear as worthy of celebration
as those of Europe. Thus Bryant gave his young nation what it needed in
46
those days: his works contributed to bringing the United States out of their
colonial complex and Bryant was one of the early writers who were working
for the United States' cultural and literary independence to complement its
newly won political independence. While Bryant had been reading the
British "graveyard poets" and while William Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads
had also left an impression on him, he was writing about American
settings. In this way, this American poet of the early nineteenth century
exemplifies Gilberto Freyre’ s notion that Americans and their cultures are
at the same time European and extra-European. Furthermore, Bryant
exerted a powerful influence on Latin American poets.
His best-known work is no doubt "Thanatopsis," of which he wrote a
first, shorter version in 1813 or 1814 and which he published in an enlarged
version in the North American Review in 1817. The poems starts:
To him who in the love of Nature holds
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks
A various language; for his gayer hours
She has a voice of gladness, and a smile
And eloquence of beauty, and she glides
Into his darker musings, with a mild
And gentle sympathy, that steals away
Their sharpness, ere he is aware. (Bryant, Poems 10).
For Bryant, man and nature are in communion. Nature is personified as a
power that understands, responds to, and is compassionate toward man.
She is seen as man's best companion. Therefore Bryant advises his fellow
Americans to listen to (American) nature: "Go forth under the open sky,
and list / To Nature's teachings, while from all around— / Earth and her
waters, and the depths of air,— / Comes a still voice— " Since he elevates
nature to a goddess-like status, Bryant tells his readers "To mix forever with
47
the elements, / To be a brother to th' insensible rock." In this way, man can
enjoy the company and assistance of nature.
Because he wants to reinforce the idea of nature as an almost hum an
companion, Bryant continues to personify and humanize it. At the same
time, he elevates nature to the ranks of majesty:
— The hills
Rock-ribb'd and ancient as the sun,--the vales
Stretching in pensive quietness between;
The venerable woods— rivers that move
In majesty and the complaining brooks
That make the meadows green; and pour’ d round all,
Old ocean's grey and melancholy waste,~
Are but the solemn decorations all
Of the great tomb of man. (Bryant, Poems 10-11)
M an’ s communion with nature continues until his death: the natural
elements are the destiny of his body. This idealization of nature would be
nothing new if it was set, for example, in England's Lake District. But Bryant
specifically locates his celebrated natural elements in America. Later in the
poem, he mentions, among other places, "the Oregan," which is now called
the Columbia River. American landscapes, as Bryant shows more clearly in
"To a Waterfowl," are at least as apt for sublime depiction as European
settings. This depiction can take the form of a poem or a painting, or a
painterly poem, like "To a Waterfowl," where the speaker admires the bird
as it is "darkly painted on the crimson sky" (Bryant, Poems 26).
The counterpart in painting to Bryant's celebrations of American nature
is furnished by the Hudson River School of painters. Thomas Cole, a leader
of this school, was a close friend of Bryant, and the two men often went on
48
walks together.4 In his sonnet "To Cole, the Painter, Departing for Europe,"
which is also entitled "Sonnet— to an American Painter Departing for
Europe," tells his fellow admirer of the beauties of American landscapes:
Thine eyes shall see the light of distant skies;
Yet, Cole! thy heart shall bear to Europe's strand
A living image of our own bright land,
Such as on thy own glorious canvass lies;
Lone lakes— savannahs where the bison roves—
Rocks rich with summer garlands— solemn streams—
Skies, where the desert eagle wheels and screams—
Spring bloom and autumn blaze of boundless groves.
(Bryant, Poems, 113)
In Bryant's eyes, American scenery can certainly match the European
landscapes his friend is going to see. In the last line of his poem, Bryant calls
American nature "wilder" than that of Europe. He celebrates this wildness
in his poems and in his Picturesque America and thereby tries to help
America match Europe.
But matching Europe, for Bryant, does not mean equalizing America and
Europe. The beauty man has to create by building a palace elsewhere in the
world is provided by nature in the Western Hemisphere. Bryant illustrates
this idea in "Catterskill Falls," where he presents the American waterfall as
a majestic palace:
And the crescent moon, high over the green,
From a sky of crimson shone,
On that icy palace, whose towers were seen
To sparkle as if with stars of their own,
While the water fell with a hollow sound,
'Twixt the glistening pillars ranged around.
(Bryant, Poems 137-138)
4 They are depicted together contemplating a spectacular natural setting in
Asher B. D urand’ s famous painting "Kindred Spirits."
49
Elizabeth Bishop will echo Bryant's feelings in "A Trip to Vigia," where she
tells of being taken to see a baroque church in a remote part of Brazil. After
visiting the church, Bishop feels that "Nature was providing all the baroque
grandeur the place lacked" (Prose 119).
Bryant's celebration of America extends beyond New England and Anglo-
America. He wrote, for example, poems like "An Indian Story" and "The
Indian Girl’ s Lament," and "The Damsel of Peru," thus attem pting to
embrace all of America and of the Americas. His depictions of the Western
Hemisphere were likewise admired not only in New England. The
Venezuelan poet Andres Bello is an example of a Latin American writing
very much in Bryant's vein. Bryant's writings about Niagara Falls, for
example, so impressed South Americans that it led to a veritable pilgrimage
of Latin American writers there. It is thanks to William Cullen Bryant that
Niagara Falls became the first emblem of the Western Hemisphere.
Numerous Latin Americans followed Bryant in writing about them. The
Cuban Jose Maria Heredia, for example, wrote a poem which he simply
entitled "Niagara," and which Bryant considered "the best which has been
written about the Great American Cataract" (quoted in Brown, Bryant 155).
By translating this poem for the Evening Post Bryant then added another
form of cultural mediation to his original inspiration of Latin American
writings about Niagara Falls.
Bryant also acted as a cultural mediator within the Western Hemisphere
by making his New England readers more acquainted with other parts of the
Americas. As he prospered with the Evening Post, he became a great
traveler and published essays like "Cuba and the Cubans" (1849) and "A
50
Visit to Mexico" (1872). In the first of these, Bryant discusses the possibility
of Cuba being annexed to the United States. His reasoning on the subject
gives not only the views of white Anglo-Americans like himself, but Bryant
also presents the effect an annexation would have on Cuban creoles and
Afro-American slaves.
And "A Visit to Mexico" shows that Bryant's celebration of America and
its scenery is not limited to New England. Here he writes about Veracruz,
for example,
The morning showed us the city, somewhat picturesque
in its aspect, with its spires and stuccoed houses, and
w ith its ancient fort on a little isle in front of it. A range
of blue mountains lay to the west, and high above these
the peak of Orizaba, white with perpetual snow, was
seen among the clouds. (Bryant, Prose 148).
Here Bryant combines in his celebration man-made beauty and the natural
beauty of the Western Hemisphere.
With regard to his embrace of all aspects of the Americas, which also
found expression in Bryant’ s opposition to slavery and in his writing for
democracy, Bryant can be seen as a precursor of the man who is commonly
regarded as the greatest celebrator of America, Walt Whitman.
b. Walt Whitman
Because of his efforts to found a truly American poetry that no longer
depends on European models and that depicts American places, subjects,
51
and people Walt Whitman is often seen as fulfilling the conditions Ralph
Waldo Emerson had outlined in "The Poet" for a truly American literature.
Whitman exulted in the extremes of New York City, where he was
acquainted with the violence of street gangs, mingled with trolley drivers
and carpenters (also working as one), attended lectures by Emerson, and
knew Bryant. In his Leaves of Grass (1855) he attempted to represent and
embrace this variety. These attempts made Whitman a model for other U.S.
poets and they also secured him an idolized position abroad, especially
among Latin Americans.
To underline his Americanness Whitman published the first edition of
his Leaves of Grass within a day or two of July 4, 1855. When, several weeks
later, only few reviews of his collection had appeared, he contributed to his
reputation by reviewing the book himself anonymously. In this guise he
praises the author of Leaves of Grass:
His scope of life is the amplest of any yet in philosophy.
. . . He is the largest lover and sympathizer that has
appeared in literature . . . [and he comes] to unsettle
what was settled, and to revolutionize in fact our
m odern civilization. (Hindus 36, 39, 40)
This is how Whitman wished to be perceived: as a poet who sympathizes
w ith everything and everyone and who writes a new kind of poetry,
unsettling old (European) traditions. Since he tries to focus on all that his
vision and poetry embrace, he disguises his own or his persona's central
position: in the first edition of Leaves of Grass. Whitman's name does not
appear on the title page, only in the often overlooked copyright clause. It is
not mentioned until 497 lines into the first poem, which was later retitled
"Song of Myself," where he introduces himself as
52
Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son,
Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating drinking and
breeding,
No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women
or apart from them,
No more modest than immodest.
(W hitman 52)
W hitman presents himself as a common person (not "above [other] men
and women") who is deeply rooted in the Western Hemisphere.
In the preface to his book Whitman found another venue for
propagating his views on America and poetry in America. Inspired by
Emerson's "The Poet," Whitman gives a list of some of the incomparable
materials awaiting the American poet. He also writes that since Americans
are people from a variety of backgrounds the American poet would not
repudiate past beliefs but would integrate them into newer ones. And since
the new beliefs are located in a new environment, W hitman advocates new
forms and new subject matters to represent this environment:
The American poets are to enclose old and new for
America is the race of races. Of them a bard is to be
commensurate with a people. To him the other
continents arrive as contributors ... he gives them
reception for their sake and his own sake. His spirit
responds to his country's spirit. ... he incarnates its
geography and natural life and rivers and lakes.
(Whitman 713)
It is, then, the American poet's task to sing the influences that can be felt in
America as well as the physical environment of the New World.
For Whitman, a main part of its newness is the freedom that America
offers. Therefore Whitman also appoints the American poet to be the
securer of liberty. He writes in his preface,
53
In the make of the great masters the idea of political
liberty is indispensable. Liberty takes the adherence of
heroes wherever men and women exist ... but never
takes any adherence or welcome from the rest more
than from poets. They are the voice and exposition of
liberty. They out of ages are worthy the grand idea ... to
them it is confided and they must sustain it. Nothing
has precedence of it and nothing can warp or degrade it.
The attitude of great poets is to cheer up slaves and
horrify despots. (Whitman 722)
In order for poets to have a larger impact on their county, Whitman also
wanted to help broaden the literary class to include all people.
The liberty he proclaims for America and Americans is not limited: it
extends to all races, genders, and classes. In order to contribute to this
democratic ideal the American poet must make everyone equal and treat
everyone equally: "the great poet is the equable man. . . . He is the equalizer
of his age and land. ... he supplies what wants supplying and checks what
wants checking" (Whitman 714). "American bards," as he calls them,
therefore
shall be kosmos ... without monopoly or secrecy ... glad
to pass any thing to any one . . . The American bard
shall delineate no class of persons nor one or two out of
the strata of interests not love most nor truth most nor
the soul most nor the body m o st.... and not be for the
eastern states more than the western or the northern
states more than the southern. (Whitman 720)
Since it is the bard's function is to be one of the people and to work for the
people, Whitman writes at the end of his preface, "The proof of a poet is
that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it"
(W hitman 731).
The theoretical precepts of his preface are probably best put into practice
in the first poem of Leaves of Grass, which has been known as "Song of
54
Myself" since the 1881 edition. The poem's speaker is journeying through
his America and through the year in order to absorb all that he sees to then
write the poem: he is "Absorbing all to myself and for this song" (Whitman
40). And: "Now I will do nothing but listen, / To accrue what I hear into this
song, to let sounds contribute toward it" (Whitman 55). Although he tries to
put himself or his persona in the background and to concentrate more on
what is is that this persona is absorbing, Whitman starts the poem out with
his persona:
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
(W hitman 28)
The self is in the center, from where it is reaches out to and shares things
w ith the other in order to then celebrate itself in its connectedness. While
most Latin American readers have seen in these lines W hitman’ s desire to
be connected to everyone and everything, one could certainly also interpret
the second line as the expression of an imperialist attitude, in which
"embracing" and "equalizing" mean making the other like the self and not
vice versa.
But this is not an interpretation that Whitman would want to suggest.
His intended message is that of a universal embrace: "Clear and sweet is my
soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul," he assures his readers
(Whitman 31). He considers this attitude to be essentially American.
Therefore he repeatedly reminds his readers of his Americanness, as in "My
tongue, every atom of my blood, form'd from this soil, this air, / Born here
of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same"
55
(Whitman 29). Stylistically, this Americanness finds its expression in
W hitman's free verse, through which he shows his and his country’ s
liberation from European traditions.5 Its liberation makes the United States
special, but there is a sense in Whitman that he does not regard his country
as the only country worth celebrating. A line like "One of the Nation of
many nations, the smallest the same and the largest the same" must
certainly have appealed to his readers elsewhere in the Western
Hem isphere (Whitman 44).
This idea is connected to Whitman's reputation as the poet of democracy,
which he holds in the Western Hemisphere. With W hitman democracy is
extended to include the equality of women. In his letter of August 1856 to
Ralph Waldo Emerson he writes, "Women in these States approach the day
of that organic equality with men, without which, I see, men cannot have
organic equality among themselves" (Whitman 739). Although the Civil
War somewhat diminished Whitman's optimism, his Democratic Vistas
(1870) presents a passionate look to the future of democracy and of
democratic literature in America. Emerson recommended W hitman for a
^ In his preface, the prominent stylistic feature is the use of three or four
dots. As David Simpson has pointed out,
In the prose as in the poetry, Whitman's favourite
mode of punctuation is the string of stops (....), denoting
a voice or sentence that can potentially go on forever,
and a field of inclusion or agglomeration that is
infinite. If we have any expectation of syntactic
subordination, then it is continually refused by the
practice of accumulation. . . . Everything possible is
done to create— by means which always of course
remain graphic— a sense of the incarnate presence of the
poet's voice and body. (Simpson 178).
56
government post, announcing that his work was "more deeply American,
democratic, & in the interest of political liberty" than that of any other
American (quoted in Kaplan 274). But although Whitman constantly
proclaims himself as the great democrat, D.H. Lawrence, who thought of
Whitman as the greatest of Americans and the greatest of poets, already
deemed W hitman’ s attitude toward other people and cultures unhealthy.
Lawrence saw in Whitman not true sympathy but the desire to be one with
everything, to merge and to give oneself up in the process.
David Simpson, in his essay "Destiny Made Manifest: The Styles of
Whitman's Poetry," largely agrees with Lawrence, arguing that Whitman's
"blindness" consists in
a failure to recognize the empirical facts of ethnic,
social, political, operational, and sexual difference
within the American society whose features he was
celebrating. Instead of standing back and thinking about
terms of the slave s or the prostitute's difference,
Whitman wants to share the slavery or the
prostitution. The appetite for identity is so omnivorous
that there is nothing it will not assimilate and hence
explain or justify. (Simpson 177)
But Simpson also points out that while Whitman assimilates others in his
poetry, he does not give a voice to those others but instead makes them part
of himself.6 Although Whitman was writing at the time of westward
expansion, Anglo-America's contact with Hispanics and Native Americans
finds little resonance in his writings. Reportedly, Whitman uses only two
Spanish words in his poems, namely "Libertad" and "Americanos."
p As Simpson writes, "There are, I think, very few [counter-voices]. In fact,
ithe enormity of what is excluded from Whitman's representation of an
’ exemplary America is quite staggering" (Simpson 184).__________________
57
Similarly, he is empathetic towards slaves, but he does not give them their
own voice in his writings. As David Simpson writes, "As he disavows or
'sees beyond’ that fact of interracial conflict, so Whitman also feels no need
to register the tensions within white society that resulted from
capitalization, industrialization, and the division of labour" (Simpson 187).
But Simpson's skepticism was not shared by Latin American readers of
Walt Whitman. As Fernando Alegria has documented in his study of W alt
W hitman en Hispanoamerica. Whitman's influence in Latin American
literature is enormous. Alegria introduces his book as follows:
Some time ago, summarizing my first impressions, I
dared say:
"Studying Walt Whitman in Hispano-American
poetry is like looking for the traces of a phantasm which
can be felt everywhere and seen nowhere."
Today, after persecuting this phantasm systematically
and stubbornly over several years I think that I have
looked it in the eyes more than once and that I can
sense the path of its pilgrimage over three or four
generations of its Hispano-American admirers. (Alegria
9, my translation)7
7 Alegria's original text reads:
Hace algun tiempo, resumiendo primeras impresiones,
me atrevf a decir:
"Estudiar a Walt Whitman en la poesia
hispanoamericana es como buscar las huellas de un
fantasma que se puede sentir en todas partes y ver en
ninguna".
Hoy, despues de perseguir a ese fantasma sistematica y
tenazmente por espacio de varios anos creo haberle
visto la cara en mas de una oportunidad y
vislumbrando el itinerario de su peregninaje a traves
de tres o cuatro generaciones de admiradores suyos en
Hispano America. (Alegria 9)
58
Alegrfa's first encounter with Whitman is probably symptomatic for
Latin American readers before and after him. He recounts that when he was
a student at the Universidad de Chile, for him and for his fellow-students
W hitman was a mythical ideal:
Whitman was, at that time, one of that class of fighters
and rebels who taught me to distrust the sold-out
culture of those who work to nourish the commercial
values of small nationalist groups intent on dividing
the hum an race and on fostering general hatred and
envy.
Whitman was the defender of the freedom of the
spirit, the enemy of prejudices, the proud maintainer of
the excellence and purity of the artistic work, the singer
of youth, of life in contact with nature, the big brother
of the workers, the romantic apostle of the persecuted
and of the exploited. (Alegria 9, my translation)8
As Alegria himself points out, one needs to see "up to what point our poets
and our general public know Whitman only in a glorified image via his
official biography written by his disciples" (Alegria 11, my translation).9 This
8 Alegrfa’ s original text reads:
Whitman pertenecfa, entonces, a esa clase de
luchadores y rebeldes que me ensenaron a desconfiar de
la cultura mercenaria de quienes crean para alimentar
los valores comerciales de pequenas bandas
nacionalistas empenadas en dividir al genero humano
y a patrocinar odios y celos colectivos.
Whitman era el defensor de la libertad del espfritu, el
enemigo de prejuicios, el orgulloso sostenedor de la
pureza y excelencia de la faena artfstica, el cantor de la
juventud, de la vida en contacto con la naturaleza, el
hermano mayor de los trabajadores, el romantico
apostol de los perseguidos y explotados. (Alegria 9)
9 Alegrfa's original text reads: "hasta que punto nuestros poetas y [el]
publico en general conocen a Whitman solamente en una imagen
59
glorified Latin American image of Whitman's life is largely based on
Whitman's own Specimen Days in America and on the biography by the
Frenchman Leon Bazalgette.
Alegria shows that Whitman's influence in Latin America can especially
be felt starting at the end of the nineteenth century. The early m odernistas,
he believes, did not know Whitman enough to be deeply influenced by
him :
the first generation of modernists, headed by Ruben
Dario, did not intimately know the content of Leaves of
Grass nor did they understand to its full extent the
meaning of Whitman’ s poetic reform, nor were they in
a position to join in his social and political crusade.
(Alegria 13, my translation)10
But starting w ith Jose Marti, Whitman's presence in Latin American poetry
is enormous. It will appear repeatedly later in this chapter.
Speaking probably of a later period in Latin American modernism, Enrico
Mario Santi writes in "The Accidental Tourist: Walt W hitman in Latin
America" about the m odernistas’ Whitman cult:
Whitman actually forms part of the very mythology of
m odernismo . . . As discovered by modernistas like
Marti, Dario, and Lugones, Whitman became yet
glorificada a traves de la biografia oficial escrita por sus discipulos" (Alegria
11).
Alegrfa's original text reads:
la primera generacion de modernistas, encabezada por
Ruben Dario, no conocio intimamente el contenido de
Leaves of Grass ni comprendio en su justo valor el
sentido de la reforma poetica de Whitman ni estuvo en
condiciones de unirse a su cruzada social y politica.
(Alegria 13)
60
another emblem of modernity, one of the missing
portraits in Dario's gallery of Los raros.. . . The
m odernistas invoke rather than imitate Whitman. In
their works Whitman tends to be a theme rather than a
stylistic or rhetorical m o d el. . . Later, during the first
decades of the century, the Whitman theme would be
gradually replaced by his persona as it seduced Latin
American bards into adopting it as a full-blown
rhetorical model. (Santf 160)
This collapse of distinction between using Whitman as an emblem or as a
rhetorical model was already noted by Jorge Luis Borges in an essay of 1929.
Borges accused Latin American poets of confusing Whitman w ith his
persona and of senselessly adopting his style and vocabulary.
But despite possible misunderstandings and misinterpretations
Whitman's impact in Latin America remained powerful. Santf writes that
because of Pan-Americanist movements during the Roosevelt era of the
1930s and 1940s "Whitman, the American Poet of Democracy, . . . became a
convenient emblem of this ideology, and it is not by accident that his cult in
Latin America reaches its apex then" (Santf 159). In 1943, for example,
Octavio Paz wrote a proposal for a Guggenheim fellowship to spend a year
at the University of California at Berkeley. His proposal was entitled
"America and Its Poetic Expression" and in it Paz outlined his intentions to
study especially Edgar Allan Poe and Ruben Darfo as representing a
universal or cosmopolitan tendency, while he was planning to use Walt
W hitman as the expression of a native strain, or a "burgeoning American
soul" (quoted in Santf 157).
Whitman spoke and continues to speak to Latin Americans because of
his attitude of embracing and celebrating everything and everyone.
Ironically, Latin American writers have used and are using W hitman’ s
61
strategy in their defense against United States imperialism. Santf calls such
uses "an alienated colonial discourse" (Santf 162).1 1 This is not to say that
W hitman's other side, that of the man who found justification for the
Mexican War as a means of betterment for the people and who, in his
nationalistic moods, had visions of "peopling the New World w ith a noble
race," has been overlooked in Latin America. For example, in 1971,
Mauricio Gonzalez de la Garza published a revisionist study on Walt
Whitman: racista, imperialista. anitm6xicano. But Whitman largely
remains idolized in Latin America and is perceived as a voice that unites
the Western Hemisphere. When Octavio Paz discusses W hitman in an
essay appended to The Bow and the Lyre (1956), which he entitled,
"Whitman, Poet of the Americas," he explains the fascination of the
Americas w ith Whitman thus:
the poetic dream and the historic one coincide in him
completely. There is no break between his belief and the
social reality. . . . With complete confidence and
innocence, Whitman can sing of democracy on the
march because the American utopia is confused with
and is indistinguishable from the American reality.
Whitman's poetry is a great prophetic dream, but is is a
dream within another dream, a prophecy within
another prophecy that is even vaster and that
11 Although many Latin American writers are aware of this irony,
W hitman's influence on them remains strong. Santf gives two examples:
Both Neruda and Borges first read Whitman in their
teens. Like Vasseur, both discovered him through
indirect sources; both imitated his poetry in their early
verse; and both rejected Whitman soon thereafter, only
to recover him in later years through other creative
means. In Neruda's work, Whitman became the
Continental American voice; in Borges', one more
embodiment of the idea of Literature. (Santf 165)
62
nourished it. America dreams itself in W hitman's
poetry because America itself is a dream. (Paz, Bow 271-
273)
c. Jose Marti
Another writer with a powerful dream of America is the Cuban Jose Marti,
who was exiled from his native land by the Spanish colonizers. He lived
mostly in New York City between 1881 and 1895, when he died in the
second w ar for Cuban independence. While living in the United States,
Marti acted as a cultural mediator, often giving speeches about various parts
and issues of the Western Hemisphere. At the same time he was reporting
on life in the United States for Latin American newspapers, mainly the
Buenos Aires publication La N ation. Apart from being a public speaker, an
essayist, and a journalist, Marti was also a poet (very much influenced by
Whitman) and a translator.
As a poet, Marti helped prepare the way for m odernism o in Spanish
American literature: his poems make use of new rhythms and meters, free
verse, and symbolism, while they forgo romantic sentimentalism. The
Versos Sencillos rSimple Verses], which he published in New York in 1891,
are characterized by simplicity and plain language. But like Whitman's
Leaves of Grass. M artf s Versos Sencillos express many complicated issues
beneath the cloak of simplicity, in which the poets reveal their innermost
sentiments and convictions. Also like Whitman, Martf presents himself as
63
the poet of the common people, speaking simply and sincerely. Most of the
poems in M artfs collection were written in New York City in the winter of
1889-1890, when the Pan-American Congress was meeting in Washington.
The book's untitled first poem must be seen in this context:
Yo soy un hombre sincero
De donde crece la palma,
Y antes de morirme quiero
Echar mis versos del alma.
Yo vengo de todas partes,
Y hacia todas partes voy: (Martf, Antologfa I I 136)
I am a sincere man
from where the palm tree grows;
and before I die I want
to loose my verses from my heart.
I come from everywhere,
and I go everywhere: (trans. Walsh 343)
As an exile who had lived in Cuba, Mexico, Guatemala, and other parts of
the Americas, Martf was in a position to assert that he comes "from
everywhere" in the Western Hemisphere. Similar to W hitman's efforts to
unite, in his Leaves of Grass, the variety of the United States, Martf can
bring together the variety of the Western Hemisphere. As he adds in "Mis
Versos," his poetry— again like Whitman's— is not borrowed from anyone; it
is honest because it comes out of his innermost self.
Like all exiles, Jos6 Martf felt strongly about his native land. He wrote a
variety of poems for Cuban independence and against Spain's colonial
atrocities in Cuba and he asked for solidarity in the Western Hemisphere
also in order to gain support in the Americas for Cuba's independence.
Apart from his poetry, M artfs essays and speeches most powerfully express
64
his desire for Western Hemisphere unity. A variety of these texts discuss the
position of the United States in the Western Hemisphere and express
M artfs fear that an imperialist United States of America might eventually
come to assume the role formerly held by the European colonial powers.
But Marti was far from seeing the United States in general only in a
negative light; he merely opposed their imperialist tendencies.
He wrote, for example, a laudatory essay on Emerson, and his speech on
"El poeta Walt Whitman," which he gave at a literary congress in New York
City in 1887, presents his U.S. counterpart as a prophetic model. Marti
believes that "Solo los libros sagrados de la antigiiedad ofrecen una doctrina
comparable, por su profetico lenguaje y robusta poesia, a la que . . . emite, a
manera de bocanadas de luz, este poeta viejo" ["Only the holy books of
antiquity offer a comparable doctrine to the prophetic language and robust
poetry which this old poet puts out like flashes of light" (my translation)]
(Marti, Antologia II 207). Marti admires Whitman's all-embracing attitude:
" 1 1 1 es de todas las castas, credos y profesiones, y en todas encuentra justicia y
poesia" ["He is of all classes, beliefs, and professions, and in all of them he
finds justice and poetry" (my translation)] (Marti, Antologia II 213). Apart
from this democratic philosophy, Marti admires Whitman's new language
and style, his adoration of the human body, his happiness, his
connectedness to nature, his celebration of Abraham Lincoln, and especially
his emphasis on freedom. While Marti may have had an idealized image of
Whitman, his embrace of this Anglo-American poet and his adoption of
W hitman’s philosophy and poetics nonetheless attest to the connectedness
of the Western Hemisphere.
65
Martf considered the hegemony of the United States and the lingering of
colonialism as the main threats to this connectedness. In 1889 he addressed
the delegates of the Pan-American Congress of Washington w ith his talk
"Madre America" ["Mother America"]. Contrary to his speech on "Nuestra
America" ["Our America"], which he gave two years later, the tone of this
earlier text is primarily optimistic. Martf expresses his joy over the Pan-
American Congress and celebrates the New World and the independence of
large parts of it. He sees the Americas united in their role of being a refuge
for those persecuted in Europe and he therefore argues for the community
of different races and countries. "Our capable and indefatigable America
conquers everything," he proclaims concerning distinctions w ithin the
W estern Hemisphere (Martf, Our America 80). Martf therefore envisions
the Americas as growing stronger and more united. For him, America is
one mother for all who live there, and all who live there are brothers. But
w hen he reports on the Washington Pan-American Congress in the
December 19-20, 1889 issue of La Nacion, Martf sounds less confident. Here
he describes the Western Hemisphere as being in a constant struggle because
On the one hand, there is in [the Americas] a nation
proclaiming its right by proper investiture, because of
geographical morality, to rule the continent, and it
announces . . . that everything in North America must
be its, and that this imperial right must be
acknowledged from the Isthmus all the way south. On
the other hand, there are the nations of diverse origins
and purposes, (quoted in Saldivar, "Dialectics" 66-67)
This division of the Americas increasingly preoccupied Martf.
The outlook of "Nuestra America," which was first published in the New
York paper La Revista Illustrada in 1891, is therefore decidedly more
66
skeptical than that of "Madre America" and the tone is far more
antagonistic. As the Cuban poet and Martf scholar Roberto Fernandez
Retamar has pointed out, Martf criticized the rise of monopolies and of
imperialism which he perceived in the United States, on the basis of their
exploitation of the poor. His life in the ghettos of New York City, where he
experienced the plight of the poor and of newly arrived immigrants first
hand, enabled Martf to voice his cultural critique and his earlier expressed
desire for unity in the Western Hemisphere was a goal he could oppose to
w hat he considered to be wrong with the United States. It is true that, as Jose
David Saldivar has argued, Martf attempted, in his oppositional discourse,
"to unify the history of the Americas" (Saldivar, "Dialectics" 64). But what
Martf wanted to unify even more was the future of the Americas as a world
w ithout imperialism and hegemony.
In his strife for a united Western Hemisphere Martf counsels, as Pablo
N eruda does in the twentieth century, that "Nations that do not know each
other should quickly become acquainted, as men who are to fight a common
enemy. . . . It is the time of mobilization, of marching together" (Martf, O ur
America 84-85). In order to enjoy the bounty of the New World, Martf
writes, Americans must be united by mutual respect. This includes respect
for Native Americans and for the "Indian apron" which the mother of all
Americans is wearing (Martf, Our America 85). And like Emerson in "The
American Scholar," Martf argues for a cultural independence of America
from Europe:
The European university must bow to the American
university. The history of America, from the Incas to
the present, must be taught in clear detail and to the
67
letter, even if the archons of Greece are overlooked. Our
Greece must take priority over the Greece which is not
ours. We need it more. (Marti, Our America 88)
Since this is a concern for the whole Western Hemisphere, Martf writes that
"Our America" must be "one in spirit" and he wants for the Americas "a
single voice" (Martf, Our America 93, 94).
The major obstacle to the realization of a hemispheric unity, Martf
believes, is the threat of Northern capital conquering the Southern half of
the hemisphere and the attitude that comes with the power of the United
States: "The scorn of our formidable neighbor who does not know us is Our
America's greatest danger" (Martf, Our America 93). Imperialist tendencies
in the United States can prevent the dream of Western Hemisphere unity
from becoming a reality:
Our America is running another risk that does not
come from itself but from the difference in origins,
methods, and interests between the two halves of the
continent, and the time is near at hand when an
enterprising and vigorous people who scorn or ignore
Our America will even so approach it and dem and a
close relationship. And since strong nations, self-made
by law and shotgun, love strong nations, and them
alone; since the time of madness and ambition— from
which North America may be freed by the
predominance of the purest elements in its blood [like
Walt Whitman], or on which it may be launched by its
vindictive and sordid masses, its tradition of expansion,
or the ambitions of some powerful leader— is not so
near at hand, even to the most timorous eye, that there
is no time for the test of discreet and unwavering pride
that could confront and dissuade it; since its good name
as a republic in the eyes of the world's perceptive
nations puts upon North America a restraint that
cannot be taken away by childish provocations or
pompous arrogance or parricidal discords among Our
American nations— the pressing need of Our America is
68
to show itself as it is, one in spirit and intent, swift
conqueror of a suffocating past, stained only by the
enriching blood draw n from the hands that struggle to
clear away ruins, and from the scars left upon us by our
masters. The scorn of our formidable neighbor who
does not know us is Our America's greatest danger.
And since the day of the visit is near, it is imperative
that our neighbor know us, and soon, so that it will not
scorn us. (Martf, Our America 93)
Martf clearly hopes to contribute to a halt of the United States' attempts to
make the rest of the Western Hemisphere like themselves or even to
integrate it in themselves.12 As he wrote in "La verdad sobre los Estados
Unidos" ["The Truth about the United States’ ], North America should not
be a model for Latin American countries because of its division w ith regard
to race, class, and origin. But in the dialectic technique of "Nuestra
America," Martf distinguishes between "Our America" and "the America
which is not ours" and he appeals to his audience to overcome this
distinction in order to achieve a greater unity of the Western Hemisphere.
12 As Jose David Saldivar has pointed out, Martf clearly discerned U.S.
im perialism :
as an alienated Cuban exiled in the homemade ghettos
of New York, he is the only Latin American intellectual
of his time audacious enough to confront the U.S.'s
imperial history, its imperial ethic, and its imperial
psychology. Imperialism, Martf suggests, had penetrated
the very fabric of North American culture and had
infected its imagination. The U.S. metropole, once and
for all, would now enjoy and exploit a structural
advantage over the Latin American "periphery."
(Saldivar, "Dialectics" 69)
69
d. Ruben Dario
Marti's skepticism about the United States and his warnings of U.S.
imperialism were shared by the Nicaraguan Rub#n Dario. Like Marti, Dario
was in a position— because of his extensive travels in Central and South
America— to speak for what Marti called "Our America."
Dario considered Marti a precursor of the m odernism o movement whose
leading figure he was to become. While Marti tried to unite "our America"
mainly through his speeches and newspaper reports, Dario's m ain venue
was his poetry. He is commonly regarded as Spanish America's most
influential poet since he was the chief inaugurator, the most famous poet,
and the guiding voice of the Latin American m odernism o movement. It is
said of Dario that "through him Hispanic poetry was born anew. He was el
poeta de America because of that supremely American characteristic of
fusing all sources, inspirations, feelings, bloods, into one spiritual sensibility
which was and is the secret of America's great cosmopolitan crucible"
(Englekirk 116). Resonances of Whitman are not accidental in this
description. In fact, both Marti and Dario, in their own ways, attempted to
enlarge the scope of Whitman’ s all-embracing attitude: while W hitman
embraced mainly all he perceived in the United States, Marti in his essays
and Dario in his poems tried to embrace all of "our America," and
preferably the whole Western Hemisphere.
Despite his skepticism concerning the United States, Dario, like Marti, did
not reject them categorically. He included, for example, an essay on Edgar
70
Allan Poe in his collection Los raros (1896), which contains literary portraits
of men whom Dario considered extraordinary. Dario describes Poe as "como
un Ariel hecho hombre" ["like an Ariel become man"] (Dario, A ntologia
297). In the same collection, Dario devotes an essay to Jose Marti. Written
after Marti's death in the Cuban struggle for independence, it speaks of
Marti as a precursor of m odernism o. Dario writes, "jDebemos llorar mucho
por esto al que ha cafdo! Quien murio allri en Cuba, era de lo mejor, de lo
poco que tenemos nosotros los pobres" ["We have to cry a lot for the one
who fell! The one who died over there in Cuba was one of the best, of the
little that we poor people have."] (Dario, Antologia 302).
Apart from connecting the Western Hemisphere through his comments
on some of its writers, Dario mainly unites the Americas in his role as the
founder of m odernism o. He was the first to use the term m odernism o (in
his essay "La literatura en Centro-America," 1888). With this new form of
poetry, Dario, like Whitman before him, wanted to create a genuinely
American literary tradition. As he wrote in the preface to his Cantos de vida
v esperanza of 1905, his goal was to give freedom to America and to
American poetry. His 1888 collection Azul. which Dario published at the age
of 21, became the main poetic inspiration for m odernism o. It secured its
author the respect of his Latin American fellow poets and led to a greater
literary unity of Spanish America.
In A zul Dario included a sonnet entitled "Walt Whitman." By the time
he wrote this poem, Dario had only known Whitman through a variety of
more or less reliable sources, many of them French. This may explain that at
that time, Dario did not yet see the similarities between his own and
71
Whitman's poetic and social goals. Instead of referring to the poems or the
preface of Leaves of Grass Dario speaks about Whitman as an American
who seemed to share his country’ s imperialist tendencies. Equating
W hitman with the United States, Dario writes:
En su pais de hierro vive el gran viejo,
bello como un patriarca, sereno y santo.
Tiene en la agurra olimpica de su entrecejo
algo que impera y vence con noble encanto.
Sacerdote que alienta soplo divino.
anuncia en el futuro tiempo mejor.
Dice al aguila: "jVuela!"; "jBoga!", al marino,
y "jTrabaja!", al robusto trabajador.
|Asf va ese poeta por su camino
con su soberbio rostro de emperador! (Dario, Poesias
465)
[ In his country of iron lives the great old man,
handsome like a patriarch, serene and saintly.
He has in the Olympic wrinkle between his eyes
something that dominates and that defeats with a noble
charm.
A priest who exhales a divine breath,
he announces better times for the future.
He tells the eagle to "Fly!" the mariner to "Row!,”
and the robust worker to "Work!"
This is how this poet wends his way
with his proud face of an emperor! (my translation)]
Although Dario apparently praises Whitman as "el gran viejo" and
"Sacerdote," he undermines this praise by comparing the N orth American
poet to a patriarch and to an emperor. Since "emperador" is the sonnet’ s last
word, this is also the dominant impression Dario wants to give of
W hitman. He seems intent on uniting Marti’ s "Our America" in its
opposition to the United States, the imperialist "country of iron," which,
72
seventeen years later, in "A Roosevelt" ['To Roosevelt"], he was going to
call "el futuro invasor / de la America ingenua" ["future invader of our
naive America"] (Dario, Poesfas 541). Although Dario mentions Whitman's
all-embracing attitude, which he labels his "alma del infinito" ["soul of the
infinite"], he does not believe that Whitman has a genuine concern for
others. Whitman's "soul of the infinite," says Dario, "seems like a mirror"
("parece espejo") in which Whitman is adm iring himself more than other
people. By extension, Dario may have objected to the fact that Whitman's
m irror was reflecting only the United States and not other parts of the
W estern Hemisphere.
But over time and as he got to be better acquainted w ith Whitman,
Dario's opinion of his North American counterpart seems to have changed.
In 'To Roosevelt," Whitman appears to have become part of "our
America": his voice and that of the Bible, Dario writes, are the only ones
that could reach Roosevelt. "Es con voz de la Biblia o verso de Walt
Whitman, / que habria que llegar hasta ti, Cazador" (Dario, Poesfas 541)
["The voice that would reach you, Hunter, must speak / in Biblical tones, or
in the poetry of Walt Whitman" (trans. Kemp 69)]. Now W hitman can
serve, in Dario's eyes, as a potential defender of "our naive America"
against Roosevelt's Big Stick policy.
What unites Dario's America is its common heritage and its threatened
position. He tells Roosevelt:
Eres los Estados Unidos,
eres el futuro invasor
de la America ingenua que tiene sangre indfgena,
que aun habla en espaol.
Crees que la vida es incendio,
que el progreso es eruption,
que en donde pones la bala
el porvenir pones.
No. (Dario, Poesfas 541)
[You are the United States,
future invader of our naive America
w ith its Indian blood, an America
that still prays to Christ and still speaks Spanish.
You think that life is a fire,
that progress is an eruption,
that the future is wherever
your bullet strikes.
No. (trans. Kemp 69)]
Dario sees in Roosevelt a betrayal of the ideals of America, primarily of the
ideal of liberty. He uses the emblem of the liberty torch to illustrate this
betrayal: while it should light the path for freedom throughout the Western
Hemisphere, in Roosevelt's "ferras garras" ["iron claws"], the liberty torch
only lights the path for conquest.
But Dario warns Roosevelt that "our America" will stand united against
him if he tries to conquer it.
Mas la America nuestra, que tenia poetas
desde los viejos tiempos de Netzahualcoyotl,
que ha guardado las huellas de los pies del gran Baco,
que el alfabeto panico en un tiempo aprendid;
que consulto los astros, que conocio la Atlantida
cuyo nombre nos llega resonando en Platon,
que desde los remotos momentos de su vida
vive de luz, de fuego, de perfume, de amor,
la America del grande Moctezuma, del inca,
la America fragrante de Cristobal Colon,
la America en que dijo el noble Guatemoc:
"yo no estoy en un lecho de rosas"; esa America
que tiembla de huracanes y que vive de Amor,
hombres de ojos sajones y alma barbara, vive.
74
Y suena. Y ama, y vibra, y es la hija del Sol.
Tened cuidado. jVive la America espaola! (Dario,
Poesfas 541-542)
[But our own America, which has had poets
since the ancient times of Nezahualcdyotl;
which preserved the footprints of great Bacchus,
and learned the Panic alphabet once,
and consulted the stars; which also knew Atlantis
(whose name comes ringing down to us in Plato)
and has lived, since the earliest moments of its life,
in light, in fire, in fragrance, and in love—
the America of Moctezuma and Atahualpa,
the aromatic America of Columbus,
Catholic America, Spanish America,
the America where noble Cuauhtemoc said:
"I am not on a bed of roses"— our America,
trembling with hurricanes, trembling w ith Love:
O men with Saxon eyes and barbarous souls,
our America lives. And dreams. And loves.
And it is the daughter of the Sun. Be careful
Long live Spanish America! (trans. Kemp 70)]
While these lines seem to be directed at Roosevelt and at the United States,
they are much more an appeal to Dario's fellow Latin Americans to
recognize their common heritage and their common position and to unite
as "our America" against what Marti called "the America that is not ours."
Ruben Dario, then, is a poetic voice striving to create a unity in the
Western Hemisphere. But with him, unlike with Marti, the unity is limited
to Spanish America. The m odernism o movement which he started aimed
at delineating the Western Hemisphere (and particularly Spanish America)
from Europe, while poems like "Walt Whitman" and "A Roosevelt"
attem pted to increase the unity of Spanish America by rem inding it of how
much it shared.
75
e. Pablo N eruda
As Whitman, Marti, and Dario show, the literature of the Western
Hemisphere has always also been a literature of revolution, be it the
revolution against Europe or the revolution against oppressive political
systems in the Americas. Earlier expressions of and reflections on these
revolutionary American politics are, for example, Tom Paine's "Common
Sense" or Nathaniel Hawthorne's "My Kinsman, Major Molineux." The
Chilean Pablo N eruda may be the best twentieth-century example of the
poetics of revolution, as they are rooted in the Western Hemisphere. But as
Jose Mario Santi writes, in many cases, Latin American poets like N eruda
"borrow Whitman's mask from North America as the rhetorical shield of
Latin America against North American imperialism" (Santf 161).
While he became popular with his collection of love poems Veinte
poemas de amor (1924), Neruda turned increasingly to social concerns in his
m iddle period. In 1938, he began working on a collection that would
eventually be published as Canto general in 1950. Initially N eruda had
conceived of it as a depiction only of Chile and he was going to call it Canto
de Chile. But the scope of the work began to be enlarged when N eruda was
posted to Mexico as as the Chilean consul in 1940. The main reason for
expanding his Canto, however, was Neruda s visit to the ruins of Macchu
Picchu in Peru in 1943. Here the Chilean poet began to identify w ith the
native American past and consequently with all of the Americas. As he
writes in the prologue to Canto general, "Me sentf chileno, peruano,
americano. Habia encontrado en aquellas alturas diffciles, entre aquellas
76
ruinas gloriosas y dispersas, una profesion de fe para la continuation de mi
canto" ["I felt Chilean, Peruvian, American. I had found in those harsh
heights, among dispersed and glorious ruins, a profound faith in the
continuation of my song."] (quoted in Agosin 59). Eventually, Las alturas de
Macchu Picchu was to become part two of the Canto general.
The experience of Macchu Picchu takes Neruda back to an identification
w ith pre-Colombian America. In the first part of the Canto general he
writes, in "Amor America (1400)" ["Love, America (1400)"], about what
there was "Antes de la peluca y la casaca" ["Before wig and frockcoat"]
(Neruda, Poems 164-165). In that America, as Neruda illustrates, there
existed a harmony within nature and between nature and man. It was a
"Tierra . . . sin nombre, sin America" [a "land without name, without
America"] (Neruda, Poems 166-167). Neruda is alluding here to Amerigo
Vespucci, who gave America its present name. But with this name came the
evils of colonialism, which, Neruda implies, are still being felt in the
Americas.
The second part of Canto general. "Las alturas de Macchu Picchu," was
also published separately in 1950. It shows Pablo Neruda's increasing
commitment to social issues and his movement towards an identification
with the workers of Latin America. The section "Las flores de Punitaqui,"
for example, describes the economic and social problems of miners and their
strikes against subhum an working conditions. And ’ The United Fruit
Company” accuses foreign colonizers of continuing age-old evils. As
N eruda adds in the final sections of Canto general, in his eyes, social
problems are very much a concern for poets. Poets, he believes, should also
77
try to address and empower workers in their struggles. Such Marxist
tendencies permeate the Canto general. As Marjorie Agosin pointed out,
"Neruda brings into harmony a poetic chronicle of Latin American history
and the Marxist interpretation of hum an development" (Agosin 61).
In "El poeta" ["The Poet"], an autobiographical poem in the fourth
section of Canto general. Neruda writes that "Antes anduve por la vida, en
medio / de un amor doloroso" ["In the old days I went through life / in the
grip of a tragic love"], a reference to his Veinte poemas de amor (Neruda,
Poems 220-221). At that unenlightened time, he also was "en el mercado /
de la codicia" ["in the market of greed"] (Neruda, Poems 220-221). But the
experience of suffering and death— caused by greed and social inequality-
dictated to the poet a new orientation: "La muerte abriendo puertas y
caminos. / La muerte deslizandose en los muros" ["Death opening doors
and paths. / Death slithering over walls."] (Neruda, Poems 220-221). N eruda
expanded on his views of the poet's task in "Deber del poeta" ["Poet's
Obligation"] from Plenos Poderes (1962). Here he writes that the poet has to
set free all those who are not listening to the sea, who are caught up in their
work. The poet can and must liberate those who are imprisoned. A nd in "La
poesia" ["Poetiy"] he adds that the liberation of others through his poems is
also a liberation for the poet.
After Canto general Neruda's concern for social equality also led to a
concern for national equality in the Western Hemisphere. "Americas" and
"North American Friend," two poems from his Cancion de gesta [Song of
Protest. 1976] especially illustrate this new concern. "Americas" celebrates
the beauty of American landscapes and the people who have defended and
78
died for the honor of their (Latin American) countries. This celebration
]
j leads to N eruda's declaration of his love for everything in the Americas. In
the m anner of Walt Whitman, Neruda writes,
I love even the roots of my land
from the Rio Grande to the Chilean Pole
. . . I love each poor door
and each hand among these deep people
and there is no beauty like the beauty
of America stretched out in her infernos,
in her hills of rocks and power,
in her atavistic and eternal rivers, (Neruda, Song 86)
Neruda's love for every part and every country of the Americas is
threatened by the United States' hegemony.
This idea is the core of "North American Friend." In that poem, Neruda
proposes a vision of unity for the American hemisphere: he mentions "the
geography / that unites us in the desired land" and he suggests that "we are
sailing in the same boat" (Neruda, Song 102). The main obstacle he sees to a
unity of the Western Hemisphere is the lack of m utual understanding and
of knowledge of each other. He sees a destructive capitalism and public lies
about other American countries emanating from the United States and he
perceives U.S. poets as having lost "Whitman's faith in the hum an race"
(Neruda, Song 100). But Neruda also sees the similarities of the United
: States to other American countries. Especially the common people and
workers, he implies, are very similar, working "in the time machine of
i
, factories, / workers broad, narrow and bent / over wheels and flames"
I (Neruda, Song 100). Therefore Neruda does not criticize average U.S.
! Americans but only the lack of inter-American communication:
79
| my only rebuke against you
is for the silence that says nothing;
we do not know what North Americans
meditate in their homes
we want to share your learning
but we find that two or three people
close the North American doors
and only the "Voice of America" is heard
which is like listening to a lean chicken. (Neruda, Song
100)
N eruda does not want to listen to the "lean" government-controlled voice
that pretends to speak for America; instead, he wants to hear the real voices
of the Americas, the voices or workers and common people, who are united
in the similarities of their existences. He aspires to "the pride of all" rather
than the pride of a few leaders or of the leading country in the Western
Hem isphere.
In order to achieve greater unity and harmony in the Americas, Neruda
argues, there must be inter-American communication, which does not
mean that anyone has to give up anything: "We are Americans like you /
»
| we do not want to exclude you from anything, / but we want to conserve
i
[what is ours," writes Neruda, assuring North Americans that they, too, will
\
not lose anything by opening up to the rest of the Americas (Neruda, Song
101). He ends his poem by giving examples of what South Americans
respect about North America, implying that this respect should be
I
j reciprocal, and finally appealing for united action:
| We respect Lincoln's space
: and Paul Robeson's clear conscience,
j We learned to love with Charlie Chaplin
(although his power was evilly rewarded).
And so many things, the geography
that unites us in the desired land,
everything tells me to say once again
that we are sailing in the same boat:
it could sink with pride:
let us load it with bread and apples,
let us load it with Blacks and Whites,
with understanding and hopes. (Neruda, Song 102)
This appeal for connections between the Americas continues in Neruda's
work until his death. Late in his career, he turned increasingly to odes as
means of celebrating a large variety of subjects. They can be seen as a Latin
American counterpart to Whitman's celebration of the variety of the
United States in "Song of Myself." But Neruda's celebration is also
intermingled with appeals for social, political, and national equality. In his
"Oda a las Americas" ["Ode to the Americas"], N eruda decries the decline of
the Americas from their earlier splendor. Social inequalities and U.S. neo
colonialism are seen as the main culprits for this situation:
cada dia
sube un m andon y con su sable corta
hipoteca y remata tu tesoro.
Se abre la cacerfa
del hermano.
Suenan tiros perdidos en los puertos.
Llegan de Pennsylvania
los expertos,
los nuevos
conquistadores,
m ientras tanto
nuestra sangre
alim enta
las piitridas
plantaciones o minas subterraneas,
los dolares resbalan
[each day
a new despot arises and with his saber
; lops off mortgages and auctions your treasure.
Brother begins
to hunt brother.
Stray shots sound in the ports.
Experts arrive
from Pennsylvania,
the new
conquistadors,
m eanw hile,
our blood
feeds
the putrid
! plantations and the buried mines,
the dollars flow] (Neruda, Odes 24-27)
Once again, Neruda implies that harmony and unity can only exist in the
Western Hemisphere if there is social equality instead of the present
"codicia panamericana" ["Pan-American greed"].
Especially N eruda’ s late work seeks to contribute to a hemispheric
harmony by revealing and condemning social inequality and its origins.
While he does not reject the United States as such, N eruda criticizes what
the United States are doing against hemispheric understanding. It is
therefore no wonder that Elizabeth Bishop was very attracted to his work
and cherished N eruda’ s friendship. Like other Latin American poets—
1 maybe chiefly among them the Nicaraguan Ernesto Cardenal— N eruda
wants to "re-volutionize" the Americas through his writings. In his sense of
| the word, he wants to help return the Americas to their earlier harmony by
I
| turning them around and overthrowing existing social, political, and
! national inequalities.
j
82
£ . Carlos Fuentes
While Pablo N eruda tried to unite and harmonize the W estern
Hemisphere by reminding it of its similarities and by arguing for social
justice and national equality, the Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes brings
different parts of the Americas together by depicting the interconnections of
American cultures through their encounter. In his attempts to depict
Mexico, Fuentes makes frequent use of myths and shows that Mexican
culture cannot be disassociated from the culture of other American
countries, just as other American cultures cannot be isolated.
According to Fuentes, myth, language, and structure make up today’ s
novel. His formal and stylistic characteristics are much influenced by his
adm iration of postm odern U.S. American fiction. Like many contemporary
fiction writers in the United States, Fuentes, too, prefers indirection and
constant tangential references to direct statements. Myths are evoked rather
than replayed, social reality is morally critiqued rather than described, and
there is a constant search for personal identity and freedom. In The Death of
Artemio Cruz (1964), for example, Fuentes sweeps through the history of
m odern Mexico in the life of Artemio Cruz, who is dying and who is
disgusted by the smell of corruption in which his (and his country’s)
idealism, ambition, passion, and achievements have ended. In Fuentes'
work, fixed categories are abandoned in favor of a more metaphysically
uncertain reality and of a plurality of meanings.
83
But at the same time, Fuentes' fiction is socially conscious and so is his
literary criticism. His essay on Melville's Moby-Dick characterizes the novel
as, among other things, an epic of democracy. Fuentes sees Melville as
subverting the manifest destiny of his times as well as the automatic linkage
of the United States to the good and the simultaneous association of what
opposes the United States with evil.13
Fuentes’ most powerful treatment of Mexico in its connections with
other parts of the Western Hemisphere is El gringo viejo (The Old Gringo,
1985). Like Malcolm Lowry’ s Under the Volcano, the novel depicts an
Anglo character in Mexico. Fuentes' old gringo is the U.S. American writer
and journalist Ambrose Bierce, who mysteriously disappeared in Mexico
during that country's civil war. Fuentes imagines Bierce's fate in order to
illustrate, like Lowry, the encounter of two cultures, namely those of the
U.S.A. and of Mexico. He portrays this encounter through the triangular
relationship of Ambrose Bierce, the U.S. American governess Harriet
Winslow, and Tomas Arroyo, a Mexican general under Pancho Villa. In this
encounter, Bierce is presented as fighting and dying for social equality and
justice in Mexico. Setting the novel during the Mexican revolution presents
Fuentes with a forum for voicing (like Whitman, Marti, Neruda, and so
many other writers of the Western Hemisphere) his revolutionary politics.
He has the character Inocencio Mansalvo declare,
13 George Gordon Wing summarizes the essay: "Indeed, Fuentes concludes,
in our time, Captain Ahab still lives, and his name is Mac A rthur and
Dulles, Joe McCarthy and Johnson; the white whale is in Cuba, in China, in
Vietnam, in Santo Domingo" (Wing 211).
84
I want the haciendas to be destroyed; I want all the
people who work the land to be free, so we can work
wherever we want, in the city or in the North— in your
country, seorita. And if it is not to be so, I will go on
fighting forever. (Fuentes 63)
The character is certainly speaking, to a degree, for his author.
In the figure of Ambrose Bierce, the old gringo, Fuentes shows that some
good is emanating from the United States, which can help fight the injustice
elsewhere in the Americas. After the old gringo's death those for whom he
died will have to continue his work:
the old gringo fell dead and his companions would
have to speak now because the papers with their history
would no longer speak for them. They would say: We
worked this land for a thousand years before the
surveyors and the lawyers and the army came to tell us,
This land is not yours, this land has been sold, but stay
here anyway, live here and serve the new owners, for if
you don’ t you’ ll die of hunger. The old gringo died and
the words on the papers went flying across the desert,
saying, We like to fight, we feel dead if we aren't
fighting, pray God this revolution never ends, but if it
ends, we'll go fight in a new revolution, fight till we
drop into our graves. The old gringo fell dead; and the
scorched words went flying far beyond the hacienda and
the village and the church, saying, We never knew
anyone outside this region, we didn't know there was a
world beyond our maize fields, now we know people
from all parts, we sing our songs together, we dream
our dreams together and argue whether we were
happier isolated in our villages or now, whirling
around everywhere, dizzied by so many dreams and so
many different songs. . . . The worst master was the one
who said he loved us like a father, insulting us with his
compassion, treating us like children, like idiots, like
savages; we re none of those; . . . Things were far away,
now they're near and we don't know whether this is
good or bad; now everything is so near to us we can
touch it, and we're afraid: is that what the Revolution
is? (Fuentes 163-164)
85
These lines contain criticism of social inequalities and, indirectly, of the
United States and their treatment of developing American countries. But
they also suggest that the time for isolationism in the Americas is over and
that the present age is one of inter-American connectedness, where the
cultures and philosophies of various American nations flow together and
support each other.
g. Jorge Luis Borges
One writer who has especially aided the literary conflux of the Americas is
the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges. In "The Literature of Exhaustion" (1967),
John Barth praises Borges as one of the few contemporary writers who have
brought perspectival and other innovations to contemporary fiction. Barth
expresses his admiration of Borges repeatedly and clearly puts his own
fiction in the same category as Borges'. The strong influence which Borges
has exerted on other postmodern fiction writers in the United States like
William Gass and Robert Coover has also been documented. But apart from
m ediating between the literatures of the Americas through his own fiction
and the model character it has assumed for many North American writers,
Jorge Luis Borges also tried to bring the literature of the United States to
Latin America by writing a brief history of North American literature,
Introduccion a la literatura norteamericana (1967; trans. An Introduction to
American Literature. 1971).
86
The book reveals Borges’ democratic inclinations: it includes, for
example, a chapter on Native American poetry. Borges tries to forgo
ethnocentrism and to concentrate not only on the literature of the
intelligentsia, reminding his readers of the vast amount of popular writing
in the United States by including, for example, a chapter on 'The Detective
Story, Science Fiction, & the Far West." He also tries to take any elitism out
of U.S. literature by presenting U.S. authors in a way that might appeal to
the emotions of his readers. Literary movements and techniques are in the
background, while the writers' biographies seem at least as important as
their works. In this way, Borges tries to bring the literature of the United
States to the hearts of his Latin American audience. In some cases, however,
Borges slips into a (possibly characteristically Latin American) sentimental
mode, as when he narrates an episode from Emily Dickinson's life:
At age twenty-three, during a brief visit to Washington,
Emily met a young preacher and they fell in love
immediately, but on learning that he was married, she
refused to see him again and returned home. She was
pretty and did not stop smiling; she sought refuge in
epistolary friendships, in dialogue with members of her
family, in the faithful reading of a few books— Keats,
Shakespeare, the Scriptures— in long walks in the
country accompanied by her dog. Carlo, and in the
composition of brief poems, of which she was to leave
about a thousand, the publication of which did not
interest her. (Borges, Introduction 42, my emphasis)
Although his description is oversentimentalized, factually inaccurate
(Dickinson actually left 1,775 poems behind), sexist, and grotesque, Borges
succeeds in drawing a portrait of Dickinson that is probably appealing to a
Latin American audience and that would generate the interest of Latin
87
American readers in Dickinson's poems. In his role as cultural mediator
w ithin the Americas, Borges is therefore also trying to generate more Latin
American interest in North American literature. He seeks to remedy the
lack of m utual knowledge between North and South America, which
N eruda and Marti decried. Borges attempts to engender a better inter-
American understanding through his Latin American readers' knowledge
of N orth American writers.
For this purpose he also tries to relate the literatures of Anglo- and Latin
America to each other, pointing out, for example, differences between the
North American cowboy story and the Argentine gaucho tale:
For Argentine writers— recalling Martin Fierro and the
novels of Eduardo Gutierrez— the gaucho is the
incarnation of rebellion and not infrequently of crime;
in contrast the ethical preoccupation of North
Americans, based on Protestantism, has led them to
present in the cowboy the trium ph of good over evil.
The gaucho of the literary tradition is usually a m an of
cunning; the cowboy may well be a sheriff or rancher.
Both characters are now legendary. . . . In contrast to the
poesfa gauchesca which came into existence shortly
after the revolution of 1810, the North American
Western is a tardy and subordinate genre. One must
admit, however, that it is a branch of the epic and that
the brave and noble cowboy has become a worldwide
symbol. (Borges, Introduction 86-88)
Borges' Introduccion a la literatura norteamericana is an attem pt to bring
the United States and their literature closer to Latin American readers.
Although he does not stress any similarities between the literatures of
North and South America, Borges is trying to contribute with this book to a
greater understanding and a better mutual knowledge w ithin the Western
H em isphere.
88
2. Toward a Literature of the Western Hemisphere
The preceding discussion of seven exemplary writers of the Americas may
not have enlightened the question about what characterizes and
distinguishes the literature of the Western Hemisphere, but it has
illustrated a minute portion of the interconnections which exist between
the various national and individual traditions that constitute this literature.
These literary interconnections are complemented by the interrelations in
history, the history of ideas, culture, anthropology, and other fields, some of
which were mentioned in more detail in the first part of this chapter. In the
field of literary studies, interconnections within the W estern Hemisphere
have received increasing attention in the past several years after they had
largely been ignored since the days of Walt Whitman and Jose Marti. In the
rest of this chapter I will briefly present some of the attempts that have
recently been made to define and illustrate the literature of the Western
Hemisphere and I will point out in what respects such attempts can be used
in a hemispheric approach to the work of Elizabeth Bishop.
In 1971, Cesar Graiia argued in "Cultural Dreams and Historical
Frustrations in Spanish American Literature" that the literatures of Spanish
America are connected by an Americanidad that is present in them now and
that will become increasingly important in the future as more emphasis is
laid upon the Spanish American experience. Grana starts his overview of
A m ericanidad in Spanish American literature with the Ecuadorian poet
Jose Olmedo in the late eighteenth century and traces it through the
89
Venezuelan Andres Bello, the Chilean Francisco Bilbao, the Cuban Jose
Marti, the Nicaraguan Ruben Dario, the Peruvian Jose Chocano, and the
Mexican Alfonso Reyes and Octavio Paz and their search for America’ s
identity. While Grana does not seek to establish connections between
Spanish American literature and the literature of Brazil, the United States,
or Canada, he tries to show that at least among the sixteen national Spanish
American literatures there are enough similarities to justify the
consideration of these literatures as one entity.
A complementary study to Grana's is Theories of American Literature
(1972), edited by Donald M. Kartiganer and Malcolm A. Griffith. While
Grana had tried to define what unites Spanish American literature, the
essays in this collection try to answer the question of what makes the
literature of the United States distinctive. Self-consciousness, cultural
comprehensiveness, and the search for identity are revealed as
characteristic. Roy Harvey Pierce, for example, sees much of U.S. American
poetry moving historically in its self-reflexive mood from an initial
questioning of itself and of its culture to justifying its existence and further
on to celebrating its possibilities.
While Grana and the collection of Theories of American Literature
concentrate on what unites certain portions of the literature of the Western
Hemisphere, over fifteen years before these two texts were published,
Stanley Williams had attempted a more synthetic study. His book on The
Spanish Background of American Literature (1955) shows the influence and
resonance of Spanish American cultures and literatures in the United States
and their literature. Williams considers Washington Irving, George
90
Ticknor, William Hickling Prescott, William Cullen Bryant, Henry
W adsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Francis Bret Harte, and
William Dean Howells as major North American interpreters of Spanish
and Spanish-American culture and literature.
William C. Spengemann continues Stanley Williams' synthetic approach
and asks "What Is American Literature?" (1978). Spengemann recounts that
the way it is commonly practiced, the study of American literature always
excludes the literature of South and Central America and customarily also
omits that of Mexico and Canada. This state of affairs leads Spengemann to
question the concepts "American" and "literature" and their customary
usage by teachers and students of American literature. The way we practice
American literature, Spengemann writes, we include only
Those few works of fiction, poetry, and the drama
which have been written in any place that is now part
of the United States or by anyone who has ever lived in
one of these places and which now rank among the
acknowledged masterpieces of Western w riting.
(Spengemann 123)
This definition, Spengemann believes, can hardly "serve our ambition of
identifying the peculiar character of American literature" (Spengemann
123). By considering only American literature written in English and by
using the above definition, Spengemann continues, we
forgo any possibility of comparing the developments of
English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese literatures in
the New World, although some knowledge of these
parallel developments would seem indispensable to
our expressed aim of measuring the impact that
America has had upon literature. (Spengemann 124)
91
Spengemann illustrates the arbitrariness of our practice of American
literature by referring to the traditional treatment of colonial literature.
While we read works from the British colonies that eventually became the
United States, we exclude the literature of those British colonies that did not
become the United States. Nor do we read the literature of non-British
colonies that eventually became part of the United States. In view of such
arbitrary distinctions, Spengemann argues that if we want to find out what
is characteristically American, we cannot keep trying to prove that
American literature is equal to European literature and that it uses the same
means to achieve this equality:
Although our feelings of cultural uniqueness persuade
us that American literature is different, it seems, our
cultural paranoia forces us to prove that American
literature is just as good as European literature, in
exactly the same ways, and hence to concentrate our
efforts upon the very works which, in measuring up to
transnational standards, may well be our least
distinctive productions. (Spengemann 125)
In order to gain more knowledge about what is distinctly American about
American literature, Spengemann would like the field of American
literature to include
all New World writings, whatever their language,
form, or degree of artistry. The works that pour in upon
our attention when this last critical barrier [of
considering only acknowledged masterpieces] is
knocked away will not necessarily assuage our pangs of
cultural inadequacy. But they can become instruments
of knowledge if we approach them in a scholarly spirit
of curiosity, and they will be good in exact proportion to
our ability to make them interesting. (Spengemann 134-
135).
92
Only in this way, Spengemann argues, can we ever hope to find out what is
distinctive about American literature. By broadening the definition of
American literature in time, space, language, and form, Spengeman also
increases its specturm in terms of class, race, gener, and age.
Spengemann's view is shared by many writers of the Western
Hemisphere. Octavio Paz, for example, while his own work also shows
hemispheric interconnections, points out in an essay that the French poet
Laforgue inspired both Latin American postmodernism and Anglo-
American modernism (in the figures of T. S. Eliot and of the Mexican Lopez
Velarde, who was influenced by the Argentine poet Leopoldo Lugones'
Lunario sentimental, a collection inspired by Laforgue):
In 1919 Lopez Velarde published Zozobra. the principal
volume of Hispano-American "postmodernism," that
is, our own antisymbolist symbolism. Two years earlier,
Eliot had published Prufrock and Other Observations.
In Boston, a Protestant Laforgue had emerged from
Harvard; in Zacatecas, a Catholic Laforgue had slipped
out of a seminary. . . . Boston and Zacatecas: the
coupling of these two names brings a smile as if it were
one of those incongruent associations Laforgue so
greatly enjoyed. Two poets writing in different
languages, neither even suspecting the existence of the
other, almost simultaneously produced different but
equally original versions of the poetry written some
years earlier by a third poet in yet another language.
(Paz, "Translations” 162)
Hemispheric connections of this sort are manifold and still present ample
opportunities for expanding the study of the literatures of the Americas.
A variety of these connections are discussed in a collection of essays
edited by Gustavo Perez Firmat, entitled Do the Americas Have a Common
Literature? (1990) and in Earl E. Fitz's Rediscovering America: Inter-
93
American Literature in a Comparative Context (1991). Perez Firmat explains
that the essays he collected "aim to couple the literatures and cultures of this
hem isphere— particularly their North American and Latin American
sectors— in order to find regions of agreement or communality" (Perez
Firmat 1-2). As he also notes, the North-South orientation on which a
hemispheric approach to the literature of the New World relies is
imposingly broad. Therefore the collection only aims at laying some
groundwork for further discussions. Gustavo Perez Firmat groups the essays
in the book into four different categories according to their approaches.
Essays w ith a generic approach establish a hemispheric context by examining
a broad abstract notion like historical consciousness or racial and cultural
miscegenation as it is used by writers of various American countries.
Contributions which adopt a genetic approach seek to establish causal links
among authors and texts, recording the uses to which a given author or text
have been put. This approach deals mainly with certain authors or texts of
the Western Hemisphere as they have been received in other American
countries. James Fenimore Cooper, Walt Whitman, and Edgar Allan Poe
are examples discussed in this category.
A third group of essays follow an appositional approach, which places
works side by side, concentrating on formal or thematic continuities rather
than postulating causal connections. Discussions of the edenic myth in
Faulkner and Carpentier, of the novelistic poetics of the Cuban Severo
Sarduy and the Quebecoise Nicole Brossard, or of Adrienne Rich's and the
M artinican Aime Cesaire's combination of poetry and politics as well as
their concern with gender, ethnicity, and miscegenation are examples of this
94
approach. A fourth category of essays uses a mediative approach, which
examines texts that already have an inter-American dimension because they
are at the intersection between different American languages, literatures,
and cultures. The collection considers works by Jose Marti, Roberto
Fernandez Retamar, and Jose Lezama Lima and the totality of Caribbean
literature in this respect. Numerous other writers could be added. Elizabeth
Bishop's works, for example, could certainly also have been discussed under
the rubric of a mediative approach. In connections with the work of poets
like Carlos Drummond de Andrade or Octavio Paz, Bishop's writings would
also lend themselves to an appositional or a genetic approach. And as a
writer of the Western Hemisphere concerned with the conflux of the
Americas, Bishop is also a writer who could be included in generic
hemispheric approaches to topics like the use of geography in Pan-
American poetry.
Like Gustavo Perez Firmat’ s collection of essays, Earl E. Fitz's
Rediscovering the New World does not aim at determining what exactly is
distinctive about the literature of the Western Hemisphere. Fitz examines
the five written New World literatures (English Canadian, French
Canadian, U.S. American, Spanish American, and Brazilian) as well as
Am erindian literatures. He sees these as "constituting a community of
literary cultures related to each other by virtue of their origins, their sundry
interrelationships, and their sociopolitical, artistic, and intellectual
evolutions" (Fitz, Rediscovering xi).
To examine some of these interrelationships and similar developments,
Fitz discusses Native American literature, narratives of discovery and
95
conquest, the theme of miscegenation, the New World novel of Henry
James and Machado de Assis, the different facets of American modernism,
the quest for an American identity, regionalism, the motif of solitude, and
the conflict between civilization and barbarism as "key issues" of inter-
American literature (Fitz, Rediscovering xi). Like Perez Firmat, he points
out that the field of Hemispheric literature is still very open and that his
book "does not presume to anything even approximating a definitive
statement concerning the principles of praxis of New World literature"
(Fitz, Rediscovering xiii).
In his essay "Whither Inter-American Literature?," which was published
in the same year as Rediscovering America. Fitz adds an outlook into the
future of the study of Inter-American literature. He explains the traditional
lack of a hemispheric perspective in the study of American literature in this
way:
Traditionally, literary scholarship devoted to
"American" or "New World" texts has been oriented in
two basic directions: toward considerations of
individual national literatures, such as Mexican
literature, Canadian literature (of both French and
English expression) or Brazilian literature, and toward
literary relations with the European "mother country."
Thus it is that Quebecois authors (like Jacques Godbout
and Anne Hebert) and works are often better known in
France, for example, than in the United States, Chile or
Brazil, while national literature departments
throughout the Americas continue to offer courses in
areas like English and American, Commonwealth,
Luso-Brazilian and Ibero-American literature. (Fitz,
"Whither" 1)
But Fitz believes that isolationism and the study of European connections,
although they will remain a strong part of its study, are to be complemented
96
by considerations of the hemispheric context of American literature. He
proclaims that "we are only at the threshold of this challenging and exciting
new area of comparative literary scholarship" in inter-American or New
W orld literature (Fitz, "Whither" 2).
Some of the possible approaches which Fitz envisions for the
comparative study of Inter-American Literature are:
theme and motif studies; problems of form and genre
development (the novel of the land, for example, or the
immigrant novel); periods and movements; the role of
the translator and of translations in the dissemination
of Inter-American literature; literary relations;
problems of writing American literary history; the
situation of pre-Columbian or Native American
literature; and, finally, an illumination of the web of
influence and reception relationships that have been
evolving in the Americas at least since 1492 and
perhaps even earlier. (Fitz, "Whither" 3)
The search for cultural and individual identity, for example, can be found in
the literatures all over the Western Hemisphere, Fitz writes.
Interconnections in the literature of the Western Hemisphere also guide
Jos6 David Saldivar's The Dialectics of Our America (1991). Saldivar
exemplifies his transnational conception of American culture mainly
through analyses of Jose Marti, Roberto Fernandez Retamar, Gabriel Garcfa
Marquez, Chicano border narratives, Ntozake Shange, and Arturo Islas. Tn
what Gustavo Perez Firmat would call a mediative approach, Saldivar
shows how these four writers incorporate and transform in their writing
the interconnectedness of the Americas.
The next chapter will illustrate why, in view of her biography, it is not
surprising to find a hemispheric content in the works of Elizabeth Bishop.
97
Her reception in Canada and Latin America, which will only be touched on
briefly and occasionally, is a further reason why Bishop can and should be
considered as an inter-American writer, who speaks to and for various parts
of the Western Hemisphere. On March 7, 1978, for example, Alejandro
Oliveros from the Venezuelan journal Zona franca wrote to Bishop about
the "homenaje que nuestra revista piensa consegrarle a Ud. y a su
esplendida poesfa" [ "the homage that our journal is thinking of paying you
and your splendid poetry"]. The Colombian poet Jaime Manrique had
probably already informed Bishop of this commemorative issue, in which
Oliveros was planning to include Octavio Paz's article on Bishop and his
translation of her "Visits to Saint Elizabeth's" as well as his own "Objetos y
apariciones" together with Bishop's translation of it. Another item in the
issue would be Jaime Manrique's translation of "The Bight."
Oliveros writes to Bishop about the motivations for the special issue on
her work:
Dos motivos centrales nos animan en esta empresa: el
primero, hacer un reconocimiento a la que
consideramos una de las voces mas autenticas de la
lfrica de habla inglesa y, en segundo lugar, dar a conocer
en nuestra lengua las excelencias de esta poesia.
[Two central motifs propel us in this enterprise: first, to
pay tribute to a poet whom we consider one of the most
authentic poetic voices in English, and secondly, to
make known in our language the excellent qualities of
this poetry.]
As a mediator between the Americas in her translations as well as in her
own poems, stories, essays, and travel accounts, Elizabeth Bishop enjoys a
high reputation in Latin America and in Canada (over one third of the
members of the Elizabeth Bishop Society are Canadian). Many of her poems
98
have been translated into the main languages of the Western Hemisphere
(Spanish, Portuguese, and French) and speak to Americans in North and
South.
With the increasing attention being given to inter-American writers like
Elizabeth Bishop, who combine various American cultures, the study of
American literature may be moving toward the study of the literature of the
Western Hemisphere or it may at least be considered increasingly from a
hemispheric perspective. While such an approach is certainly not called for
in all areas of study within American literature, a Pan-American awareness
may help enlighten some parts of certain areas. Elizabeth Bishop's own
inter-American connections suggest that a hemispheric approach to her
work might reveal aspects that may have been neglected in Bishop criticism
so far.
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I didn't want to be an American.
— Elizabeth Bishop, "The Country Mouse"
Chapter II: At Home in the Western Hemisphere: The Life of Elizabeth
Bishop
The poet Richard Wilbur has pointed to the "lifelong sense of dislocation"
that appears in several of Bishop’ s prose writings (Wilbur 263). But in fact,
this sense of dislocation permeates not just a number of prose texts; is an
underlying quality of most of Bishop's writing. In this chapter, I will trace
the origins of Bishop’ s sense of dislocation in her biography. Bishop will
emerge here as someone who was constantly looking for a home, who
found homes and family substitutes in various parts of the Western
Hemisphere, and who therefore tried, in her life as well as in her writing, to
bring the Americas closer together, since she had come to w iden her concept
of home: for Bishop, "home" came to mean not one specific location but a
combination of the American places in which she had lived and to which
she had formed an emotional attachment. Her desire to overcome the
conventional boundaries of home and to define home as the locale of
attachment and happiness can probably be traced to Bishop's childhood,
which put her in the position of a powerless outsider deprived of home and
family. This situation awakened her empathy with other outsiders, be they
persons, animals, or countries. It enabled Bishop to sympathize w ith less
privileged American places, especially with Brazil, and to adopt those as her
home, while trying to improve their status or reputation. Her identification
100
w ith so many parts of the Western Hemisphere then allowed Bishop to
unite these places in her work and to become a voice of the Americas,
instead of speaking only for one American culture or country.
Elizabeth Bishop was born in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1911, the only
child of a Nova Scotian mother and a father who was Canadian on one side
of the family and of old New England stock on the other. In an
"Autobiographical Sketch," which she wrote in 1961, Bishop mentions her
inter-American family heritage: "Ancestors fought in the Revolution, on
both sides. Maternal side left farms in upstate New York to take up land
grants in Nova Scotia given to Loyalists by George III." This heritage already
led her along the path of becoming a hemispheric figure. The fact that she
mentions this family history in 1961, after having lived in Brazil for ten
years, also suggests that she perceived herself as rooted in various parts of
the Western Hemisphere.
Initially, Bishop's inter-American roots were a necessity rather than a
wish. When she was eight months old, her father died. H er mother,
Gertrude Bulmer, then took Elizabeth to Great Village, Nova Scotia, where
the m other’ s parents lived. But the death of her husband had left Gertrude
jBulmer in a state of mental instability and so her maternal grandparents
became Elizabeth's first substitute parents. Significantly, in her
autobiographical sketch Elizabeth Bishop refers to herself as "orphaned by
five," although her mother was to live on until Bishop was a student at
Vassar College. But it was when Elizabeth was five years old that she last
saw her mother. After that, the mother was committed to a sanatorium
because of her neurosis. In spite of the strain of her mother's growing
101
instability, which is dramatized in Bishop's short story "In the Village," the
years she spent with her maternal grandparents were the happiest (and
healthiest) of Bishop's childhood. Therefore she returned to Great Village
for long summer vacations while growing up and she never broke her
emotional attachment to Nova Scotia.
Great Village was also the first American place with which Bishop
identified because of its underprivileged status and which she defended
against the more "sophisticated" Worcester and Boston. In a 1965 interview
she said:
I didn't spend all of my childhood in Nova Scotia. I
lived there from 1914 to 1917 during the first World
War. After that I spent long summers there till I was
thirteen. Since then I've made only occasional visits.
My relatives were not literary in any way, but in my
aunt's house we had quite a few books, and I drew
heavily on them. In some ways the little village in
Canada where I lived was more cultured than the
suburbs of Boston where I lived later. (Brown,
"Interview" 291)
Bishop came to identify strongly with Nova Scotia--an identification that
lasted a lifetime, as, for example, her letters to her mother's sister, Grace
Bulmer, show— and, had it been up to her, she would certainly have decided
to grow up there.
In her memoir "Primer Class," which she probably wrote in 1960, while
living in Brazil, Bishop recalls her fondness of Great Village and of her
maternal grandparents. In this reminiscence, which was not published until
1984, when, five years after Bishop's death, Robert Giroux edited The
Collected Prose of Elizabeth Bishop, she writes about the pictures that come
to her mind whenever she sees columns:
102
The real name of this sensation is memory. It is a
memory I do not even have to try to remember, or
reconstruct; it is always right there, clear and complete.
The mysterious numbers, the columns, that impressed
me so much— a mystery I never solved when I went to
Primer Class in Nova Scotia! (Prose 4)
The constant presence of her Nova Scotian childhood memories attests to
the importance which Great Village had for Elizabeth Bishop.
During her Nova Scotian years, Elizabeth was very attached to her
grandmother, a bond that resulted from the loss of her parents and that led
to Bishop's sympathy for the disadvantaged, which was to remain with her
throughout her life:
My grandmother had a glass eye, blue, almost like her
other one, and this made her especially vulnerable and
precious to me. My father was dead and my mother was
away in a sanatorium. Until I was teased out of it, I used
to ask Grandmother, when I said goodbye, to promise
me not to die before I came home. (Prose 6)
Another reason for her attachment to Great Village was the primer
school she attended there. This is where Elizabeth's interest in geography,
which was to inspire so much of her poetry, originated. H er strongest
prim er school memory is that of the maps in the classroom:
They were on cloth, very limp, with a shiny surface,
and in pale colors— tan, pink, yellow, and green-
surrounded by the blue that was the ocean. . . . On the
world map, all of Canada was pink; on the Canadian,
the provinces were different colors. I was so taken with
the pull-down maps that I wanted to snap them up, and
pull them down again, and touch all the countries and
provinces with my own hands. (Prose 10)
Bishop's first collection of poetry, North & South (1946), and especially her
poem "The Map" come to mind here. In that poem Bishop writes, "more
103
delicate than the historians' are the map-makers' colors." What she was
looking forward to in her first grade, Bishop continues in her memoir, were
"geography [and] the maps" (Prose 12).
But she was not allowed to attend first grade in Great Village because her
paternal grandparents took her back to Worcester, Massachusetts to live
there with them. The early years in Great Village may have been the ones in
which Elizabeth Bishop got closest to having a real home and family. But
her paternal grandparents' wishes put an end to this happy childhood. The
physical effect of her forceful repatriation was that Elizabeth started
suffering from a painful eczema and bronchitis as well as chronic asthma.
The psychological effect was that she developed a sense of herself as an
outsider and as homeless. As Lloyd Schwartz recalls, the unwanted move to
Worcester destroyed the idea of family life for Bishop:
Within a year, she was sent to live with one of her
mother's older sisters, in Boston, where she was
happier. At sixteen, she went to boarding school, then
to Vassar. Summers, she visited Nova Scotia, but
essentially she no longer had a family life. "I was always
a sort of a guest," she told an interviewer.
It is clear that she spent the rest of her life trying to
recover the home she had been exiled from. (Schwartz
89)
This idea is supported, for example, by the last two lines of Bishop's poem
"Questions of Travel," where the speaker asks, " Should we have stayed at
home, / wherever that may be?"
In her memoir "The Country Mouse," which was probably written in
Brazil in 1961, Bishop gives some further clues to understanding her sense
of dislocation and its origins. Here she recounts being taken to
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Massachusetts by her father's humorless, rigid parents, which caused her
uncertainty about her status. The young Elizabeth feels a mixture of
resentment and fear about the new life in Massachusetts that is being forced
onto her:
I had been brought back unconsulted and against my
wishes to the house my father had been born in, to be
saved from a life of poverty and provincialism, bare
feet, suet puddings, unsanitary school slates, perhaps
even from the inverted r's of my mother's family.
With this surprising extra set of grandparents, until a
few weeks ago no more than names, a new life was
about to begin. It was a day that seemed to include
months in it, or even years, a whole unknown past I
was made to feel I should have known about, and a
strange, unpredictable future.
The house was gloomy, there was no denying it, and
everyone seemed nervous and unsettled. There was
something ominous, threatening, lowering in the air.
(Prose 17)
The difference in social class between her two sets of grandparents, to which
Bishop alludes here, may be responsible for her lifelong desire to disregard
differences of class, gender, or ethnicity in favor of a heterogeneous
harm ony.
Having to move against her will also awakened Elizabeth's view of
herself as a powerless outsider and her desire to bond with other outsiders:
There was a dog, a Boston bull terrier nominally
belonging to Aunt Jenny, and oddly named Beppo. At
first I was afraid of him, but he immediately adopted
me, perhaps as being on the same terms in the house as
himself, and we became very attached. (Prose 21)
Further on, she recounts another unpleasant experience that illustrates her
powerlessness: "I wanted to be on good terms with everyone, but [Uncle
105
Neddy] would insist on making jokes I couldn't understand, and talking
about spankings and other horrors" (Prose 30).
But most importantly, her forced relocation makes the young Elizabeth
question nationality and national identity and strive instead for a larger
com m unity:
The War was on. In school at recess we were marched
into the central hall, class by class, to the music of an
upright piano, a clumping march that has haunted me
all my life and I have never yet placed. There we
pledged allegiance to the flag and sang war songs: "Joan
of Arc, they are ca-alllll-ing you." I hated the songs, and
most of all I hated saluting the flag. I would have
refused if I had dared. In my Canadian schooling the
year before, we had started every day with "God Save
the King" and "The Maple Leaf Forever." Now I felt
like a traitor. I wanted us to win the War, of course, but
I didn’ t want to be an American. (Prose 26)
Bishop then goes on to narrate how her paternal grandmother forced her to
memorize all stanzas of the United States national anthem. Being forced to
regard the U.S.A. as her nation, Bishop becomes disenchanted w ith the idea
of a fatherland and starts to think of her home as disassociated from
national boundaries. By the time she is six years old, she does not "want to
be an American" in a narrow sense, calling calls at least two American
countries her home, namely Canada and the United States.
Because of the health problems she developed in her paternal
grandparents' house, Elizabeth lived there for only nine months before
being taken to stay with an aunt in Boston. This further dislocation must
have intensified her problems with the concept of home and w ith exclusive
definitions of America. As Bishop mentions in her 1961 biographical sketch,
she started writing poetry at the age of eight. She also writes that her
106
Literary career started at the age of twelve with a prize, a
$5.00 gold piece, awarded by the American Legion for an
essay on AMERICANISM. This has vanished, but the
first sentence, something about "From the icy regions of
the frozen north to the waving palm trees of the
burning south ...” seems to have been prophetic,
indicating directions taken later by both life and work.
Thus, in 1961, Bishop clearly sees her life and her work as pursing the
hemispheric direction she had embarked on with her "Americanism" essay
almost forty years earlier.14 And in recalling the beginning of her essay
Bishop underlines that for her, "Americanism" is by no means limited to
the United States or North America, but includes the whole Western
Hem isphere.
Because of her frail health, Elizabeth did not attend public or private
schools regularly until the age of fifteen, when she went to W alnut Hill
boarding school in Natick, Massachusetts. There she started writing for the
school newspaper, a tradition she continued while studying at Vassar
College, which she attended from 1929 to 1934. For example, she
interviewed T.S. Eliot for the student newspaper Con Spirito while he was
visiting the campus. When, one day, Bishop asked the Vassar College
Librarian why there was no copy of Marianne Moore’ s recent book of poems
in the library, the librarian, a personal friend of Ms. Moore, arranged for
Bishop to meet Moore. This encounter later resulted in Bishop becoming
14 This "Americanism" is certainly related to the A m ericanidad which
Cesar Grana mentions as a characteristic of Spanish American literature.
But in Bishop's case, it includes not only Spanish America but the whole
Western Hemisphere, as she illustrates by applying the term to an area
reaching "From the icy regions of the frozen north to the waving palm trees
of the burning south."
107
Moore's protegee and in Moore publishing Bishop's first poems in the
anthology Trial Balances (1935). The association between Marianne Moore
and Elizabeth Bishop, their similarities and dissimilarities, Bishop's initial
dependence and subsequent liberation from Moore’ s influence have been
much commented on (especially by David Kalstone and Jeredith Merrin)
and are only of minor concern here.
In 1935, the year after her graduation from college, Elizabeth Bishop
followed in the footsteps of so many writers of the Western Hemisphere.
She spent two years in Europe, mostly in Paris. Although this was Bishop's
first major trip abroad, in the course of her life she was to travel more in the
Americas than anywhere else. After this first stretch abroad, Bishop started
making another part of the Americas her home. She bought a house in Key
West, Florida and lived there for about a decade, while frequently going to
New York City and Nova Scotia for extended stays. In an interview she said
about her decision to move to Florida:
In 1938,1 believe, I was on the West Coast of Florida to
fish. I went to Key West just for a couple of days to see
what the fishing was like there. I liked the town and
decided to go back there in 1939, after another eight
months or so in Europe. Eventually I acquired a modest
but beautiful old house. I can’ t say Key West offered any
special advantages for a writer. But I liked living there.
The light and blaze of colors made a good impression
on me, and I loved the swimming. The town was
absolutely broke then. Everybody lived on the W.P.A. I
seemed to have a taste for impoverished places in those
days. But my Key West period dwindled away. I went
back for winters till 1949, but after the war it wasn't the
same. (Brown, "Interview" 299)
108
In Key West Bishop knew, for example, John Dewey, whom she found "an
adorable man" (Brown, "Interview" 299).
In 1943, while still living in Florida, Elizabeth Bishop went on a nine-
m onth visit to various places in Mexico. This extended stay also testifies to
her reaching out in the Americas and together with Florida it provided the
first impact Latin culture had on her. The effect of her contact with this
culture can already be seen in several of the North & South poems, like
"Florida" and "Jeronimo's House." In Mexico, Bishop met Pablo N eruda (an
inter-American poet, as discussed in the preceding chapter), w ith whom she
was to correspond occasionally for the following three decades. When she
was back in Florida, Bishop took private Spanish lessons from a friend of
Neruda, a further sign of her desire to become more immersed in the
Western Hemisphere's variety of cultures. She also wrote an essay entitled
"Mexico, 1943," which she was planning to include in a collection of her
prose writings, an undertaking that never materialized.15 These efforts were
complemented by more travels in the Americas: after her stay in Mexico,
Bishop visited Cuba, Haiti, and Canada (Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island,
and Sable Island). By 1946, when her first collection of poems was published,
Bishop thus already had an inter-American background and consciousness.
Following the publication of North & South. Bishop’ s friend Randall
Jarrell introduced her to Robert Lowell, who had favorably reviewed the
book. This association has also received extensive critical attention,
especially by David Kalstone and Lorrie Goldensohn. It is certain that a close
There is no trace of the actual essay, but Bishop's intended table of
contents for the prose collection in the Vassar College Library lists its title.
109
professional and personal relationship ensued between these two poets,
w ith Lowell becoming a second mentor to Bishop. Whether or not Lowell
actually ever proposed to Bishop is still a point of contention. While Bishop
is usually referred to as "homosexual," she certainly had numerous
romantic relationships with men and "bisexual" would therefore be a more
correct term to describe her. Lloyd Schwartz, a friend of Bishop in her late
years, has surmised that while she probably did not want to marry Lowell,
Bishop w ould have liked to have had children with him.
As her correspondence with her New York doctor, Anny Bowman,
shows, the years in Florida were also characterized by Bishop's growing
alcoholism. This state continued when she held the post of Consultant in
Poetry at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. in 1949-1950, a post
that was later converted to that of Poet Laureate. Bishop seems to have
experienced Washington as constricting and she was looking to enlarge her
horizon. When she was awarded an Amy Lowell Fellowship in 1951, she
was planning to use it for travelling around South America. By November
of that year she was a passenger on a freighter headed for Tierra del Fuego.
During a stop in Rio de Janeiro, Bishop visited acquaintances from New
York, including a former dancer named Mary Morse. A violent allergic
reaction to some cashew fruit which she had bought from a street vendor
resulted in her hospitalization and forced her to discontinue her trip.
Lloyd Schwartz recounts Bishop's initial months in Brazil and the start of
her relationship with Lota de Macedo Soares, which was to last for fifteen
years:
110
Nine years earlier [i.e. in 1942], in New York, she had
met a Brazilian friend of Mary Morse's, Maria Carlota
Costellat de Macedo Soares. Lota, as she was called, was
from an aristocratic family, and was close to people in
political power, like Carlos Lacerda, who in 1961 became
governor of the state of Guanabara. She had a deep
interest in architecture and design. Lota had an
apartment in Rio and, barely finished, an austerely
elegant modern house in Petropolis, a resort town high
in the mountains about an hour's drive from Rio. . . .
Lota invited Elizabeth to recuperate there.
They fell in love. Soon Bishop engaged an architect to
build a little studio higher up the mountain. (Schwartz
89)
With Lota, Bishop s homelessness and her search for a substitute family had
come to an end for the time being, but her hemisphericity took on a new
dimension. As Schwartz recalls, "Brazil may have been the closest thing to a
real home that Bishop ever found after her paternal grandparents removed
her from Nova Scotia. She lived in Rio and Petropolis longer than she ever
lived anywhere else” (Schwartz 90).
Bishop herself, in her 1961 "Biographical Sketch," writes about her
reasons for going to Brazil and about her first ten years there:
Late in 1951 began a South American trip, stopping off
in Brazil to visit Brazilian friends. Like the life very
much and have lived here ever since, with various
trips to New York.
I live outside Petropolis, in the mountains, most of
the time; sometimes in a pied a terre on Copacabana
Beach, in Rio. I am very interested in architecture, and
in Petropolis I have the good fortune to live in (I think)
one of the best examples of contemporary Brazilian
work, a house by Sergio Bernardes. I am also fortunate
in numbering among my friends and acquaintances
most of the best contemporary Brazilian architects,
artists, and some writers.
I've been down the Amazon from Manaus to Belem;
made many trips to Minas Gerais, Ouro Preto,
I l l
Diamantina, etc.; to Sao Paulo; one to Paraty; frequently
spend holidays in Cabo Frio; one trip to Brasilia and one
to the Xingu River to the Indian Post of Capitao
Vasconcelos. I'm about to go to Bahia— I hope.
As this account shows, Bishop did not want to remain a visitor who was
just passing through, but instead strove to immerse herself in Brazil and to
get to know as many of its parts and aspects as she could. For example, she
also became an expert cook of Brazilian dishes.
Bishop really wanted to make Brazil her home and with Lota she had
found the emotional component of home and as well as a substitute family.
Although Lota did not have any children either, the house in Petropolis
often seems to have been filled with nephews and nieces and the children
of friends. In 1956 Bishop writes to her aunt Grace Bulmer about a friend's
baby of whom she and Lota were taking care:
Everything is fine here - our baby is adorable, & talking.
I left her playing in bed with Lota - jumping all over
her, like a kitten. She has no inhibitions whatever! Oh -
Lota is building a toy house, a playhouse, back of the
kitchen, for Betty and the "grandchildren," who are
coming to visit us for a month soon.
Referring to the child as "our" baby, Bishop seems to have seen herself and
Lota very much as parents and as a family. Her remark that the baby "has no
inhibitions whatever!" reveals Bishop's envy of a personality trait she
never enjoyed, although Brazil helped reduce her shyness. And her "Oh"
seems to show Bishop's desire to have a child of her own, preferably with
Lota, as she also hints in "Crusoe in England."
A sign of Bishop's immersion in Brazil is that she is joking lovingly
about Brazil or repeats the jokes Brazilians tell about themselves. On
December 2, 1956, for example, she writes to her aunt Grace Bulmer:
112
Everything is an awful mess, here, too - threats of a new
dictatorship - but Brazilians aren't very blood-thirsty,
thank goodness - The last "revolution" was all over in a
few hours and afterwards they made jokes about how
no one saw it, because it was a rainy day and no one
went out -
And her favorite story about Brazil, according to Lloyd Schwartz, is what
occurred after she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1956:
The grocer in Petropolis saw her picture in the paper
and was thrilled. "All my customers are lucky," he
repeated to everyone he saw. "One has just won a big
prize in America, and last week another won a bicycle
in the lottery!" (Schwartz 90)
Like a Brazilian, Bishop seems to have loved to laugh about Brazil's
idiosyncrasies and its occasional lack of sophistication.
During the 1950s, she is feeling at home in Brazil and connects Brazil to
other places in the Western Hemisphere where she had made her home
earlier. In her letter of December 2, 1956 to her aunt Grace she relates, for
example, Brazilian vegetation to the vegetation in North America, thus
mediating for herself and for her aunt (and in other texts for her larger
N orth American audience) between South and North:
We've had so much rain that Lota's 500 trees have all
grown eight or ten inches. But it's too tropical for maple
here. The pines she planted are "Australian pines" -
they grow in Florida, too - there is also one native pine.
But there's never any frost here, so no sap - Right now
we have wonderful lilies - agapanthus - they grow in
the south in the U.S., too - a big round head of little
lilies, either blue or white, and four feet high - we have
really acres of them now, under the trees; L[ota] had
them all planted 2 years ago -
113
Such a comparison of the vegetation of South and N orth America will
reappear in Bishop's 1978 poem "Santarem," for example, where she
describes "azulejos" palms as "buttercup yellow."
Her mediations between Brazil and North America also include
changing N orth American stereotypical ideas about South America and
underlining in what respects the South is ahead of the North. The aspect on
which she comments most often, and which she also stresses in her Brazil
book, is that of Brazil's peaceful and uncomplicated race relations. Another
one is the view Brazilians have of their politicians. In a letter dated
"November 15th - or 16th (1959 or 1960) she lovingly and admiringly tells
her aunt about a graphic way in which Brazilians expressed their
dissatisfaction:
maybe you even saw (it was on television in N.Y.) how
a rhinoceros got elected to be a city councilman? He's a
famous rhinoceros in the zoo here - and it started just
as a joke, then people took it up and actually voted for
him, just to show what they think of their crooked
politicians. He got over 200,000 votes - then they
stopped counting them. I think it is a very nice - and
very Brazilian - gesture -
This adm iration for Brazil sometimes gives way to compassion for what she
occasionally calls her "poor Brazil." During the 1961 political upheavals she
writes to her aunt,
there may be a civil war - don't ask me why - it is all too
confused. However - things are never very bloody here,
you know - there is no danger at all - 1 just feel
dreadfully sorry for all my Brazilian friends and for the
country.
114
This sympathy for Brazil and especially for the country’ s poor and
disenfranchized remained w ith Bishop even after she had left South
America, as a late poem like "Crusoe in England" illustrates.
Lloyd Schwartz concludes from a letter which Bishop sent to Robert
Lowell in 1958 that by that time the novelty of the new surroundings had
w orn off and that Bishop was ready to move back to the United States. But
Schwartz is making too much of one letter. While Bishop was certainly
getting somewhat disenchanted with Brazil, these seem to have been only
occasional phases. But it is true that a growing feeling of homesickness for
the North sets in toward the end of the 1950s. These are the years when
Nova Scotia was strongly on Bishop's mind and when she wrote about it in
the poems of the "Elsewhere" section in Questions of Travel, in short
stories like "In the Village," and in her autobiographical reminiscences. On
May 20, 1958, she writes to her aunt Grace,
I got a nice book called Down East - on sale for $1.00 -
mostly photographs of Maine, P.E.I. [Prince Edward
Island] and N.S. [Nova Scotia] - one called "View from
Economy Mountain." Makes me feel quite homesick.
I’ ve almost finished a long poem about N.S. ["The
Moose"] that I think I’ ll dedicate to you, with your
perm ission.
But this nostalgia is mixed with an enjoyment and appreciation of Brazil. In
the same year, for example, she tells her aunt that her Brazilian allergist is
adorable and competent and that she is "almost cured" from her allergies.
This ambivalence about where in the Western Hemisphere she felt most
at home and her desire to have both North and South America as her home
is also apparent in Bishop's plan to acquire a house in Great Village to retire
115
r-
in at some point. In the letter dated "November 15th - or 16th" (1959 or
I960), Bishop asks her aunt Grace, "Do you think the G V [Great Village]
home would be a good place to retire to in my old age?" And on January 18,
1962, she reminisces about New York City, complaining to her aunt,
"everything takes so long to do [in Brazil] - I don’ t mind cooking in N.Y. - it
takes no time at all - here it's a real job - nothing comes cleaned or ready,
you know." And a month later she thanks her aunt for sending her a book
about Great Village:
Just a note to tell you the book about G V came last
week-end and I enjoyed it very much over the week
end and I am finding it very useful.... you'll be
surprised! I'm now writing a poem about the Mill
Pond, among other things. Thank you very much - you
couldn't have found a present I'd like better. . . . I'd love
to get back for a trip sometime and wonder when and
how on earth I can.
On May 31, 1962, she adds, "I am loving the G V book and am working on a
long story [probably "Memories of Uncle Neddy"] using a lot of information
from it."
Despite her nostalgia for the North in the late 1950s and in the 1960s,
Bishop's love for Brazil and for Lota made her decide to stay in her adopted
homeland. Visitors from the North (like Aldous Huxley in 1961 and Robert
Lowell in 1962) were one way of enjoying both the North and the South and
they may have helped Bishop feel more at home in Brazil. In July and
August 1962, Robert Lowell, his wife Elizabeth Hartwick, and their daughter
Harriet went to visit Bishop in Rio de Janeiro and Petropolis as both Lowell
and Hartwick were giving lectures in Rio. When, in December 1992, I
interviewed Ms. Hartwick about this trip, she told me that, in her view,
Bishop very much fit into her Brazilian world and seemed to feel at home
there:
Ms. H artw ick She was friends with all the famous
architects, poets and artists in Rio. This was a very
sophisticated world; they all spoke English. Elizabeth
and Lota had a beautiful house and a beautiful flat.
They were very busy and very happy, building the
house— well the house was built, but everything was
just so— and she did seem happy and then, then she left
all of a sudden [at the end of 1965].
Mr. Raab: I think in 1958, she must have written to Mr.
Lowell that the novelty of Brazil had worn off and she
seemed to get disenchanted. But you didn't get that
feeling in 1962, did you?
Ms. Hartwick: No. You know, you say those things. You
feel isolated, and sometimes things don't come, the
newspapers and the records. But she always travelled;
she never really lived very long in one place. The
longest, I think, after she went to college, really was
Brazil. Although it’ s hard to think of her as restless, I
really don't either.
Mr. Raab: Would you think of her as somebody who
was constantly looking for a home.
Ms. H artw ick I don’ t know. She was very domestic and
very much a homemaker, had very pretty houses, was a
very good cook, loved houses, loved objects, furniture.
She had wonderful Brazilian furniture, made of all the
different woods put into patterns and she went around
and she'd collect little things— oddities. She had a group
of things the nuns made and she still had those in
Boston [in the 1970s]— every kind of odd thing. There
was a big sort of wooden ship’ s prow. She liked all that.
Mr. Raab: How do you think the Brazilian experience
changed her? Or did it?
Ms. H artw ick I don't know if it did. Well, she quit
drinking for a while. That was good. She was happier
there. . . . She did quit. And that I think was due to the
influence of Lota.
117
Ms. Hartwick's belief that Elizabeth Bishop seemed happy and felt at
home in Brazil in 1962 is supported by a letter which Bishop wrote to her
aunt Grace on September 22, 1962. After complaining about the Lowells'
visit Bishop mentions the political turmoil in Brazil:
As you may have seen in the papers - Brazil has been
through crises after crises lately - things seem pretty
calm at the moment, although the country is bankrupt .
. . We are all right, of course - it is the poor people who
are suffering - they are so incredibly patient - I don't
know why there isn't a revolution every month, really
- And all the politicians except one or two are knaves
and fools - Poor Brazil!
However - things look even worse elsewhere - The U
S A may be awfully rich - but their problems are worse,
really, than any here.
Identifying more w ith her adopted homeland than with the country that
issued her passport, Bishop is taking Brazil's side and is criticizing the
United States. A constant outsider herself, she is joining forces with Brazil,
an outsider in the Western Hemisphere, and with outsiders in Brazil, i.e.
with the poor. Bishop wanted to voice similar thoughts in the Brazil book,
which she wrote for Time/Life in the second half of 1961, but her editors did
not allow her to.
She m ust have thought of the Brazil project in part as a way of mediating
between South and North America by making her North American readers
better acquainted with South America and by countering Northern
stereotypes about Brazil. In 1965, she told Ashley Brown, "Most New York
intellectuals' ideas about "underdeveloped countries" are partly mistaken,
and living among people of a completely different culture has changed a lot
of my old stereotyped ideas" (Brown, "Interview" 290). She goes on to say
118
that with Brazil and with the collection Black Beans and Diamonds, which
she was planning, but never finished, she wanted "to make Brazil seem less
remote and less an object of picturesque fancy" (Brown, "Interview" 302).
But her intentions for the Brazil book were crossed right from the start by
Time/Life. On July 26, 1961, Bishop writes to her aunt Grace about the
project,
Well - now I've taken on a job, too - and almost wish I
hadn’ t, it’ s such a headache. LIFE magazine asked me to
write the text of a small book on Brazil. They have a
series of them - each a different country. Probably no
one reads the text, anyway, just looks at the
photographs, which are wonderful, usually - colored
ones, and black & white. - But that kind of writing is
hard for me to do and I have to cover the whole
country - history, economics, geography, arts, sports -
everything, even if superficially. However - they will
pay well, and also pay for three weeks in N Y to work
on it with them - and the plane fare, of course - so I
thought I might as well tackle it. I don't like the
magazine and don’ t like them much - these high-
pressure salesmen types - but I am doing it for the
money - and I do know a lot about Brazil by now, of
course, willy nilly. So I MAY get to N.Y. in October - and
I MIGHT get to N S, too -
In the same letter, Bishop mentions that she is pressured for time while
writing the book: "I really can't stop working at all now - I have to have 100
pages in in August [i.e. the following month] - and for me that's an awful
lot. - I also have to run around to libraries, etc. looking things up - and type
and type and type
The time pressure as well as the restrictions which the editors of
Tim e/Life laid on her made Bishop increasingly hostile toward the project.
On August 12, 1961, she tells her aunt,
119
I loathe Time and Life and everything they stand for -
but they pay well, and also they will pay my fare to N.Y.,
1st class, and expenses there for three weeks, in October,
while we "revise.” (All that means is they take what I
write and put it through their own special meat-grinder
so it sounds just like them and not like me - but they
pay well enough to make it a fairly good bargain, I
think.) I have not signed the contract yet - have it here
now - but have already done three chapters and think
I’ ll go on with it. It is hell - I hate this ldnd of writing -
ALL of Brazilian history, geography, and politics
reduced to pill-form - and all in two or three months.
As it turned out, Bishop's fears were justified.
"The Editors of LIFE," listed on the title page as co-authors, for example,
changed all of Bishop's chapter titles, although they retained the basic
content of each chapter, making the book more optimistic and stereotypical,
however. Bishop s outline had been:
Chapter 1. Paradoxes and Ironie s
Chapter 2. The Land of Dye-Wood.
Chapter 3. The Only Western Empire.
Chapter 4. Three Capitals and Other- Places.
Chapter 5. Vegetable. Mineral, and Animal.
Chapter 6. The Unselfconscious Arts.
Chapter 7. The Selfconscious Arts.
Chapter 8. Individuals and Groups.
Chapter 9. The New Republic.
Chapter 10. A New Hopefulness.
These chapter headings were altered by the Time/Life editors, who made
them into the more shallow, romantic, and stereotypical:
Chapter 1 A Warm and Reasonable People
Chapter 2 Underdeveloped Land of Legend
Chapter 3 Century of Honor and Pride
Chapter 4 Shifting Centers of Government
Chapter 5 The Slow Awakening of a Giant
Chapter 6 Graceful and Popular Skills
120
Chapter 7 A Merited Respect for the Arts
Chapter 8 A Changing Social Scene
Chapter 9 The Struggle for a Stable Democracy
Chapter 10 A Nation Perplexed and Uncertain
But although her prose was toned down by the editors of Time/Life, the
book shows some characteristics of Bishop’ s writing. For example, Brazil
starts w ith an anecdote to illustrate the Brazilian way of life. This is the
same technique Bishop uses in her poetry, where she also prefers to show
rather than to describe.
Moreover, the book reveals some of Bishop's views on Brazil, which she
wanted to share with her North American readers. She stresses, for
example, the emotionality of Brazilians, their lack of shyness, their love of
children, their appreciation of the family unit and their racial tolerance.
These are all aspects that Bishop valued highly and that must therefore
have helped her feel at home in Brazil. She writes,
Brazilians love children. They are highly emotional
and not ashamed of it. Family feeling is very strong.
They are Roman Catholics, at least in outward
behavior. They are franker than Anglo-Saxons about
extramarital love, and they are tolerant of
miscegenation. (Brazil 10)
The low degree of inhibition and the emotional warm th as well as the
desire of Brazilians to overcome social and ethnic distinctions probably
helped Bishop feel accepted and loved in Brazil and made it easier for her to
call that country her home. Sharing her adm iration with her N orthern
audience, she writes,
Brazilians are very quick, both emotionally and
physically. Like the heroes of Homer, men can show
their emotions without disgrace. Their superb futebol
(soccer football) players hug and kiss each other when
1
121
they score goals, and weep dramatically when they fail
to. Brazilians are also quick to show sympathy. One of
the first and most useful words a foreigner picks up is
coitado (poor thing!).
Part of the same emotionalism in social life is the
custom of the abrayo, or embrace. Brazilians shake
hands a great deal, and men simultaneously embrace
each other casually with their free arms. Women often
embrace, too, and kiss rapidly on both cheeks: left! right!
Under strong feeling the abrayo becomes a real embrace.
A rich man will shake hands with and embrace a poor
man and also give him money, try to find him a job
and pay his wife’ s doctors bills, because they grew up on
the same fazenda, or country estate, made their first
communions together and perhaps are even "brothers
of creation," a system of patriarchal adoption that dates
from slavery days. fBrazil 12)
Coming from the more reticent cultures of New England and Nova Scotia,
Bishop m ust have felt a sense of liberation in her Brazilian environment.
In her opinion, Brazil is a candidate for becoming a prosperous First-
World country because of its resources. But, empathizing with her adopted
homeland, she deplores the country’ s century-long plundering:
Indeed, the banana tree is a fairly good symbol for the
country itself and for what has happened and is still
happening to it. Brazil struck the early explorers as a
"natural paradise," a "garden," and at its best moments
it still gives that impression— a garden neglected, abused
and still mostly uncultivated, but growing vigorously
nevertheless. Great resources have been squandered,
but even greater ones are still there, waiting. Barring
some world-wide disaster, material prosperity seems
bound to arrive. But it is the mismanagement and
waste of both human and material wealth along the
way that shocks the foreigner as well as the educated,
sensitive Brazilian. (Brazil 11)
This description of Brazil as a garden is reminiscent of Bishop's poem
"Brazil, January 1, 1502," where the newly arrived speaker admires
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every square inch filling in with foliage-
big leaves, little leaves, and giant leaves,
blue, blue-green, and olive,
with occasional lighter veins and edges,
or a satin underleaf turned over;
m onster ferns
in silver-gray relief,
and flowers, too, like giant water lilies
In that poem, too, Bishop closes with a comment on the corruption of the
paradisical garden.
Apart from its natural splendor, Brazil elicited Bishop’ s adm iration in
various other respects, one of them being its modern architecture. Implying
that her N orth American readers may have less reason to look dow n on
Brazil than they think they do, she writes,
Brazil is also one of the few countries where
contemporary architecture is encouraged— even
favored— by the government. While the United States,
for example, was sticking safely to Greco-Roman for the
new Supreme Court Building in Washington in the
1930s, Brazil was inaugurating its architectural
revolution with the construction of the Ministry of
Education and Health in Rio de Janeiro, still considered
one of the best examples of contemporary design in the
world. (Brazil 98)
More praise for Brazil comes in the area of ethnic harmony:
Brazilians take great pride in their fine record in race
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. (Brazil 114)
Bishop makes this same point— adding her criticism of the United States— in
J a letter of March 13, 1965 to her aunt Grace. She writes about her reaction to
Dr. M artin Luther King being awarded the Nobel Prize:
123
When King got the Nobel prize I was interviewed by a
very dumb young man here from a morning paper - he
apparently thought that all Americans dislike Negroes,
or something. He asked me what my "reaction" was to
King’ s getting the prize, and I said, "I'm DELIGHTED,
naturally; what did you think?" This was in the papers,
and you'd be surprised how many telephone calls and
messages I got, many from strangers, thanking me, etc.
You have no idea how the rest of the world feels about
how the U S treats its colored people - and particularly
here, where there is no problem at all. It is one reason I
like living here.
As mentioned above, the feeling of appreciating life in Brazil remained
the dominant one for Bishop into the 1960s, although she was also aware of
many of Brazil's problems. Naturally, she would rather have preferred to
have the best of both South and North America. But in 1963 Bishop is still
planning to remain in Brazil for several years, as evidenced by a letter she
wrote to her aunt in January of that year, in which she tells her aunt Grace
that she bought "us," i.e. Lota and herself, three air conditioners for their
Rio apartment because she thinks that she and Lota will continue spending
several days a week in Rio, although she would rather live in the quiet
atmosphere of Petropolis.
But later in 1963, Bishop is getting worried about Lota working too much
for her park project in Rio. On March 18, she writes to her aunt from
(Petropolis,
I am way behind with my own work and am trying to
make up for it - Lota works so hard in Rio I don't think
she'll even miss me for a week - she is doing wonders -
and won't take any pay. Sometime I'll send you pictures
of her 2-mile long PARK... She's just getting too
dam ned important for fun, however, and we both need
to get away - from Brazilian problems and politics for a
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while - but she can't leave while the present governor
is in office - 2 years to go.
By this time Bishop is also getting increasingly well-known in Latin
America. In April she writes to her aunt,
Someone here has translated some of me into
Portuguese - he is coming to discuss it today - and what
a mess! He will insist on being poetic & putting in
"thees" & "thous" - and when I say "stood up" he'll say
things like "arose to his feet" etc... I want to tell him,
"Please don't publish them," but don’ t want to hurt his
feelings; he's worked so hard. There was a long article
about me in a Latin-American magazine - an all-South-
America one - not too bad - but since it's all in Spanish
& the photographs are terrible. I won't send it...
But although she appreciated and was appreciated by South America,
Bishop's desire to have it both ways and thus to unite the N orthern and
Southern halves of the hemisphere as her home continues. On June 10,
1963, she tells her aunt,
I am going through another wave of nostalgia for the
NORTH - Even Lota has asked me to write about the
price of a little old house we know of in Connecticut.
This is just the wildest day-dreaming - but I'd STILL like
to own something in or around G V [Great Village], I
think - don't know when I'd get to it - but one never
knows here, these days. When L's job is up, we might
leave Brazil for a good long stretch - I don’ t know.
Anyway - keep your eyes open. Are Norman (is it
Norman?) & Hazel still living in the old house? I mean
our - your old house? Would they ever want to sell it?
(But don't mention me, for heaven's sake - both sides
of my family seem to think I’ m a millionaire, I suspect!
- when they're all richer than I am... I do live in a b ig
house - but it's somebody else’ s!)
Out of this letter speaks again Bishop's desire to have a home and to unite
South and North (by living in the North with a South American). The two
125
main ingredients for feeling at home, it seems, were that Bishop wanted to
own the place she lived in and that she wanted to share it w ith Lota. Again,
the emotional component of home outweighs the spatial one.
Bishop's connection of Lota with the concept of home also becomes
apparent in a poem which Lloyd Schwartz recently unearthed in Ouro
Preto. Schwartz assumes that Bishop wrote the poem in the mid-sixties,
after having lived in Brazil for over a decade. As he points out, the poem
"weighs the world of [Bishop's] childhood in Nova Scotia against the life
she chose for herself later, in which she measures not only how far she has
travelled from her origins but how difficult it is to escape them" (Schwartz
86). This is also one of Bishop's rare love poems; it shows her love for both
Lota and North America:
Dear, my compass
still points north
to wooden houses
and blue eyes,
fairy-tales where
flaxen-headed
younger sons
bring home the goose,
love in hay-lofts,
Protestants, and heavy drinkers...
Springs are backward,
but crab-apples
ripen to rubies,
cranberries
to drops of blood,
and swans can paddle
icy water,
so hot the blood
126
in those webbed feet.
— Cold as it is, we'd
go to bed, dear,
early, but never to keep warm, (quoted in Schwartz 86)
As in the letter about possibly buying a house in Connecticut for herself and
Lota, Bishop expresses in this poem her wish to take her South American
lover to North America with her and thus to combine her love for the
Americas. Furthermore, Bishop adopts here the Brazilian gesture of joking
about oneself lovingly (she was both a "Protestant" and a "heavy drinker")
while talking about the North. Although the world of the North is "icy," it
is an environment that Bishop loves and in which she locates love
(especially in the poem’ s last stanza).
But the toll which her work for her park in Rio took on Lota seems to
have made Bishop feel increasingly left out. This does not mean, however,
that she rejected Brazil. Quite the contrary: in 1965 she bought a colonial
house in Ouro Preto in the state of Minas Gerais, which had been built in
1690. Bishop had the house restored for the next two years and nam ed it
"Casa Mariana" in honor of Marianne Moore and also because it was located
on the road between Ouro Preto and a village called Mariana. Because of the
growing emotional distance to Lota and because of financial needs,
however, Bishop decided toward the end of 1965 to accept her first teaching
position at the University of Washington in Seattle for the spring and
Lummer of 1966. She writes to her aunt Grace on November 15, 1965,
I am really going to take that job for two terms, leaving
here about December 28th probably. I don’ t like the idea,
but feel I should - and it pays well - and they have
written me such nice letters. . . . My hope is that Lota
will be able to join me for a month, and we can see the
127
Big TREES - Mt. Rainier - San Francisco, etc. on the way
back. Since I have never been west of Albany it will all
be new to me. Lota is so damnedly busy I don't think
she'll miss me too much.
But Bishop's attempt to make a new part of the Americas her home while
retaining the emotional home of her relationship with Lota failed.
In Seattle, she met a young woman named Roxanne, w ith whom she
probably started an affair there. But nonetheless Bishop traveled through
Europe with Lota late in 1966 and then returned to Brazil. However, Lota
had a nervous breakdown toward the end of the year, apparently caused by
the strain of her work for her park and by the deteriorating relationship
w ith Bishop. This course of events made Bishop feel homeless again. While
she still loved Brazil, she was also thinking about returning to the United
States. In one of her grimmest letters she writes to her aunt on January 29,
1967,
Very sad things have been happening here. Lota got
much worse in London and we had to get back as soon
as possible. She was then treated at home for a while,
then spent about six weeks in the hospital with insulin
treatments - I went up to Ouro Preto for some of that
time, since I was of no use and she couldn't see anyone
at all. We went up to Samambaia for Christmas but had
to come back right away - and now she is in the
apartment with the maid, and two nurses - 1 had to
move out, not enough room - and also, the way these
things are - she alternately loves me and turns on me
violently. It is not my fault, really - but 6 1/2 years over
work for a stupid, corrupt, and ungrateful country. . . .
Meanwhile I am homeless and don’ t know what on
earth to do next - I tried a hotel for a while then came
up here to a "rest home" (give me a boiler factory next
time!) because after six months of this the Dr felt I
needed a "rest," vitamin shots, sleeping pills, etc. I
128
think I AM beginning to feel better but didn’ t realize
how tired I was until I took to my bed for a few days.
I’ m going out now to see the analyst for a talk about
L’ s state and my plans - I have that dam ned book I'm
supposed to write, etc. - may go travelling in Brazil -
may go back to the U S a while. I can't see or speak to
poor L for at least six months - my going to Seattle
(which she didn't object to at the time) is now all mixed
up in her mind with the general "betrayal" of her park -
and as far as that goes, I think she is perfectly right - the
dirty politicians certainly did their worst.
Although she is disenchanted with Lota, with Brazil, and especially with
Brazilian politics, Bishop is still thinking about travelling in Brazil and
seems not to be willing to just go back to the United States. She calls herself
"homeless" although she has her house in Ouro Preto, which further
illustrates that for Bishop home is an emotional, not a spatial concept.
Three months later, as Lota has recovered somewhat, Bishop is hopeful
about her relationship with Lota again and seems to have given up the idea
of returning to the United States any time soon, telling her aunt what she
intends to do "If ever I get to the USA." While she called Brazil "a stupid,
corrupt, and ungrateful country" in the earlier letter, she now realizes that
this country had become her home and was probably closer to her heart
than the United States.
Still, later in 1967, Bishop went on a trip to New York City, it seems that
by that time her relationship with Lota had been broken off or had at least
cooled off significantly. While Bishop was in New York, Lota came to see
her there. But during her first night in the city Lota took an overdose of
Valium. She was hospitalized and died nearly a week later. Following this
devastating experience, Bishop returned to Brazil for six weeks, but there
she was blamed by most of her and Lota's friends for Lota's death and Lota’ s
129
sister contested the will, according to which Bishop would get the Rio
apartment. Later, after her return to the United States, Bishop wrote to her
cousin Mary about these difficult weeks, "The stretch in Brazil - six weeks -
was awful. Of course - I had to pack up & move from two places. Took
everything up to my old house in Ouro Preto since I want to keep that if I
can afford to." Despite her unpleasant experiences, she is not ready to give
up Brazil or her house there. She adds at the end of her letter, "I hope to get
back to my old house in Brazil in July."
But although she still wants Brazil to be part of her concept of home,
Bishop decides to get away from everything for the first six months of 1968.
Therefore she moves to San Francisco in January 1968, where she lives with
Roxanne and Roxanne’ s eighteen-month old son H ugh (called Boogie). She
tells her aunt about this living arrangement, "This provides me with a kind
of a 'family;' [Roxanne] keeps me cheered up, and also is doing a lot of
secretarial work for me - 1 need help with the book [Black Beans and
Diamonds! I am working on." Clearly, after Lota’ s death, Bishop is looking
for a new family substitute. But this does not mean that she is ready to
disassociate herself from her former adopted home. While living in San
Francisco, she frequently uses the library of the University of California at
Berkeley to do research for her second book on Brazil, Black Beans and
D iam onds, which she never finished.
Later in 1968 she takes both Roxanne and Boogie to Ouro Preto with her,
an act of combining North and South, similar to the plan of moving to
Connecticut with Lota which she had made five years earlier. But although
her love for Brazil remains, she writes to her aunt in June 1969, "I am pretty
130
fed up with the people I had thought were my friends all these years,"
because she is still being blamed for Lota's death. But Bishop stays in Brazil
nonetheless. However, in a long letter of February 5, 1970 to her aunt Grace,
she writes in another demonstration of how im portant the emotional
component of home is to her, "I feel terribly isolated here and want very
much to get back to the USA, in fact, I am thinking of New York again, even
if I don’ t like it as a place to live - almost all my friends are there, at least."
But by April 1970, she is again less certain if she really wants to give up her
house in Ouro Preto: "I may keep it as a part-time home," she tells her aunt
then.
This lingering love for Brazil also gave Bishop the impetus to keep
working on what was going to be "a book of prose about Brazil. It is
tentatively called Black Beans and Diamonds. It's to be a combination of a
travel book, a memoir, and a picture book," as she told an interviewer in
1965 (Brown, "Interview" 302). With this book Bishop wanted to make up
for the heavy alterations which the Time/Life editors had made to her
Brazil book and in it she was planning to give her more personal response
to Brazil. In the introduction to her translation of The Diary of "Helena
Morlev" Bishop had already written that "The staple diet of Brazil consists
of dried black beans and rice, with whatever meat, beef or pork, salted or
fresh, can be afforded or obtained. And black beans, instead of the 'bread' of
other countries, seem to be equated with life itself" (Diary xxx). Life in Brazil
the way she really perceived it was going to be the subject of Black Beans and
D iam onds. The plan for putting things right originated immediately after
her Brazil book had been published. On January 18, 1962, Bishop had written
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to her aunt Grace, "Now that I have done that awful LIFE book I think I’ ll
write one of my own about Brazil and say all the things I couldn't say in it.
This means some more travelling - I may use my fellowship just to travel
in Brazil."
Instead of giving general information about Brazil, as she had to do in
the book for Time/Life, Bishop seems to have planned to compile personal
vignettes of Brazilian life in Black Beans and Diamonds. One of these was to
be called "The Procession of St. George." After quoting a Brazilian
newspaper article about the 1963 St. George procession in Rio de Janeiro, she
adds her own impressions of the event, mediated for her Northern readers:
Strangers talked to each other and made jokes; it was all
very friendly. One cop got off his motorcycle and
pushed us back personally.
"Get back, you macumbeirasi" he said, good-natured
and contemptuous. Macumbeiras are the female
practitioners of macumba. or voodoo - witches, that is,
bad or good. Such is the sad state to which the once
proud and wealthy cult of St. George has fallen.
The thousands of "the faithful" that moved along so
slowly ahead of the-saint were from the class of the very
poor, mostly negroes & mulattoes & more women than
men, many carrying babies or dragging small children
by the hand. There were witch-like old crones,
mumbling their rosaries. The women wore wispy black
mantillas and both men & women carried candles,
yard-long church ones or ordinary wax ones, stuck in
paper "lily" cups. Tipped and dripping, limp from being
held so long, they really looked like wilted cala lilies.
The children had candles too, and small starchy flags,
Brazilian ones, green and yellow, or white ones with
the red cross of St. George.
And at last, on his white charger, came St. George,
carried by young men. He looked brand new— perhaps
he is annually re-painted.
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Although she remains the outsider, Bishop's description of the event is
adm iring and loving despite some slight criticism. It is reminiscent of the
Ash W ednesday procession in Diamantina, which appears in Bishop's
translation of The Diary of Helena Morlev. She had not been able to express
her love so strongly in the Brasil book since the Time/Life editors wanted a
more objective introduction to the country.
As in her poems, Bishop was planning, in Black Beans and Diamonds, to
present Brazil as quaint. This presentation would show both Brazil’ s
distance from North America and the ease with which this distance could
be overcome. In a short piece entitled "Speak, Parrot,” for example, she was
going to present the hyperbolic penchant of Brazilians and their adm iration
for animals:
Joao was a rich parrot who lived in Rio de Janeiro. He
was 69 years old and had lived with the same family of
millionaires for 67 of them. Sometimes the latest batch
of children would tell their friends that he was "over a
hundred," but he said nothing. Let them think it. He
had always had the very best of care and was actually
rather young for 69. He was very big with an eye like an
expensive bright topaz, and long bright yellow and black
tail feathers. . . . Being a Brazilian parrot he called for
coffee instead of crackers. He could say Good morning,
Good night, It's time to go to bed, Hush!, Viva
Presidente (pres in 1912) and sing the first four bars of
the national anthem.
As she does in many of her poems, Bishop adopts here both the perspective
of Brazilians and of an animal. She makes the parrot, who would usually be
considered an outsider, the center of attention and thus subverts power
relations. Similarly, she is trying to make the outsider Brazil a center of
133
attention and thus to help it overcome its subordination in the Western
H em isphere.
As she had intended to do in her Brazil book~and was only partly
allowed to--, Bishop wanted to raise consciousness in the United States for
Brazil and to show to her fellow countrymen that Brazil was not inferior to
N orth America in all respects. In an essay she was going to entitle "A Trip
on the Rio Sao Francisco” she writes,
Brazilians are extremely clean people, as a rule, rich and
poor alike. The poor may be forced to live in squalor
and filth, but somehow they manage to keep
themselves personally clean, and put on clean clothes
when their work is done. In the cities, a plumber or
carpenter will never come to do a job in his working
clothes. He comes dressed up, with his working clothes
in a brief-case, and changes, and afterwards takes for
granted that he will be allowed to take a shower in the
servant’ s bathroom and change again before going out
on the street. The favelas. the slums, smell bad, but the
crowds, even under a tropical sun, rarely do. Upper-
class Brazilians are shocked by the habits of other
nations. A friend of mine sent a son to a very good
English preparatory school and almost took him out
again when she discovered the boys had baths only
twice a week, and that several had to use the same bath
water. On a trip I made on the Amazon several years
ago, we had over six hundred hammock passengers,
and yet they all seemed to appear freshly showered,
somehow or other, every afternoon, w ith clean shirts or
cotton dresses, combing out their wet hair.
Telling her N orth American readers that they may have something to learn
from the South is a way in which Bishop mediates between different parts
of the Western Hemisphere and in which she is trying to bring North and
South closer together.
134
Bishop was unable or unwilling to disassociate herself from the country
in which she had come to feel at home. After a turbulent separation from
Roxanne she stayed in Ouro Preto until the m iddle of 1970. By that time
Robert Lowell had obtained for her a teaching position at Harvard
University and so Bishop moved to Boston before the start of the Fall
semester. But she is not ready to give up her Brazilian base: until 1974,
when she finally sells her Casa Mariana, she goes back to Ouro Preto every
year. Bishop remains at Harvard until 1977, when she accepts a position at
New York University. In Boston, her search for a home and for the
emotional connotations of feeling at home continue. At H arvard she met
Alice Methfessel, who was working as a secretary there. Their relationship
lasted until Bishop's death in 1979, when Ms. Methfessel became Bishop's
literary executrix. While living in Boston, Bishop preserved a loving
memory of Brazil, filling her apartment with a cornucopia of objects that
rem inded her of Brazil. Lloyd Schwartz recounts that "her rooms in were a
virtual gallery of Brazilian artifacts" (Schwartz 95).
Bishop also continued her inter-Americanness with regard to her travels.
In 1972 and 1973, for example, she went with Alice Methfessel, among other
places, to Ecuador and to the Galdpagos Islands. In her late years she was still
trying to contribute to a greater unity of the Americas, as poems like "One
A rt,” "Crusoe in England," "12 O’ Clock News," "Pink Dog," and "Santar#m"
illustrate. Having lived in a variety of American places and having
struggled w ith the concept of home throughout her life Bishop strove to
enlarge, in her life as well as in her work, the notion of "home" and to
135
make the whole Western Hemisphere her emotional home. She died on
October 6, 1979, at her home in Boston of a ruptured cerebral aneurysm.
136
Topography displays no favorites,
North's as near as West.
More delicate than the historians'
are the map-makers' colors.
— Elizabeth Bishop, "The Map"
Chapter III: Geography and Outsiders: Elizabeth Bishop's Early Poems
Because of Elizabeth Bishop’ s biography it is not surprising that an
identification with outsiders characterizes so many of her poems and
stories. Adrienne Rich comments in her homage to Bishop on the
"experience of outsiderhood, closely— though not exclusively— linked with
the essential outsiderhood of a lesbian identity" and she adm ires "how the
outsider's eye enables Bishop to perceive other kinds of outsiders and to
identify, or try to identify, with them" (Rich 127). Although Rich may be
overemphasizing the role of Bishop's "lesbian identity" and does not
mention the obvious connection of Bishop's sympathy w ith outsiders to
her disempowered outsider status as a child, Bishop's "outsiderhood" is
certainly a constant feature of her work. It is also related to her desire to
bring about a greater unity of the Western Hemisphere in and through her
work. In this chapter, I will examine the early manifestations of Bishop's
em pathy with outsiders in the poems of North & South (1946) and of A
Cold Spring (1955), which was published in one volume together with
N orth & South and for which Bishop received the Pulitzer Prize in 1956. I
will particularly show that Bishop’ s empathy with outsiders is connected to
her use of geography. Her geographies are inner landscapes that employ
137
childlike enjoyment, personification and animation, and the crossing of
boundaries.
Bishop's childlike perspective in her depictions of exotic places has often
been commented on. But this same perspective of wonder can be observed
in poems about familiar settings, where, as Helen Vendler has pointed out,
it helps defamiliarize the domestic. "The Map," the first poem in N orth &
South, already illustrates the poet's fascination with where things are in
relation to each other and her desire to give equal importance to every part.
Bishop toys with geography and its representations, asking playful questions
like
Or does the land lean down to lift the sea from under,
drawing it unperturbed around itself?
along the fine tan sandy shelf
is the land tugging at the sea from under?
Throughout this poem, Bishop uses the vision of a child who is introduced
into a new realm of knowledge. The depictions on the map are playfully
animated. As mentioned in the previous chapter, this fascination with
maps and with their colors can be traced back to Bishop’ s experience in
prim er school at the age of five. Her childlike investigation takes nothing
for granted. Therefore she wants to know, for example, "Are they assigned,
or can the countries pick their colors?".
Formally, this three-stanza poem moves from an eight-line stanza with
embracing rhymes to and eleven-line unrhymed stanza and back to an
eight-line stanza with embracing rhymes. This arrangem ent complements
the irregular meter, which mixes trochees, iambs, and free verse. Bishop’ s
mixture of irregularities and regularities is a way of expressing the speaker's
138
excitement as well as the harmony and (embracing) connectedness she is
seeking. The observer's emotions and fantasies are projected onto the map:
Labrador's yellow, where the moony Eskimo
has oiled it. We can stroke these lovely bays,
under a glass as if they were expected to blossom,
or as if to provide a clean cage for invisible fish.
She wants to touch or "stroke" the map to endow it with life
(metonymically invoked through a "fish”). Later on, she speaks, for
example, of "Norway's hare run[ning] south in agitation."
By animating the map and the countries represented on it, the speaker
also seeks to empower these countries. She manifests her wish to give equal
importance to each of them, a wish that later led to Bishop's pleas, directed
at her N orth American audience, not to look down on other parts of the
Western Hemisphere, especially her adopted homeland, Brazil. She ends
"The Map" with "Topography displays no favorites; N orth’ s as near as
West. / More delicate than the historians' are the map-makers' colors." By
the time she wrote this poem, Bishop had already started to be a traveler
and her idea of herself as a disempowered outsider led her to pursue
equality for all— including all countries. Having by that time been at home
in Nova Scotia, Massachusetts, New York, and Florida, Bishop can say that,
at least to her, "North's as near as West" and that there should be "no
favorites" because all these areas have their own charm and merit and they
all form part of a larger American entity. When she publishes her first
collection of poems, Bishop sees herself as a "map-maker" primarily of
N orth America, its different geographies, climates, and cultures. But with
Questions of Travel (1965) the realm of her map-making would come to
139
include parts of South America as well. In her poetic maps, Bishop uses
"delicate colors," i.e. depictions of American scenes that are colored by her
emotional response to them, not by the facts of a "historian."
The innocent, inquisitive, and playful vision of "The Map" is what
Bishop misses in the Bible illustrations that are the topic of "Over 2,000
Illustrations and a Complete Concordance." In that poem the speaker
deplores that we "looked and looked our infant sight away." An "infant
sight," she implies, would be more joyful, lively, and wondrous than the
illustrator's technique of presenting travels as "serious, engravable."
Because of that unexciting technique "The Seven W onders of the World are
tired / . . . the other scenes, / innumerable, though equally sad and still." An
"infant sight" would disrupt this seriousness and monotony; it would not
have "Everything only connected by and' and 'and.'" Relating this concept
back to "The Map," we can see that the "infant sight" Bishop employs in
that poem is what enables the speaker to disregard and play with the map's
boundaries and to see the greater entity (like the Western Hemisphere)
instead of concentrating on its smaller constituents (like the United States).
In contrast to the "Over 2,000 Illustrations" about which she writes,
Bishop's own images are characterized by an outsider's loving
understanding and a childlike fascination that result from the identification
with the object of perception. "The Bight," for example, demonstrates
Bishop's pleasure in observing nature and her immersion in it. This
poem ’ s speaker seeks a synaesthetic enjoyment of her surroundings: she
wants to see, "smell" and "hear" her environment and at the same time she
tries to connect the works of nature and the works of man. "If one were
140
Baudelaire," she says, "one could probably hear it [i.e. the water] turning to
marim ba music." She admires this French poet, whose portrait later
decorated her desk in Ouro Preto, and like him she wants to become one
with her surroundings. Therefore, in her eyes, the boats that have been
swept away by a storm "lie on their sides . . . like tom-open, unanswered
letters." Bishop sees her surroundings as inviting communication and
empathy. When she observes that "The bight is littered with old
correspondences," she is not condemning human intrusion into nature;
instead, she delights in the interplay: "All the untidy activity continues, /
awful but cheerful." Emotional communication with nature and an
immersion in it are what Bishop is after.
She wants to become one with the landscape, animals or people that
appear in her poems because she is, as she writes in "At the Fishhouses," "a
believer in total immersion." In this poem, the water— always an attraction
for Bishop— which the speaker is observing is a metaphor for her own poetic
re-creation of a place:
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
draw n from the old hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.
Bishop wants her poetic pictures to be just as "clear, moving, [and] utterly
free" as the water she observes here. The landscapes of her poems are to
come out of reality, out of "the old hard mouth / of the world" and its
'rocky breasts" and are then to be made "moving" (in the double sense of
he word, the way Emily Dickinson would use it) and "utterly free" through
141
the speaker's interaction with them, which gives them a life of their own.
Bishop's pictures are therefore not stable but constantly evolving. They do
not hold still but are, as she writes, "flowing" and in an instant "flown"
away and altered or replaced by other pictures. Since, for Bishop, knowledge
is evanescent, so is place.1 6
One effect of Bishop’ s immersion in her geographies is the disregard for
boundaries, another is the animation of her places. Several of Bishop’ s
poetic places assume a certain uncontrolability that facilitates their crossing
of boundaries. Thus, on Bishop's map, "The names of seashore towns run
out to sea, / the names of cities cross the neighboring mountains / — the
printer here experiencing the same excitement / as when emotion too far
exceeds its cause." Geographic entities need the emotional response of the
person who represents them— the "excitement" and "emotion" of the
printer or poet— in order for their representations on a map or in a poem to
cross boundaries. The representer's emotional involvement— i.e. the
identification of the subject with the object, of the self with the Other, of the
jinsider with the outsider— makes geography uncontrolable as it assumes a
'life of its own. Because of such techniques Bishop has been called, like Walt
Whitman, a poet of wildness: "Wildness in Bishop, is like the ocean, or the
jwind, or the unstoppable flood of feeling: when it breaks into her world it
threatens the boundaries she has so skillfully created" (Wallace 95). Like
{ 1 6 Elizabeth Spires considers "At the Fishhouses" an illustration of
Bishop's belief "that what little we know to be true keeps changing" (Spires
23). She argues that "At the Fishhouses" is "a meditation on empirical
knowledge vs. absolute truth, the human problem of 'netting' or knowing
anything w ith any degree of certainty in a physically ever-changing world"
([Spires 20).____________________________________________________________
142
Ezra Pound, Bishop wants to make her representations "new." She does so
by giving the represented place a life and voice of its own. Those emerge
from the onlooker's emotional interaction with her geography.
As "The Weed" shows, Bishop also uses such immersion and the
resulting uncontrolability in purely mental landscapes. The speaker of this
poem invents the poem’s geography in a dream; she projects herself not
only into a space but also into its vegetation, recounting how a phallic weed
is growing through her heart:
. . . A slight young weed
had pushed up through the heart and its
green head was nodding on the breast.
The weed stood in the severed heart.
"What are you doing there?" I asked.
It lifted its head all dripping wet
(with my own thoughts?)
and answered then: "I grow," it said,
"but to divide your heart again."
The speaker is aware that the weed is in herself and that she is in the weed,
projecting part of herself onto it and hoping to control it w ith her thoughts.
The fear of division, which Bishop expresses in this poem, is the flip side of
her desire for harmony and unity, a desire she was to extend to all parts of
the W estern Hemisphere.
With Bishop, the crossing of boundaries is not limited to spatial units. In
"The Man-Moth," she transcends not only the limits of what is below and
w hat is above the ground, but she also takes on the division between
hum an and animal life, darkness and light, reality and dream. And, among
later poems, "Exchanging Hats" playfully takes on gender boundaries,
evoking a shared "transvestite twist;" "Santarem" delights in the "conflux"
143
of two rivers, of past and present, of North and South; and "Sonnet" depicts
the metaphorical journey from being "Caught" inside boundaries to being
"Freed" from them.
A way of achieving the transcendence of divisions in Bishop's
geographies is the animation and personification of her poetic places. In
"The Map," for example, peninsulas are humanized when they "take the
w ater between thum b and finger / like women feeling for the smoothness
of yard-goods." Similarly, in "From the Country to the City," a city is
depicted as having "long, long legs" that carry it nowhere and thus make it
the "wickedest clown" whose dreams go "out countrywards." Through the
speaker's mediation, geographic shapes become living beings and as such
they can act upon the observer. The result of animating "The Imaginary
Iceberg" of another one of Bishop's poems, of depicting it as taking "repose”
on a layer of snow, where it "stands and stares," is that the iceberg can then
"behoove the soul" of the onlooker. In "A Cold Spring," life similarly
originates in the scenery when a calf is born on the side of "big and aimless
hills": "the calf got up promptly / and seemed inclined to feel gay" because,
Bishop implies, the life that comes out of geography is playful and joyful.
This joy— perceived by the eye— must spill over to the poet— the m ind that
converts the observed place into an internal landscape— and, ultimately, to
the reader in order for the portrayal of a place to be authentic; it must be
passed on from "eye" to "I" to "you."
As the speaker/ poet's "eye" and "I" become one, the geography which the
"eye" perceives is invested with the "I'"s reflections and emotions. In
"Chemin de Fer" the speaker is walking "Alone" and "with a pounding
144
heart" along railroad tracks. Through the image of a tear she projects her
mood into her natural surroundings, comparing the pond she passes to a
"tear" and perceiving in it (her own emotional) "injuries":
I saw the little pond
where the dirty hermit lives,
lie like an old tear
holding onto its injuries
lucidly year after year.
The indentation of every other line and especially the move from the
regular iambic trimeter of "I saw the little pond" to the metric irregularities
which start in the following stanza and which become overwhelming in the
lines that contain "tear" and "injuries" are additional illustrations of the
speaker's emotional upheaval. Since she identifies with the geography that
surrounds her, the poetic place becomes the vessel for her inner self.
W riting gives an emotional component to the place in the process of
depicting it. Therefore, in "Large Bad Picture," in which "are scribbled
hundreds of fine black birds / hanging in n's in banks," "One can hear their
crying, crying."
Since the poet, through her observation and her poetic recreation, puts
herself into her geographies, her places are individual rather than general.
Bishop’ s view of "Florida," in the poem of that name, is a personal response
to the state, which makes her Florida different from the Florida someone
else m ight perceive:
The state with the prettiest name,
the state that floats in brackish water,
The state full of long S-shaped birds, blue and white,
145
and unseen hysterical birds who rush up the scale
every time in a tantrum.
Tanagers embarrassed by their flashiness,
and pelicans whose delight it is to clown;
Enormous turtles, helpless and mild,
The palm trees clatter in the stiff breeze
like the bills of the pelicans. The tropical rain comes
dow n
to freshen the tide-looped strings of fading shells:
with these the monotonous, endless, sagging coast-line
is delicately ornamented.
The use of "delicately" in this poem refers the reader back to the first poem
in the collection, "The Map," where Bishop had adm ired the delicate colors
a map-maker uses. In "Florida," she is drawing a personal map of the state
the way she experiences it. The images with which she fills it are also
delicate ones, mediated by the speaker’ s sympathy or by her identification
with them. As she had implied in "The Map," Bishop does not seek the
factual representations of a historian but instead wants to create delicate,
colorful, inner scenes. Like her "The Gentleman of Shalott," she "loves /
that sense of constant re-adjustment." With this self-reflexive comment
Bishop underlines that her poetic landscapes are not stable; since they
depend on the onlooker's emotions, they change with these emotions.
I
As Bishop writes in "Cape Breton," she wants to dissociate herself from
other people's visions of a landscape she recreates because, for her,
landscapes are individual, inner renderings or creations:
Whatever the landscape had of meaning appears to
have been
abandoned,
unless the road is holding it back, in the interior,
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where we cannot see,
where deep lakes are reputed to be.
It is into the "interior" of landscape that Bishop wants to put her voice. And
this interior can only be reached through the interior of the perceiver.17 In
order to decipher "the admirable scriptures made on stones by stones," the
hieroglyphs of nature, the speaker must put her heart into what she
observes. By arguing in this poem that "these regions now have little to say
for themselves," Bishop justifies the task she has set herself of becoming the
voice of geography and landscape.
Since they are commonly being silenced, geography and landscapes are
outsiders. Therefore they elicit Bishop's empathy. But especially her early
poems also show empathy with numerous human outsiders, a
characteristic that will continue in her middle period with poems like
"Manuelzinho" and 'The Burglar of Babylon" and in her late work w ith "In
the Waiting Room" and "Crusoe in England." A num ber of her early poems
express Bishop's socialist politics. While a politicizing dimension has been
largely absent from Bishop criticism so far, Jeredith Merrin has draw n
attention to a related issue. In her feminist analysis of Bishop and Marianne
Moore, M errin praises Bishop for "juxtaposing hum an perspectives and
presenting a variety of voices . . . [and for her link] between multiple
perspectivism and a strong distaste for dogmatism, egocentricity, and
17 As Jan B. Gordon has shown, Bishop's poetry is closer to map-making
than to landscape painting, "which is to say that scale and perspective
become primary considerations. Although the genre would seem to be that
of the landscape, map-making is really a pseudo-landscape, enacting . . .
bricolage" (Gordon 13). While this argument is correct, Gordon fails to stress
that an important aspect of this bricolage is the onlooker's emotional
response to the place she charts.
147
domination" (Merrin 143). But Merrin's contention that these qualities of
Bishop's work are "rooted in the experience of women who have
themselves been 'made to feel' the power of others" is less convincing
(Merrin 143). Instead, Bishop's desire to empower all kinds of voices in her
poetry is more likely to stem from her spatial movements in the Western
Hemisphere as well as from her childhood.
Bishop does not foreground the political or social component of her
poetry; she disliked the use of literature for muckraking. As she told an
interviewer in response to his question about growing up and attending
college in the Marxist thirties:
I was always opposed to political thinking as such for
writers. What good writing came out of that period,
really? Perhaps a few good poem s;. . . A great deal of it
seemed to me very false. Politically I considered myself
a socialist, but I disliked "social conscious" writing. . . .
The atmosphere in Vassar was left-wing; it was the
popular thing. . . . [But] I felt that most of the college
girls didn't know much about social conditions. . . . I
had lived with poor people and knew something of
poverty at firsthand. . . . I'm much more interested in
social problems and politics now [in 1965] than I was in
the '30s. (Brown 294-5)
Bishop's dislike for what she calls "social conscious" writing is not in
opposition to her designation of herself as a socialist. Her poetry
unobtrusively argues for egalitarian empowerment. Therefore Bishop often
lends her voice to outsiders. These include women as well as ethnic
minorities, other countries as well as animals. By giving a voice to everyone
and everything in the Western Hemisphere Bishop goes against elitist
definitions of America. Early poems like "The Fish," "The Man-Moth,"
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"Roosters," "A Miracle for Breakfast," "Varick Street," "Songs for a Colored
Singer," "Cootchie," "Faustina, or Rock Roses," and "Jerdnimo's House" all
present different kinds of outsiders with whom Bishop empathizes or
whom she empowers by giving them her voice.
"The Fish" starts with "I caught a tremendous fish" and it ends with
"And I let the fish go." This final decision comes after the speaker has
closely observed the fish, a "venerable / and homely" animal and has
"admired his sullen face" and many of his other attributes. She is conscious
of her "victory," but she uses her position of power to give the fish back its
own power and freedom, thus presenting a model for the behavior Bishop
w ould have liked to see in the Western Hemisphere.
While 'The Fish" shows the identification of the hum an with the
animal, "View of the Capitol from the Library of Congress," similar to "The
Bight," illustrates the absorption of human activity by nature. From her
vantage point of an office in the Library of Congress, where Bishop worked
as Consultant in Poetry in 1948-49, the speaker faintly hears the music of
"the Air Force Band." But "the trees" between herself and the band "must
intervene, / catching the music in their leaves / like gold-dust, till each big
leaf sags." In the same way that we can absorb nature, nature can absorb us,
Bishop suggests. a
Later in her career, her poem "In the Waiting Room," was to express
Bishop's feeling that something "held us all together / or made us all just
one," a reason for her identification with all kinds of outsiders. In her early
surreal poem "The Man-Moth," inspired by a newspaper misprint for
"mammoth,” Bishop tells the story of a forlorn creature living in subway
149
tunnels and only rarely coming up to the surface of the earth. This "Man-
j Moth," like Bishop herself, is a powerless outsider, lost in an indifferent,
strange world:
The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat.
It lies at his feet like a circle for a doll to stand on,
and he makes an inverted pin, the point magnetized to
the moon.
He does not see the moon; he observes only her vast
properties,
feeling the queer light on his hands, neither warm nor
cold,
of a temperature impossible to record in thermometers.
The "Man-Moth" tries "fearfully" and in vain to climb up to the moon but
never gives up hope. His hopefulness further estranges him from the
mainstream, because "(Man, standing below him, has no such illusions.)"
The poem reveals Bishop’ s admiration and compassion for the creature
who "always seats himself facing the wrong way" in subway cars and who
therefore "travels backward.” Her admiration for the nonconformist can
again be traced back to Bishop's childhood experience. As she writes in "The
Country Mouse": when everyone around her was patriotic, she "didn’ t
t
want to be an American" and she "would have refused [to sing the war
songs in school] if I had dared" (Prose 26). This early questioning of narrow
i and exclusive definitions that were forced onto her led to Bishop's rejection
‘! of conformity and exclusiveness in favor of a heterogeneous harmony.
i
! To help achieve such harmony, Bishop asks her reader in the poem's
i
final stanza to reach out to the Other, strange as he, she, or it may be:
i
. . . Then from the lids
I
i one tear, his only possession, like the bee's sting, slips.
Slyly he palms it, and if you're not paying attention
150
i he'll swallow it. However, if you watch, he'll hand it
! over,
cool as from underground springs and pure enough to
drink.
The "Man-Moth"’s tear symbolizes the speaker’ s compassion and makes
this compassion a source of a renewed (and better, harmonious) life. Only if
we "watch" and watch out for the Other, Bishop implies, can there be
greater harmony.
Another, more overt, challenge to power relations and a more forceful
plea for universal equality are contained in "Roosters," Bishop’ s most
obviously feminist poem. She writes about roosters— and more widely about
men in positions of power:
Deep from protruding chests
in green-gold medals dressed,
planned to command and terrorize the rest,
the many wives
who lead hens' lives
of being courted and despised;
deep from raw throats
a senseless order floats
all over town. . . .
The speaker goes on to ask the roosters, "what right have you to give /
commands and tell us how to live"? This questioning of authority is
supported by the use of impure rhymes, which also subvert the apparently
clear-cut position of power. Bishop, however, never considered herself a
| feminist, but instead— more generally— a speaker for all kinds of outsiders
| and victims of oppression. She told an interviewer that when she read this
I
' poem to friends two or three decades after writing it, "I suddenly realized it !
151
sounded like a feminist tract, which it wasn't meant to sound like at all to
begin with" (Starbuck 320).
But in rare cases Bishop cannot stop herself from going further than
merely calling for sympathy for the disadvantaged. Although she prefers
subtle depiction to overt criticism or calls for action, in her early poem "A
Miracle for Breakfast" Bishop speaks out forcefully against social inequality.
She calls this her "Depression poem. It was written shortly after the time of
souplines and men selling apples, around 1936 or so. It was my 'social
conscious' poem, a poem about hunger" (Brown 297). The poem's speaker is
a member of a group of outsiders standing in the cold and "waiting for
coffee and the charitable crumb / that was going to be served from a certain
balcony." She is waiting, against all odds, for the relief of her hunger,
hoping "that the crumb / would be a loaf each, buttered by a miracle." But
the Biblical miracle of the bread multiplying does not occur. Instead, a man
appears on the balcony.
A servant handed him the makings of a miracle,
consisting of one lone cup of coffee
and one roll, which he proceeded to crumb,
his head, so to speak, in the clouds— along with the sun.
Was the man crazy? What under the sun
was he trying to do, up there on his balcony!
Each man received one rather hard crumb,
which some flicked scornfully into the river,
and, in a cup, one drop of the coffee.
Some of us stood around, waiting for the miracle.
But the only "miracle" that occurs comes in the form of a dream, in which
the speaker sees herself living in a "mansion, made for me by a miracle"
152
drinking "gallons of coffee." But eventually she has to realize that this
vision is merely an illusion. The poem ends:
We licked up the crumb and swallowed the coffee.
A window across the river caught the sun
as if the miracle were working, on the wrong balcony.
This is probably Bishop's strongest expression of her disillusionment w ith
the American Dream of plenitude for all. The poem paints a stark contrast
between the rich man— symbolically positioned above, on the balcony of his
villa— and the poor people standing in the cold, waiting to be fed by him.
The entrance of the poor speaker into the class that can drink as much coffee
as they want to and that can look down on others from their balcony is
revealed to be a dream. The crossing of social demarcations is shown to be
impossible because even if a miracle were to occur, it would not favor the
poor but would happen "on the wrong balcony." Seen against the
background of Bishop's life in Brazil, which was to begin fifteen years after
she had written this poem, it is not surprising that during this later period
she would continue to identify with the disadvantaged, i.e. with Brazil, and
ask those in power, i.e. the United States, to share their (material and
intellectual) prosperity.
In "Varick Street" she presents another image of social inequality and
injustice. While the factories of that poem are humanized, (they "struggle
f
j awake," are "veined with pipes," "Trying to breathe" through their
i "elongated nostrils"), the people in them are dehumanized: w ithout stating :
! i
' who utters the sentence, Bishop puts ends each of the three stanzas the |
I
; refrain "And I shall sell you sell you / sell you of course, my dear, and you’ lll
sell m e." She seems to imply that even machines can be more hum an and !
I humane than factory owners and profiteers who use their power in an
unconscientious manner.
Elizabeth Bishop does not only deal with inequalities based on gender (as
in "Roosters") or on social class (as in "A Miracle for Breakfast" and "Varick
Street"). She is also concerned with overcoming ethnic distinctions, a wish
that was greatly reinforced through the experience of peaceful race relations
in Brazil later on. Since Bishop’ s idea of America includes democratic
equality as well as ethnic diversity, she strives to combine those concepts in
some of her poems by arguing for ethnic equality. The first stanza of her
poem "Songs for a Colored Singer," for example, poignantly opposes the
poor colored speaker to her more wealthy surroundings, implying that the
various cultures of the Western Hemisphere should have equal status:
A washing hangs upon the line,
but it’ s not mine.
None of the things that I can see
belong to me.
The neighbors got a radio with an aerial;
we got a little portable.
They got a lot of closet space;
we got a suitcase.
Rather than trying to find a culprit or calling for action Bishop is, as usual,
j more interested in expressing her sympathy for the disadvantaged. Rather
( than being dogmatic, she leaves the conclusions up to her readers.
In her poem "Cootchie," Bishop introduces her audience to a servant
j
j who went "black into white."
| Her life was spent
in caring for Miss Lula, who is deaf,
eating her dinner off the kitchen sink
while Lula ate hers off the kitchen table.
154
Even at Cootchie's funeral there is less lament for her than there is for
i
"Miss Lula's losses." But at that moment, the speaker of the poem can no
longer remain in her position of a distant observer: she asks "who will
shout and make her understand?” However, the poem expresses little hope
that this call for sympathy will be answered. Therefore, the call is directed at
Bishop's readers rather than at the characters in her poem. There is also
little hope that the children of the poor black family depicted in "A Norther-
-Key West" will ever wear clothes other than "ancient winter coats . . . once
w orn by an immense white child." As an outsider, Bishop is aware of the
plight of other outsiders; she empathizes with them and by writing about
them hopes to achieve a greater (social) harmony in her America.
The nine years during which she lived in Florida off and on made
Bishop more aware of Latin cultures in America. Since these were a
component of her picture of America, she strove to represent them too and
to argue for their equality. In "Faustina," for example, Bishop presents a
Latina m aid whom she knew in Florida and with whom she corresponded
while living in New York and in Washington D.C. The poem establishes a
clear opposition between Faustina and the unnam ed ill "white woman" of
whom she takes care. It concentrates not on the white woman whom the
1
speaker is visiting but on Faustina, the outsider with her oxymoronic
1 "sinister kind face" and her dreams.
■ Bishop's respect for the disadvantaged and for non-Anglo cultures in the
(
i W estern Hemisphere becomes especially apparent in her loving depiction {
of "Jeronimo's House." In this poem, Bishop presents a dilapidating house
or hut, which is probably the home of a Cuban immigrant in Florida. She |
t
155
identifies with this outsider (as evidenced by her use of the first person) and
w ith his pride in the few possessions he has, calling the house a "palace":
My house, my fairy
palace, is
of perishable
clapboards with
three rooms in all,
my gray wasps' nest1 8
of chewed-up paper
glued with spit.
[ The arrangem ent of the verses seems to recreate the overlapping clapboards
that form the house. If two lines are taken together, they create a regular
iambic tetrameter: in this way, Bishop illustrates that underneath the
house's dilapidation, there is harmony and beauty. She does not use iambic
pentameter, though, because that meter would be associated w ith a more
traditional poetic celebration, while her goal is to celebrate, like Whitman,
what is not usually celebrated.
After describing the outside of the house, which is called a "home" (an
emotionally laden concept for Bishop, as shown in the preceding chapter)
and a "love nest," the speaker moves to its inside, lovingly presenting the
m odest objects housed in it. Then he continues,
I
Also I have
hung on a hook,
! an old French horn
repainted with
| IS The use of "wasps’ nest" for a treasured object will reappear at the end of j
! "Santarem," where Bishop’ s speaker, on her way down the Amazon, j
received a wasps' nest from a pharmacist. While she values it, a fellow |
passenger calls it an "ugly thing." In that late poem, again, Bishop does not ;
pass judgment but leaves it up to her readers to decide which is the more
appropriate attitude to take to the nest.
156
alum inum paint.
! I play each year
1 in the parade
for Jose Marti.
This is of course not an accidental invocation of the Cuban freedom fighter,
who lived in the United States for almost half his life and who, like Bishop,
had argued for an inter-American connectedness. Bishop adopts Martf's
philosophy of identifying with the poor and powerless and argues w ith and
through him for m utual respect and assistance in the Western Hemisphere.
While Elizabeth Bishop cannot be considered an openly political writer, a
social message is nonetheless incorporated in a number of her early poems.
This political content does not push to the foreground; it is instead
expressed with what Octavio Paz has called Bishop’ s "enormous power of
reticence" (Paz, "Reticence" 16). Bishop argues for the equality of all parts of
her America, an America that was soon to be enlarged, as will be shown in
I the next chapter. In her early poems as well as throughout her career,
j Bishop is looking for connection instead of separation. For example, in her
"Letter to N.Y.," dedicated to Louise Crane, with whom she shared her
house in Florida, she seeks a link between New York City and the
countryside, where she is at the time of writing the poem, speaking of "one
side of buildings" on a Manhattan street rising "with the sun / like a
' glistening field of wheat." Similarly, in her "Invitation to Miss Marianne
Moore," she wants to bridge the distance between Manhattan, where she is, j
i
; and Brooklyn, where Marianne Moore lived, asking her mentor,
; From Brooklyn, over the Brooklyn Bridge, on this fine
morning,
please come flying.
In a cloud of fiery pale chemicals, !
please come flying.
Through her early desire for connectedness, her identification with
outsiders, and her immersion in the geographies she observed Bishop
embarked from the start of her literary career on the path of becoming
inter-American poetic voice of the Americas.
f
158
a believer in total immersion
— Elizabeth Bishop, "At the Fishhouses"
Chapter IV: At Home With the Exotic
After moving to Brazil in 1951 and finding a new home there, Bishop
enlarges the loci of her work; she no longer interconnects only N orth
America, as she had done in North & South and A Cold Spring but now
Brazil plays an increasingly important part in her writing. With Brazil, the
scope of Bishop’ s poetic imagination is enlarged and she starts to combine
in her work the depiction and influence of various parts of the Western
Hemisphere, thereby embarking firmly on the course toward becoming a
poet of the Americas rather than remaining a poet of the United States or of
North America. Like the places of her early poems, as discussed in the
previous chapter, Bishop's depictions of Brazil are characterized by
immersion, loving understanding, and a childlike fascination for what she
observes. Through these techniques, her poetic places become again inner
landscapes. What is now added in a number of poems is the connection of
inner place, its depiction, and art, a connection that will become far more
pronounced in Bishop's late work, especially in her "Poem."
In 1962, Elizabeth Hartwick, as the told me in the interview excerpted in
chapter two, got the same impression of Bishop as someone in harmony
with Brazil. And having visited Elizabeth Bishop in her Casa Mariana in
Ouro Preto in 1965, Ashley Brown similarly conveys the impression of a
poet in tune with her adopted home. Brown narrates that Bishop "seemed
159
perfectly in harmony with this barrage of sights, sound, and smells that
(awaited one at every hand" (Brown 223). By 1965, Brazil had become a home
i
for Elizabeth Bishop. It therefore reminded her of places where she had felt
at home earlier. Apparently, among these the one that came to her mind
most strongly was Great Village in Nova Scotia. For this reason, she wrote
numerous stories and poems about Nova Scotia while she was living in
Brazil. As mentioned in chapter two, their composition was also related to
Bishop's "homesickness for the North," as she called it in a letter to her
aunt Grace. This feeling seems to have occasionally come to the foreground
starting in the late 1950s. But in her homesickness Bishop became a more
inter-American figure: writing about the North while living in the South
helped her make the different parts of the Americas flow together first in
her m ind and then in her writing.
A. Present and Past: Brazilian Essays and Nova Scotian Stories
i
| In the process of Bishop's mental and compositional conflux of South and
l
North, the time periods with which she associated these places were also
combined so that Bishop could see elements of her Brazilian present in her 1
J
Nova Scotian past and elements of her Nova Scotian past in her Brazilian
j
I present. I will here examine in particular "A Trip to Vigia" and "To the
I
Botequim & Back," two autobiographical essays which Bishop probably
m eant to include in her collection Black Beans and Diamonds, together
160
w ith "In the Village" and "Memories of Uncle Neddy," two
autobiographical short stories set in the Nova Scotia of her childhood,
which Bishop wrote while living in Brazil.
In his appended notes to The Collected Prose of Elizabeth Bishop, Robert
Giroux surmises that "A Trip to Vigia" was probably written in 1967,
although it was not published in Bishop’s lifetime. It appeared
posthumously in the New Yorker in 1983. If Giroux is right, then Bishop
wrote this essay in what was probably the most turbulent year of her life:
late in 1966, she and Lota had returned prematurely from a trip through
Europe because of Lota's nervous breakdown, during the first half of the
year; Bishop was becoming increasingly estranged from Lota; she had to
move out of their apartment in Rio, and wrote to her aunt that she was
"homeless;" then she went to New York by herself, followed by Lota, who
then committed suicide; Bishop returned to Brazil, but was blamed by
former friends for Lota's death. The turbulences of that year may explain the
critical distance to Brazil that characterizes parts of "A Trip to Vigia." But far
more strongly, the essay reveals that despite all her difficulties Bishop was
unable and unwilling to give up her adopted homeland; instead she is
j acting as a cultural mediator, trying to elicit in her N orthern audience the
: same fascination with and love for Brazil which she was feeling, thus
i
j contributing to a closer unity within the Western Hemisphere,
i In this travel essay, Bishop narrates an excursion to a baroque church
about one hundred kilometers away from the hotel in Belem where she was
i staying. She had been invited to this excursion by the shy Brazilian poet
1 Ruy, and is accompanied by Ruy’ s son, a mechanista, and a Brazilian friend 1
161
of Bishop's, who is only referred to as "M," which might well stand for Lota
de Macedo Soares. The party are traveling in a car that is on its last legs and
Bishop is sensitive to her Brazilian friends: despite her mixed feelings about
the vehicle she does not flaunt her dollars and offer to rent a more reliable
car because "The shy poet, so soiled, so poor, so polite, insisted on taking us
in his own car" (Prose 111). She is thus presenting a model for her North
American audience on how to treat the other Americas.
In Ruy's behavior toward her, Bishop shows the deference of poorer
American countries toward richer ones and she adds the richer country’ s
customary reaction to this humility: "Ruy was nervous. He kept telling us
we probably wouldn't like the famous church at Vigia; it would be too
'baroque' for us. Each time he said this, our imagination added more
belfries and a slightly wilder wave of carved stone" (Prose 111). But Ruy also
becomes a sensitive spokesperson for his country and its problems, of which
Bishop makes her Northern audience aware through him: when they pass
fields of pepper, which had recently become an important crop in Northern
Brazil, "Ruy complained about it, saying it was already overplanted, the way
any successful crop always is in Brazil, and the price was dropping" (Prose
i
j 113). But through her interaction with Ruy Bishop also shows that even
with good intentions on both parts, inter-American communication is still
' difficult:
i
[ Ruy was talking about T.S. Eliot. He read English, some,
I but spoke not a word. I tried a story about Ezra Pound. It
was very well received but, I felt, not understood. I
undertook some more literary anecdotes. Smiling
| politely, Ruy waited for every joke until the faithful M.
162
had helped me put them into Portuguese. Often they
proved to be untranslatable. (Prose 113)
[ Her experience of such difficulties and the frustration which they bring with
themselves were probably another reason why Bishop strove to be a
m ediator between South and North America.
Another important aspect of what she wants to share with her Northern
audience is her fascination with Brazil's vegetation. As in the poems of
N orth & South, A Cold Spring, and Questions of Travel, nature is animated
and personified: "Suddenly the rain came down hard, great white lashings.
The bushes crouched and the gravel danced" (Prose 113). The plantations
are "a bright and tender green" and there are "mild, lovely zebus" (Prose
113). Like in "Brazil, January 1, 1502," Bishop is overwhelmed by her
surroundings:
The rains stopped and the sun came out. Certain
varieties of glazed tropical leaves reflected the light like
nickel, or white enamel, but as the car passed they
returned to their actual gray-green. It was confusing,
and trying to the eyes. Palm trees, more pepper and jute,
more bushes. Here and there a great jungle tree had
been left standing, and black specks were busy high
around the tops; each tree held a whole community of
birds. At least two hundred feet high, a Brazil nut tree
blossomed; one could tell only by the smell like that of a
thousand lilacs. (Prose 114)
i In her enjoyment of the vegetation, Bishop also connects this place to a
! similar one in North America, thus underlining again that the connections
i
; w ithin the W estern Hemisphere are numerous: "we might as well have
, been in the . . . Yucatan," she writes, "(It looked a bit like the Yucatan.)"
(Prose 114). Later on, during the trip, she admires a river, which is also
personified and which is presented as one of the few things the poor people j
4 i
163
in this region can proudly show visitors. "Its banks were a dream of the
tropics. It splashed, it sang, it glittered over white pebbles" (Prose 117).
But as a North American and seeing for her Northern audience, Bishop
is also struck by the poverty and squalor she witnesses on the trip: w hen the
party stops to repair the car, for example, Ruy, Bishop, and M. go into a
store:
The store had been raided, sacked. Oh, that was its
normal state. It was quite large, no color inside or cloud-
1 color perhaps, with holes in the floor, holes in the
walls, holes in the roof. . . . Lined on the shelves were
many, many bottles of cachaya, all alike: Esperan^a,
Hope, Hope, Hope. (Prose 114)
s
The name of this sugar cane brandy or rum also expresses Bishop's feeling
for her adopted homeland. By mentioning the Portuguese name and then
repeating it three times in English Bishop testifies to the hope Brazilians
like Ruy have for their country and forcefully underlines that she shares
this hope.
As a sensitive cultural mediator, Bishop also emphasizes that despite
Ruy’s humility about it, the church in Vigia really is impressive and
attractive. This could be a way of showing her Northern audience that
despite its poverty the South of the Americas also has much to be proud of:
The pearly, silent, huge church of Vigia had made us all
feel somehow guilty at abandoning it once again. The
i town's little white houses were turning mauve. In the
' high, high skies, shafts of long golden beams fell
! through the thunderclouds. Nature was providing all
I the baroque grandeur the place lacked. (Prose 119)
Artistic grandeur is not seen as the exclusive domain of artistic
representation but can also be achieved and expressed by nature.
164
At the party's return to Belem, Bishop is still the foreigner, but she is also
still ravished by this world and wants to share her feeling with her audience
through the immediacy of her style: "A man carrying a lantern— oh, he's
leading a cow and a calf. Goats. Look out, a zebu! We almost hit him, a high
bony gray wall across the road. He lowered his horns sharply and snorted
softly" (Prose 120). The exclamations and the ellipsis pull Bishop's
N orthern readers further into this world and make them experience it with
her.
Bishop is slightly more detached from her Brazilian surroundings in "To
the Botequim & Back." If Robert Giroux is right in assuming that this essay
about going to the grocery store in Ouro Preto was w ritten in 1970, the
occasionally pretentious tone is not surprising. During that year, Bishop was
living in her Casa Mariana together with Roxanne; she had been
disappointed by many former Brazilian friends (most of them friends of
Lota) who had turned against her; and she was starting to contemplate
selling her house to move back to the United States. With Roxanne as a
fellow Northern observer, Bishop may have felt more inclined to see her
surroundings through critical Northern eyes or to mediate them critically
| for her Northern readers. But the ironic detachment finally gives in to
Bishop’ s more powerful feeling of admiring her natural surroundings in
( Brazil. Both these attitudes, criticism as well as admiration, are part of
Bishop's cultural mediation.
! The first two thirds of the essay reveal Bishop's status as an outsider and,
probably in part because of Roxanne, as a cultural critic. For example, she
mocks the speech of the locals, calling the use of "the following" to
165
introduce what one wants to say a "slight pretentiousness in speech of semi
literacy. Workmen love to say, 'I want to say the following,' colon, then say
it" (Prose 73). A tone of the Northerner's ironic detachment and of her
feeling of superiority also appears in Bishop’ s account of the feast of St.
Blasius:
Palmyra had asked to leave work early this morning to
go to have her throat blessed. Father Antonio was
holding a Throat Blessing at the church at 6 a.m. (It's
the feast of St. Blasius, the patron saint of throats.)
Aurea had had a sore throat; Palmyra didn't, so
apparently she was taking precautions. I asked her how
the blessing had gone. There had been "many folks";
the priest had blessed them all in general, then at the
railing he had come up close to each one, with his arms
crossed and candles burning on either side of him,
murmuring a blessing. (Prose 74)
Characteristically for Bishop, the passage contains a mixture of detachment,
slight superiority, and admiration. But she does not offer any direct
comment on the custom; rather, she leaves it up to her N orthern audience
to draw the conclusions that they feel inclined to.
She is somewhat more critical of the village's population, particularly of
the storekeeper and of an antique dealer. After describing the owner of the
i
i botequim and retelling his story about having broken up a fight the night
before she writes,
} '
I He ends his little sermon by saying, "It is stupid, it is
I great nonsense to kill a man. Imagine, the police would
j catch him, he’ d spend a year in jail, and lose his job,
I and confound his life completely." Everyone nods in
I agreement. (Prose 76)
| Although she does not seem to judge this scene, the use of "sermon"
| reveals Bishop’ s own superior attitude. But, like the account of the throat
166
1 blessing, the whole scene also shows how much she is charmed by this
w orld and its simplicity.
When she describes the town's antique dealer, who stops her on her way
home from the store, Bishop is more openly critical, however. "He comes
running across the road, wagging his fat hands like a baby," she writes (Prose
77). Then she adds a hint at the reason for her dislike: "I stopped speaking to
him for two years because of a dirty trick he played on me over the most
beautiful statue of St. Sebastian I have ever seen. I've started speaking again;
it's useless to try to make him understand ethics" (Prose 77). Her resignation
is also a sign of accepting her adopted homeland, even with all its
shortcom ings.
After Lota's death, the main cause for Bishop's acceptance and love of
Brazil seems to have been Brazil's natural splendor. The final and lasting
impression she gives in "To the Botequim & Back" is that of her fascination
with her natural surroundings. The essay ends with Bishop's magical
description of the river and waterfall she can see from her Casa Mariana:
This is the field of the Waterfall of the Little Swallows,
and this is where the stream disappears, like the sacred
river Alph in Coleridge's dream. It fans out over the
red stone, narrows and rises in cold gray ridges,
disappears underground, and then shows up again
farther off, dashing downwards now through more
beautiful rocks. It then takes off downwards for the
Underworld. You can hang over the rocks and see it far
| below. It keeps descending, disappears into a cavern,
| and is never seen again. It talks as it goes, but the words
j are lost... (Prose 79)
| Again, nature is personified; the river "talks" and it is the connection to a
j mysterious, magical world like the one Bishop presents in "The
167
Riverman."19 As in "The Bight," nature is seen as unable to speak for itself;
i
j the river’ s words are "lost." Therefore Bishop appoints herself the voice of
this nature. In contrast to "The Bight," her assumption of this task in "To
the Botequim & Back" also implies the wider assumption of the task of
speaking for a part of the Western Hemisphere whose voice is also often
"lost."
For Bishop, this cultural mediation and the conflux of North and South
America also worked in the opposite direction. This is to say that Brazil
became a part of the depictions of Nova Scotia (in both poems and stories)
which Bishop wrote while living in South America. With regard to the
"Elsewhere" section of her Questions of Travel (1965), this interrelation will
be discussed in the second section of this chapter. With regard to short
stories, I will examine the Brazilian impact on "In the Village" and
| "Memories of Uncle Neddy."
In 1953, during her second year of residence in Brazil Bishop published
what has become her best-known short story, "In the Village." Significantly,
she reprinted this story twelve years later in her third collection of poems,
Questions of Travel, in between the collection's two main sections, entitled
j "Brazil" and "Elsewhere." Apparently, Bishop considered it a connection
19 The connection between this waterfall and Coleridge is not accidental. In
1956, probably fourteen years before writing "To the Botequim & Back,"
! Bishop had written to Robert Lowell on December 2 of that year, "I read
1 Coleridge, and read him, & read him— just couldn't stop— until he and the
waterfall roaring under the window, and ten times its usual size, were
indistinguishable to my ears (quoted in Costello, Mastery 124). Inspired by
Coleridge, Bishop has made it her task to recover the lost words that her
natural surroundings are speaking.
168
and a combination between her Brazilian environment of the present and
her other American environments of earlier years.
Stylistically, Bishop shows a Latin American characteristic in her story's
magical realism. She begins,
A scream, the echo of a scream, hangs over that Nova
Scotian village. No one hears it; it hangs there forever,
a slight stain in those pure blue skies, skies that
travelers compare to those of Switzerland, too dark, too
blue, so that they seem to keep on darkening a little
more around the horizon— or is it around the rims of
the eyes?— . . . The scream hangs like that, unheard, in
memory— in the past, in the present, and those years
between. It was not even loud to begin with, perhaps. It
just came there to live, forever— not loud, just alive
forever. Its pitch would be the pitch of my village. Flick
the lightning rod on top of the church steeple with your
fingernail and you will hear it. (Prose 251)
Through the image of the scream and its continuing haunting presence in
her consciousness Bishop unites her Nova Scotian "past" and her Brazilian
j
i "present" and "those years between." Like the concept of home, her
m other’ s scream is for Bishop not spatially defined but psychologically
determ ined.
This story about Bishop's childhood experience of living in Great Village
w ith her maternal grandparents while her mother was w ith them in
I between two stays in a sanatorium is, for the most part, told from the child's
| perspective. As usual, Bishop employs questions to illustrate the child’ s
! uncertainty and disorientation. When she hears her aunt talking about a
| "mourning hat" and a "mourning coat," the girl thinks, "I always think
i
i they are saying 'morning.' Why, in the morning, did one put on black?
! How early in the morning did one begin? Before the sun came up?" (Prose
169
254). The narrator feels lost and afraid. In an attempt to distance herself
from those feelings, Bishop narrates the first three pages of the story in an
impersonal third person, speaking of "the girl." But then this girl takes over
as a first-person narrator. It is as if the older Bishop is at first trying to look
back at this scene of her childhood objectively and from a distance
(including the spatial distance of Brazil); but she cannot keep up this
detachment because the events narrated in the story are still too
overwhelming. The present cannot be disassociated from the past.
Probably because of her desire to distance herself from the memory of her
m other’ s oppressive presence Bishop does not refer to her as "mother" or by
her name, but only as "she;" "it was she who gave the scream" (Prose 251).
The mother’ s coming and going and her varying degrees of mental
instability are shown in their painful effect on the narrator.
But as a counterbalance to them Bishop recounts what made her feel at
home in Great Village. Bishop connected this feeling of being at home in
her Nova Scotian past with the same feeling in her Brazilian present at the
time of finishing the story. The following scene at the blacksmith's might
almost as well be one of Bishop's descriptions of Brazil:
Two men stand watching, chewing or spitting tobacco,
matches, horseshoe nails— anything, apparently, but
with such presence; they are perfectly at home. This
horse is the real guest, however. His harness hangs
loose like a man’ s suspenders; they say pleasant things
to him; one of his legs is doubled up in an improbably,
affectedly polite way, and the bottom of his hoof is laid
bare, but he doesn't seem to mind. Manure piles up
behind him, suddenly, neatly. He, too, is very much at
home. He is enormous. His rum p is like a brown, glossy
170
globe of the whole brown world. His ears are secret
i entrances to the underworld. (Prose 257)
| The repetition of "home" in this passage is revealing: Bishop is feeling at
home in her Brazilian world and remembers the Nova Scotian world
where she had felt at home earlier. What makes her feel at home in both
places is the warm th of people. Although she remains in the position of an
outsider (as a foreigner with language difficulties in Brazil and as a child in
Nova Scotia) she feels accepted in both places. As an outsider, she identifies
with and idealizes other outsiders, i.e. the horse. Inverting the structure of
domination, Bishop makes the horse "the real guest." Significantly, the
horse's rum p becomes a "glossy globe of the whole brow n world." Through
and with the horse, and later in the story through her identification with
the cow Nelly, the narrator is feeling at home. In this way, Bishop suggests
that this feeling of being at home is not spatially determined but is
connected to the warmth and acceptance of other beings in that
environm ent.
By the end of the story, Bishop's feeling of home in her Brazilian present
and in her Nova Scotian past have led to acceptance and calm. After the
mother has returned to a sanatorium, "there is no scream. . . . surely it has
! gone away, forever" (Prose 274). Without the pressures caused by the
1 i
; mother's instability the village feels like a harmonious home to the girl.
' But it remains uncertain if she will be able to forget her mother and the fear
| associated with her memory. The initial scream is still a part of her
j 1
■ i
; unconscious, wether she is in Brazil or in Nova Scotia. I
i
i
More ambivalent memories of her Nova Scotian childhood that are
; connected to her Brazilian present are told in "Memories of Uncle Neddy," j
171
| which Bishop probably wrote in the early 1960s, although, out of
consideration for her aunt Hat, she did not publish this reminiscence until
1977. Bishop did not want to publicly reveal her uncle’ s alcoholism while
his widow was still alive. As David Kalstone has pointed out, this story
attempts the montage of Nova Scotia and Brazil, a combination which
Bishop constantly felt while living in Brazil. It opens in Rio de Janeiro,
where Bishop has just been sent a pair of companion portraits of her
mother and her uncle as children, which makes her remember her family
i
<
and her own childhood. Lloyd Schwartz comments that this reminiscence
"reads like a parable of the limited human possibilities of life in Nova
Scotia. Yet in the story her commemoration--or, at least, her defense— of her
escape into the larger world is tinged with regret" (Schwartz 94). Bishop was
unable to stay in the "narrow provinces / of fish and bread and tea," as she
calls them in "The Moose," but she also could not discard her nostalgic
| longing for the place where she had spent a happy early childhood.
Therefore, at least in her mind, she combined her Nova Scotian past with
her Brazilian present.
Bishop starts her story self-reflexively: "The sea— I’ m writing in a
penthouse apartment, eleven floors up, facing southeast over the sea— the
I sea is blurred with rain, almost hidden by the mixture of rain and fog, that
rarity here (Prose 227). After establishing the scene of her Brazilian present
she connects it to her Nova Scotian past:
I
! And Uncle Neddy, that is, my Uncle Edward, is here.
: Into this wildly foreign and, to him, exotic setting,
Uncle Neddy has just come back, from the framer’ s. He
, leans slightly, silently backwards against the damp-
stained pale-yellow wall, looking quite cheerfully into
172
the eyes of whoever happens to look at him— including
the cat's, who investigated him just now. (Prose 228).
i
Similarly, in her "Poem," Bishop was to write of a place in Nova Scotia that
is "still loved, / or its memory is." In both "Poem" and "Memories of Uncle
Neddy," the memory is triggered by a picture and in both cases the memory
of the past is combined with the experiential present. In this way, past and
present are being connected, as, in other instances, North and South or life
and art are.
Although her uncle had died several years before Bishop's narrator, who
can be equated with the author, received his portrait, the picture brings him
back to life and makes him part of Bishop's surroundings: "I realize only
now that he represented 'the devil' for me, not a violent, active Devil, but a
gentle black one, a devil of weakness, acquiescence, tentatively black, like
the sooty mildew" that is growing in her apartment at the present time
because of Rio's hot and humid climate. Now there is "nothing between us
but a glaze of old-fashioned varnishing. . . . and now I can’ t stop thinking
about him," she realizes (Prose 229). By way of the portraits, her Nova
Scotian past has become part of her Brazilian present. Bishop cannot stop
thinking about her uncle and her own childhood because her Brazilian
surroundings reminded her of her time in Nova Scotia, as can be seen, for
example, in her translation of The Diary of "Helena Morley", for which she
I tried to think of phrases her Nova Scotian grandmother used because, to
her, those rendered best in English the speech of Helena's grandmother.
These are "memories I want to keep on remembering," she writes, "I
i couldn’ t forget them if I tried, probably— and remembering clearly, as if they
I
I had just happened or were still happening" (Prose 248). Because of the !
i __________________________________________________________ !
173
emotional proximity which Nova Scotia and Brazil have for Bishop, her
Nova Scotian memories are "still happening" in her Southern world.
The portraits of her uncle and mother will continue an inter-American
connection not only Bishop herself but also between her Canadian ancestors
and her Brazilian friends: once she has hung the picture,
Uncle Neddy will continue to exchange his direct,
bright-hazel, child's looks, now, with those of strangers-
-dark-eyed Latins he never knew, who never would
have understood him, whom he would have thought
of, if he had ever thought of them at all, as "foreigners."
How late, Uncle Neddy, how late to have started on
your travels! (Prose 250)
Inter-American communication, Bishop implies is still difficult, partly
because of the North's unwillingness to accept the South. Bishop considers
many of her fellow North Americans as exclusive and unwilling to be
foreigners themselves in Latin America the way she herself was. But she
also implies that it is never too late to "start on your travels" and contribute
to a closer connection of the Americas.
1 B. "Driving to the Interior": Questions of Travel and The Complete Poems
j After living in Brazil for well over a decade Elizabeth Bishop published her
third collection of poems, Questions of Travel (1965), which was followed
four years later by an edition she called The Complete Poems, although she
; did not include in it all the poems she had published until then and
174
although she was to publish over a dozen more poems later in her life. Both
the poems of Questions and Travel and those collected for the first time in
The Complete Poems are strongly influenced by Bishop's Brazilian
experience. In fact, Brazil is the stated topic of more than half of them and
even where it is not in the foreground, Brazil is often present indirectly.
Questions of Travel is divided into two main sections, entitled "Brazil" and
"Elsewhere." But as I have shown in the preceding analysis of prose
writings of that period, Bishop finds it hard to delineate her Brazilian
experience from her North American past. The Americas are gradually
coming closer together for her.
These poems about Brazil demonstrate Bishop's wonder at her exotic
surroundings; they contain a fascination with landscapes reminiscent of
early poems like "The Bight" and "A Cold Spring." In Brazil Bishop found
jan atmosphere conducive to the kind of animated vision she would have
liked to see in "Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance." The
"infant sight" for which she had argued in that poem was possible and
accepted here and Bishop uses it to express how overwhelmed she is by her
Brazilian surroundings.20 Klaus Martens rightly points out that Brazil was
20 Childhood remains a powerful factor in these poems. Therefore, Bonnie
| Costello asks, "What are these poems of childhood doing in a volume called
Questions of Travel?" As a tentative answer Costello suggests that
j Bishop may want to make an analogy between the
' condition of the traveler and that of the child. Both find
themselves in situations where the codes and frames of
reference which have given them security break down.
Both experience, as a result, a heightening of sensation
as they struggle to reconstitute reality for themselves.
(Costello, Mastery 200)
175
for her, in the double sense of the word, "a developing country, a country in
I which she had to look for a path between isolation and loss of identity"
i
(Martens 321 ).2 1 Brazil enabled Bishop to discover herself; the country's
landscape points the way to the poet's self, a self which will inevitably
become part of her descriptions and mediate the place that is being observed,
thus making it an interior landscape.22
Bishop's stay in Brazil was conducive to her ability for immersion. As
Lynn Keller points out in tracing the correspondence between Elizabeth
Bishop and Marianne Moore, Bishop and Moore had written each other
about twelve letters each per year between 1935 and 1940. But in the fifties
and sixties, when Bishop was living in Brazil, there were only between two
and five letters a year. Keller concludes that "This period . . . appears to have
been the happiest as well as the most productive in [Bishop's] life, and it was
[the busiest period in Moore's" (Keller 407). During these years Bishop seems
j
(to have been well able to immerse herself into her Brazilian surroundings.
I
But this immersion was combined with a desire to mediate between South
and North America. It has been argued that, stylistically, Bishop's
{immersion in the place that is the subject of her poems results in
i
I
i
i
t
21 "Brazilian war fur sie im besten Sinne ein Entwicklungsland, ein Land,
in dem sie einen Pfad zwischen Isolation und Identitatsverlust suchen
jmufite."
i
|22 What Lee Edelman has pointed out for the the late poem "In the
(Waiting Room" also holds true for the poems about Brazil: Bishop's poetry
"takes place beneath the aegis of 'geography,' [it conducts] a study of places
that leads her, invariably, to the question of poetic positioning— a question
that converges, in turn, with the quest for, and the questioning of, poetic
{authority" (Edelman 179).
176
indirection and self-effacement.23 But I would argue that although Bishop is
trying to let Brazil speak for itself, she is still very present in her poetic
recreations. Through her interaction with her Brazilian world, as Octavio
Paz has said of Bishop's work in general, "things become other things
without ceasing to be the things they are" (Paz, "Reticence" 15).
As a foreigner, Bishop felt compelled to chart her new surroundings, no
matter how unfamiliar they must have been for her. As John Ashbery has
pointed out, one of Bishop’ s main subjects is the "continually renewed
sense of discovering the strangeness, the unreality of our reality at the very
moment of becoming conscious of it as reality" (Ashbery 10). Bishop had
w ritten in her introduction to The Diary of "Helena Morlev" that the diary's
scenes and events were "odd, remote, and long ago, and yet fresh, sad,
funny, and eternally true" (Prose 82). This was Bishop's impression not only
of the diary she was translating but of Brazil in general. And this was also
the impression she strove to create in the Brazil poems of Questions of
Travel and The Complete Poems: by continuing to write as "a believer in
total immersion," she presents her adopted homeland as fascinating and
! 23 Lynn Keller and Christanne Miller have argued from a feminist
perspective that indirection for Bishop as well as for Dickinson is a means of
! disrupting hierarchical social structures or of protecting themselves against
their "own extreme emotion and against societal rejection" (Keller/M iller
■534). While this may be true to a degree, it is questionable if "Brazil, January
1 1, 1502" can be considered an "example of the poet effacing herself . . . as an
unseen observer" (Keller/M iller 539). Although Bishop does not explicitly
i refer to her personal life story, she is far from "effaced." It is precisely the
presence of her response to the places she re-creates that makes these places
such powerful interior landscapes.
177
exotic, but she also mediates this impression through her reaction to Brazil
i
j and thus makes Brazil more accessible to her Northern audience.
Through her immersion Bishop creates an effect of immediacy. The
immediacy of observation of Questions of Travel will give way to an
immediacy of recollection in Geography III and the late poems, rendered
often through the use of anacoluths and corrections. In "Brazil, January 1,
1502," the speaker seems overwhelmed by the nature that greets her in
Brazil and that greeted the Portuguese conquerors four and a half centuries
before her.
Januaries, Nature greets our eyes
exactly as she must have greeted theirs:
every square inch filling in with foliage-
big leaves, little leaves, and giant leaves,
blue, blue-green, and olive,
with occasional lighter veins and edges,
or a satin underleaf turned over;
monster ferns
in silver-gray relief,
and flowers, too, like giant water lilies
up in the air— up, rather, in the leaves—
purple, yellow, two yellows, pink,
rust red and greenish white;
solid but airy; fresh as if just finished
and taken off the frame.
Like a child, the speaker of this passage is overwhelmed by a variety of
: colors, shapes, and sizes that she has probably never before experienced.
I
j Shades of colors are so numerous that she is at a loss when she has to find
adequate expressions for them: there is "yellow" and then there are "two
yellows." A dded to these nuances are mixed colors like "blue-green,"
"silver-grey," and "greenish white." The fact that this whole first stanza
178
! consists of only one sentence is a further sign of how overwhelmed the
speaker is.
The preceding passage is also characteristic of Bishop's attempt to
concentrate on details and to combine accurate description w ith childlike
wonder. Like the speaker's pounding heart in Bishop's early poem
"Chemin de Fer," the observer's excitement becomes part of her observation
in "Brazil, January 1, 1502." Thomas J. Travisano's assessment of this poem,
and the poems in Questions of Travel in general, as an exploration of "the
cultural history of Brazil" is therefore only partly adequate at best
(Travisano 133). What Randall Jarrell praises in Robert Frost's poetry— the
combination of an "observation of and empathy w ith everything in Nature
from a hornet to a hillside" with an investigation of the poet’ s "own nature,
one person’ s random or consequential chains of thoughts and feelings and
perceptions" (Jarrell 31)— is also true for Bishop. It makes the Brazilian
geography that Bishop charts an inner landscape, one in which the poet's
>
.self interacts with the place that is being re-created in the poem. David
:Kalstone has pointed out that while for Marianne Moore precise
|descriptions are "an instrument of ironic self-protectiveness . . . Bishop's
jprecise explorations become a way of countering and encountering a lost
i
Iworld" (Kalstone, "Memory" 4).
: The sympathy for Brazil which Bishop wants to arouse in her Northern
i
jreaders must come through art. Therefore nature and artful renderings of it
jinteract in her poetry. The epigraph from Kenneth Clark which Bishop uses
i
for "Brazil, January 1, 1502" also mixes the realms of nature and art, as it
179
speaks of "embroidered nature" and of "tapestried landscape."24 Although,
as David Kalstone has written, Bishop does not agree w ith "such passive
notions" (Kalstone, Becoming 194), her poem shows that the onlooker's
m ind is conditioned by its knowledge about artistic representation. In a
partly self-referential comment she calls the scene she sees and maybe also
her poetic depiction of it "fresh as if just finished / and taken off the frame."
Bishop was flattered when she was called a painterly poet and, being also a
painter herself, she draws attention to the similarities of poetic and
painterly depiction.
But the overwhelming scenery is not all that interests Bishop in "Brazil,
January 1, 1502." She is also looking at the "Sin" and the oxymoronic
"lovely hell-green flames" underneath it. After alluding to this "Sin" in the
poem's second stanza, Bishop describes it more directly in the third and
final stanza:
Just so the Christians, hard as nails,
tiny as nails, and glinting,
t in creaking armor, came and found it all,
not unfamiliar:
no lovers' walks, no bowers,
no cherries to be picked, no lute music,
i but corresponding, nevertheless,
; to an old dream of wealth and luxury
already out of style when they left home—
wealth, plus a brand-new pleasure.
I Directly after Mass, humming perhaps
j24 After Bishop had sent Robert Lowell her poem "Brazil, January 1, 1502"
ifor New Year’s Day in 1959, Lowell characterized it as "Jungle into picture
into history and then jungle again." Bishop defended herself by writing
back, "I think it is a bit artificial, but I finally had to do something with the
cliche about the landscape looking like a tapestry, I suppose" (quoted in
Kalstone, Becoming 194).
180
L'Homme arme or some such tune,
they ripped away into the hanging fabric,
each out to catch an Indian for himself—
those maddening little women who kept calling,
calling to each other (or had the birds waked up?)
and retreating, always retreating, behind it.
This stanza recounts the loss of paradise through the invasion of un-
Christian "Christians." While Bishop's pleasure, as she shows in the first
stanza, is the enjoyment of nature, theirs was the subjugation and
persecution of the indigenous population. The story of their atrocities is still
being told by nature, e. g. by the birds that may have woken up. And once
again, as she had done in early poems like 'The Bight," Bishop makes
herself the voice of the landscape. In continuation of the social concern and
the identification with outsiders apparent in a number of her early poems,
Bishop celebrates Brazil here and condemns its conquest, implying toward
her North America audience that a neo-colonial conquest would be just as
pernicious.
This attitude aligns Bishop with Pablo Neruda. In "Love, America
(1400)," N eruda also celebrates a pre-Colombian undivided America:
My land without name, without America,
equinoctial stamen, lance-like purple,
your aroma rose through my roots
into the cup I drained, into the most tenuous
word not yet born in my mouth.
i
What further connects Neruda and Bishop is the conviction that their
poetic voice is inspired by and is coming out of the nature they depict.
While Bishop uses corrections as her main stylistic means for expressing
I her excitement when faced with Brazil's nature, in "Questions of Travel"
her wonder is— appropriately— mainly expressed through questions. In this
181
poem, she asks what the poet/ traveler's relationship with the world around
her, w ith "this strangest of theatres," should be. It is a world that has been
dream t of before it is seen and that resembles a dream: "Oh, m ust we dream
our dreams / and have them, too?" asks the poem's speaker. She stresses
her confusion and her uncertain position as a foreigner in an "inexplicable
and impenetrable" environment. But its foreignness makes the lost external
and internal world "always, always delightful." Bishop believes that in
order to explore and render the external and internal landscapes she
[perceives the poet/traveler should adopt the attitude of the boy and girl in
"Squatter’s Children," who, in their play, are in communion w ith nature so
that they can hear "rain's reply" to their toys.
The beginning of "Questions of Travel" already clearly shows that the
observed scene is mediated by the speaker's reaction to it:
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.
Like the volcano's lava will be "spilling over" in Bishop's later poem "In
[the Waiting Room," so the "crowded streams" spill over in this poem,
metamorphosing into waterfalls. Later on, she describes trees as
i
"exaggerated in their beauty." Once again, Bishop's is an inner landscape
shaped by the speaker's experience and expectation, according to which the
jstreams appear "crowded" and seem to be flowing "too rapidly." The
Onlooker becomes part of the geography she represents.
As she had done in earlier poems, Bishop uses personification as a means j
of strengthening the connection between herself and the place she observes.
182
| She writes of trees that are "gesturing / like noble pantomimists," or, to use
Samuel Johnson's phrase, noble savages. The trees— and the landscape on
the whole— combine civilized nobility with the vigor of untam ed nature.
But the traveler's enjoyment of her exotic surroundings is mixed with
her uncertainty about her own status. In the following series of questions
Bishop reflects on her own situation as a foreigner in Brazil:
Think of the long trip home.
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?
Where should we be today?
Is it right to be watching strangers in a play
in this strangest of theatres?
What childishness is it that while there's a breath of life
in our bodies, we are determined to rush
to see the sun the other way around?
The tiniest green hummingbird in the world?
Brazil is for Bishop "this strangest of theatres." But although she questions
her status as a traveler, she is not thinking of "home" as a place where she
would rather be. Her question "Should we have stayed at home and
thought of here?," which is taken up as a travel diary excerpt at the very end
of the poem, where it reads, "Should we have stayed at home. / wherever
that may be?," is answered by the poem with a clear no. She writes that
"surely it would have been a pity / not to have seen" all this and repeats
1 "pity" two more times later in the poem.
Speaking of a "folded sunset" that is "still quite warm," Bishop implies
I that her experience of this scene is a source for her writing, in which she
attempts to preserve the warmth and character of the setting. The "golden
I j
silence" of the scene, which will become a "golden evening" in "Santarem," ;
I i
I |
is conducive to writing, because it is after its onset that the traveler takes out
183
her notebook and starts to write. By converting the physical picture she sees
into a poetic picture that includes her emotional response, Bishop mediates
Brazil for her audience in North America.
The strong presence of the self in the depiction of her surroundings also
characterizes "Arrival at Santos," the first poem in Questions of Travel.
This free verse poem consists of ten four-line stanzas, in which the second
and fourth line rhyme while the first and third line are unrhymed. Bishop
may have used this rhyme scheme in order to reflect the meeting of two
! worlds in the poem, those of North and South America, those of order and
of an apparent lack of control. The first stanza reads,
Here is a coast; here is a harbor;
here, after a meager diet of horizon, is some scenery:
unpractically shaped and— who knows?— self-pitying
mountains,
sad and harsh beneath their frivolous greenery,
| The traveler projects herself onto the mountains, personifying them as
j "self-pitying," which is her state after eighteen strenuous days on a freighter.
!She is the one who feels both "sad" and "frivolous" in view of the scenery.
J Bishop merges with her Brazilian world and thereby can bring it home
j more easily to her readers in the North.
Since the landscape is "unassertive," Bishop becomes its voice. While
this dramatic monologue is addressed to a "tourist," i.e. an aspect of the poet
| herself, the poetic voice combines the place for which it speaks with the
! responses of her tourist self. Bishop is aware of her status and also of her
I
self-imposed mission of mediating this Southern world for her Northern
audience. Therefore, she is the self-questioning tourist, asking,
184
. . . Oh, tourist,
is this how this country is going to answer you
and your immodest demands for a different world,
and a better life, and complete comprehension
of both at last, and immediately,
after eighteen days of suspension?
She does not want to be the "immodest" and impatient traveler and also
cautions her readers against exaggerated demands. In the pose of the
immodest tourist she calls the Brazilian flag at first "a strange and brilliant
rag," but in the persona of the self-reflexive, mediating traveler she adds,
"So that’ s the flag. I never saw it before. / I somehow never thought of there
being a flag, / but of course there was, all along." Similarly she suggests at
first that the postage stamps may be slipping away because "the glue here is
very inferior" and then adds that this may also be "because of the heat."
Bishop's use of strophic enjambement and of exclamations like "Please,
boy, do be more careful with that boat hook! / Watch out! Oh! It has caught
Miss Breen's skirt! There!" again creates an immediacy that shows her as
part of the scene and that pulls the audience into the setting. She ends the
poem with "we are driving to the interior," an invitation to the reader to
follow her into the interior of Brazil, that will be the subject of many of the
poems that follow "Arrival at Santos" in Questions of Travel." Bishop
would like her readers in the North to also explore the "interior" the way
she is planning to do and to discard their preconceived ideas about the other
Americas.
This is one of the few poems which Bishop dates. The date she gives is
"January, 1952," i.e. no more than two months after her arrival in Brazil.
185
Over a decade later she recounts the same event in her "Introductory Note"
to Black Beans and Diamonds:
I arrived in Brazil in late November, 1951. I came on a
Norwegian freighter, 14 days out of Brooklyn, and arri
reached Santos late one night. The captain had told me
that I would smell coffee twenty miles out at sea, and he
was right; we smelled it all the afternoon before we
entered the harbor. There were twenty-six freighters
waiting there to be loaded with coffee beans. That whole
fir Almost the whole of that first night I sat up on the
deck top deck watching the motions of the freighters,
the play of lights, sweeping searchlights, ships' lights
going to and fro, large and small crafts of all sorts. It was
a kind of water-ballet mysterious and beautiful, because
nothing could be made out distinctly. In the morning
light I was surprised by the comparative meanness and
simplicity of the scene that had appeared so wild and
strange at midnight.
From more than a decade's distance, Brazil is still described as "mysterious
and beautiful," "wild and strange," the impression Bishop gives of it in
"Arrival at Santos." But in the later account she adds a more realistic
retrospective evaluation of the scene’ s "comparative meanness and
simplicity."
In her poetic recreations of Brazil, as in her early poems, a sign of
Bishop’s immersion is her identification with animals. "Rainy Season; Sub
Tropics," a three-part prose poem from Bishop's first Complete Poems.
which Helen Vendler considers mainly a meta-poem, makes Bishop's
readers listen to the voices of a "Giant Toad," a "Strayed Crab," and a "Giant
Snail."25 Bishop uses these animal voices with sincerity, not mockingly, and
25 Vendler calls these poems "reflections on Bishop's self and her art" and
argues they emphasize "the radical solitude of the poet" (Vendler, Music
284, 285).
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puts hum an attributes like "I have big shoulders, like a boxer" into them.
This technique of animating a place and of putting her emotions into that
place is supported by Sir Kenneth Clark, from whose book Landscape into
Art (1949) Bishop takes the epigraph for "Brazil, January 1, 1502." Clark
argues that landscape painting at its best is "an extension of the pathetic
fallacy," which uses "landscape as a focus for our own emotions" (Clark
142).
All three animals are parts of Bishop but also speak for themselves. The
"Giant Toad" complains that her eyes, which are her "one great beauty, . . .
see too much," a reflection of Bishop being overwhelmed by all the newness
of Brazil. Like Bishop, the toad delights in what she takes in being
transformed into her voice: "Swallow the air and mouthfuls of cold mist.
Give voice, just once. O how it echoed from the rock! What a profound,
angelic bell I rang!" The toad also becomes an emblem of Brazil: Bishop has
it tell the story of its mistreatment by the more powerful human race:
"some naughty children picked me up, me and two brothers. They set us
down again somewhere and in our mouths they put lit cigarettes." Bishop
may here be alluding to the mistreatment of developing countries like
Brazil by the First World. Added to this evaluation of Brazil is the toad’ s
description of herself as "an angel in disguise."
The "Strayed Crab" also speaks for Bishop, saying "This is not my home.
How did I get so far from water?" This note of being lost and of wanting to
return to one's earlier home also rings in "I wasn't meant for this. If I
maneuver a bit and keep a sharp lookout, I shall find my pool again." The
animal very clearly becomes its author's mouthpiece when it declares, "I
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believe in the oblique, the indirect approach, and I keep my feelings to
myself," a reference to Bishop's dislike of confessional poetry. Later on, the
crab says, "I admire compression, lightness, and agility, all rare in this loose
world" and all attributes of Bishop's poems. The "Giant Snail" continues
the comment on Bishop’ s writing: "I give the impression of mysterious
ease, but it is only with the greatest effort of my will that I can rise above the
smallest stones and sticks," it says, indirectly reminding readers that Bishop
often worked on one poem for over twenty years. The snail also expresses
Bishop's humility about her poetry: it observes streamers on a black rock
m ountain left by "Snail Gods" and resigns herself, "I could never descend
such steep escarpments, much less dream of climbing them."
All three animals are therefore different sides of Bishop herself: the
beautiful but shy and helpless toad the crab with its sharp claws and high
poetic demands, and the "grievous" humble snail.
"The Riverman" is another impersonation of Elizabeth Bishop (as
underlined by Bishop's use of the first person). He follows the call of a
dolphin and is led into a mysterious underwater world to meet the river
spirit Luandinha. This is Bishop’ s only Brazilian poem which is not based
on direct personal experience. She wrote it before she had seen the Amazon
and she took its details from Charles Wagley's Amazon Town, as she
acknowledges in her epigraph. Apart from Wagley's book the poem is also
based on a dream about which Bishop told Robert Lowell as early as 1948.
Her dream had been of a mermaid gasping under an exposed dock, trying to
tear mussels off the piles. In her poem, on the contrary, the merman is
about to enter his proper realm instead of being abandoned by the water. If
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one can see the author in her riverman being initiated into his proper
world, then there is a sense of Bishop feeling increasingly at home in Brazil
and thinking of it as the world where she belongs.
Bishop may also have been inspired in this poem by Joao Guimaraes
Rosa's short story "The Third Bank of the River," where the river also
becomes a mysterious world apart. In Bishop's poem the merman "waded
into the river / and suddenly a door / in the water opened inward." The
riverman's experience of the mysterious world he enters is similar to
Bishop’ s experience of Brazil: when Luandinha speaks to him she says, "She
complimented me / in a language I didn’ t know; . . . I understood, like a
dog, although I can't speak it yet." Bishop herself said in an interview in
1965 when asked about her command of Portuguese that "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" (Brown, "Interview" 291).
Like in Jorge Luis Borges' "The Aleph" the world which the riverman
enters defies space and time: "They showed me room after room / and took
me from here to Belem / and back again in a minute," he recounts. This is
also a comment on Bishop’ s wonder at the newness of Brazil. Like his
author the riverman finds it hard to grasp the new environment he is in: "I
know some things already, / but it will take years of study, / it is all so
difficult." But the riverman feels accepted in his new world, as Bishop does
in hers. "The dolphin singled me out; Luandinha seconded it," he
concludes satisfied. Through her immersion Bishop creates in "The
Riverman," as Howard Moss has remarked, "a totally formed universe felt
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from the inside, as if knowledge had been transformed into feeling" (Moss
29).
Empathy in a dreamlike world also characterizes "The Armadillo,"
which is dedicated to Robert Lowell and which can be read as a companion
piece to Lowell’ s "Skunk Hour." The poem describes the disruption of
animal life through falling "frail, illegal fire balloons" which Brazilians fly
at the feast of "a saint / still honored in these parts." As one of the burning
balloons falls,
Hastily, all alone,
a glistening armadillo left the scene,
rose-flecked, head down, tail down,
and then a baby rabbit jumped out,
short-eared, to our surprise.
So soft!— a handful of intangible ash
with fixed, ignited eyes.
While the poem expresses sympathy for the outsiders, i.e. the frightened
animals, the total picture is 'Too pretty " to be criticized. Bishop calls it a
"dream like mimicry." As in "The Bight," Bishop delights in the interplay of
m an and nature rather than criticizing it.
She observes another interplay she admires in the "Squatter's Children"
whose play she observes.
On the unbreathing sides of hills
they play, a specklike girl and boy,
alone, but near a specklike house.
The sun's suspended eye
blinks casually,
N ature is in harmony with these children: the sun watches them, "their
laughter spreads / effulgence in the thunder heads," and the rain "replies"
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through the sound it makes when it hits their toys. Bishop can discern an
admirable aspect in any part of life in Brazil, even in the slums. Through
poems like "Squatter’ s Children" and "Manuelzinho" she invites her
N orth American audience to join her in her adm iration and empathy for
Brazil and her celebration of outsiders.
In "Manuelzinho" Bishop paints a picture of the harmony between
different social classes in Brazil. Asserting that "A friend of the writer is
speaking." Bishop employs the voice of the master who chides his gardener
but who still feels a responsibility toward him:
Half squatter, half tenant (no rent)—
a sort of inheritance; white,
in your thirties now, and supposed
to supply me with vegetables,
but you don't; or you won't; or you can't
get the idea through your brain—
the world's worst gardener since Cain.
The playful rhyme at the end of this passage reveals that the speaker is not
serious in his criticism. Underneath the playfulness, there is between
Manuelzinho and his master a sense of deep sympathy for one another:
"you helpless, foolish man, / I love you all I can."
Playfulness does not make Bishop's portrayal of Brazil less true or less
genuine though. In "Twelfth Morning; or What You Will" Bishop offers
her version of Shakespeare's jesting wise fool:
The sea's off somewhere, doing nothing. Listen.
An expelled breath. And faint, faint, faint
(or are you hearing things), the sandpipers'
heart-broken cries.
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The jesting, which is so apparent in a neologism like "housewreck," is
mixed with an immersion in the surroundings and a loving respect for sea
and animals. The speaker tells us, for example, that we should not ask the
"big white horse" if he is trespassing because "He's still / asleep."
A Whitmanesque all-encompassing sympathy, especially w ith outsiders,
can also be witnessed in "The Burglar of Babylon." In this ballad, Bishop
tells the story of soldiers pursuing and finally killing a burglar in the hilly
slums of Rio. As Lloyd Schwartz has pointed out, Bishop's sympathy is with
the burglar as well as with the soldiers who have to shoot him. Both are
victims of the country's plight.26 Again, no judgment is being passed
because, as Bonnie Costello has written, when we read a Bishop poem, "We
gaze rather than reply" (Costello, "Vision" 351).27
26 Schwartz writes,
By the end of the "Brazil" section, she finds herself, still
the observer, literally staring, with a kind of child-like
steadfastness, into the face of Brazilian despair. . . . Her
"view" is now informed by her intimate knowledge of
the problems of urban Brazil— of the favelas, congested
with squatters and their kaleidoscopically multicolored
shacks. The Keystone Cops violence of "The Burglar of
Babylon" is humanized by Bishop's nonjudgmental
sympathy for the innocence and helplessness of both
the criminal and his captors— all of them equally caught
up in Brazil's self-contradictions. (Schwartz 91)
27 Costello demonstrates that
the description of the landscape becomes a means for
the release of motions and tensions which might
otherwise be precluded or overlooked. What we
experience, then, is not so much the particular streak of
the tulip, or the particular mountain or cave or field,
but a series of tensions and movements, a range from
close focus to wide prospect, and so on, which invites us
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But "The Burglar of Babylon" displays an especially strong social
consciousness. The poem illustrates that
On the fair green hills of Rio
There grows a fearful stain:
The poor who come to Rio
And can't go home again.
In this first stanza, which is repeated as the poem's penultimate stanza,
Bishop opposes the beautiful landscape and vegetation of Rio de Janeiro to
the poverty of its slum inhabitants. In this opposition she links people and
animals and sets them off against their miserable surroundings: "On the
hills a million people, / A million sparrows, nest, / Like a confused
migration." She implies that not only Micu^u, the title character, is
"doomed" but that everyone who lives here is in a similar predicament.
The soldier who accidentally shoots the officer in command is also
representative of people on the hill of Babylon: "The soldier had hysterics /
A nd sobbed like a little child." Both the soldiers and the burglar are
therefore outsiders and victims. Those who profit from their sacrifice are
the "Rich people in apartments [who] / Watched through binoculars."
The poem implies that the persecution of one group by another is
continuous here: after shooting Micugu, the soldiers are soon after two
other criminals. When the fifth stanza is repeated as the last one, the
designation of the hill of Babylon as "the hill of the Skeleton" carries more
force as an image of death after we have witnessed the killing of Micu^u.
And the repetition of the first stanza as the penultimate one stresses that
to enter the poem each w ith his own range of more
individual feelings and thoughts. (Costello, "Vision”
352)
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poverty is also continuous here because in spite of the poor living
conditions and fights for life and death in the slums, migrants keep coming
to Rio. Although Bishop seems to be a distanced observer in this poem, she
draws attention to the victimization of parts of the population and is again
striving for a stronger unity. In a hemispheric context, the underprivileged
groups in the poems may represent Brazil, while the "Rich people" who
watch their predicament may be associated with the United States.
But Bishop also knows that empathy for the disadvantaged is not an
automatic reaction. The speaker of her poem on "Going to the Bakery" in
Rio de Janeiro catches herself in a neo-colonial pose. While the speaker of
"The Burglar of Babylon" is rather invisible and sympathizes (maybe
because of her physical distance) with the underprivileged from beginning
to end of the poem, the speaker of "Going to the Bakery," comes into direct
contact with a bandaged beggar and has to analyze her situation before she
can empathize. After giving the beggar seven cents and telling him "Good
night' / from force of habit," she realizes her lack of understanding for this
person, thinking "Oh, mean habit! / Not one word more apt or bright?"
Now she recognizes and rejects the neo-colonizer's inaptness and
somberness. She further realizes that Brazil’ s poor cannot speak out for
themselves. In the wider context of the Americas, Bishop is telling her
North American audience that giving loans to poorer American countries
is not enough. A loving understanding and admiration of the kind Bishop
displays in "Under the Window: Ouro Preto" must complement financial
assistance.
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While Bishop's depictions of Brazil in the first section of Questions of
Travel are often characterized by their interest in the strange and
mysterious, this aspect also appears in several of the poems of the
collection's "Elsewhere" section. Through this device Bishop shows that
Brazil is not necessarily as exotic as her North American audience may
think. As "Sestina" and "First Death in Nova Scotia" show, the mysterious
is also present closer to home. In Bishop’ s "Sestina" a child is sitting in the
kitchen w ith her crying grandmother, a scene reminiscent of "In the
Village." After the child has drawn a house with a garden, magic sets in:
the little moons fall down like tears
from between the pages of the almanac
into the flower bed the child *
has carefully placed in front of the house.
Time to plant tears, says the almanac.
Again, Bishop is interested in connections. Here they include the
combination of reality and magic.
The same is true for "First Death in Nova Scotia," where a little girl is
taken to say good-bye to her infant cousin, who is lying in his coffin. Since
the girl does not understand the situation, to her "Arthur's coffin was / a
little frosted cake" and "Arthur was very small. / He was all white, like a
doll / that hadn't been painted yet." In the girl’ s understanding of the
situation, her cousin is on his way to become "the smallest page at court" for
the "gracious royal couples" depicted on the walls.
Like the world of Brazil, the world of "Elsewhere" is enigmatic, as Bishop
demonstrates, for example through the numerous question marks in
"Filling Station." Therefore, Helen Vendler is right in draw ing attention to
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"the interpenetration of the domestic and the strange" as a constant feature
of Bishop's work, where "it is not only the exotic that is strange" (Vendler,
Part 97).
The exuberance and "spilling over" which Bishop would later present in
"In the Waiting Room," also characterize the poems of Questions of Travel
and The Complete Poems. Both Brazil and other places in the Western
Hemisphere are portrayed together with the speaker's excitement and her
imm ediate reactions to the "frivolous greenery" and the "strange,"
"ancient" and "brilliant" world she is recreating. Through the mixture of
narration w ith stream-of-consciousness and/ or direct speech on the one
hand and through the use of "now" and of frequent corrections on the other
hand, these poems create immediate and unmediated pictures of places and
of the speaker's reaction to them. The resulting pictures are, to use Bishop's
phrase from "Brazil, January 1, 1502," "taken off the frame." They are too
lively to be confined by a frame or painted definitively. For Bishop, the
depiction of a place in poetry is necessarily tentative. But its tentative nature
and its animation give the re-created place autonomy and a potential for
magic.
In Bishop's poetics, the artful re-creation of a place must capture the life
inherent in a place which the straightforward eye cannot see. It is through
her concentration on details and through her playfulness that Bishop
creates a language of magic realism which brings out the life inherent in a
place. In a letter to Anne Stevenson, Bishop explains that she adopted her
use of details from Charles Darwin's work:
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Dreams, works of art (some glimpses of the always-
more-successful surrealism of everyday life, unexpected
moments of empathy (is it?), catch a peripheral vision
of whatever it is one can never really see full-face but
that seems enormously important. . . . [Rjeading Darwin
one admires the beautiful solid case being built up out
of his endless, heroic observations, almost unconscious
or automatic— and then comes a sudden relaxation, a
forgetful phrase, and one feels that strangeness of his
undertaking, sees the lonely young man, his eye fixed
on facts and minute details, sinking or sliding giddily
off into the unknown. What one seems to want in art,
in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for
its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless
concentration, (quoted in Kalstone, "Memory" 6)
"Endless, heroic observations" that are "almost unconscious or automatic"
give Bishop’ s poetry its immediacy. And Darwin's "strangeness" and
"concentration" are also key terms for a description of Bishop's own
observations.
In her poetic pictures of places details assume a life of their own and thus
give life to the place of which they are a part. In order to recognize the life
inherent in a detail or to invest it with life Bishop has to immerse herself in
the place she re-creates because she wants to feel with it and become a part of
it. This attempt to be "driving to the interior," as she writes at the end of
"Arrival at Santos," is characteristic of the whole volume Questions of
Travel. The epigraph to this book, "...O dar-vos quanto tenho e quanto
posso, / Que quanto mais vos pago, mais vos devo" [Giving you as much as
I have and as much as I can, / The more I pay you, the more I owe you."], a
quotation from Camoes, is foremost intended for Lota de Macedo Soares, to
whom the book is dedicated, but also applies to Bishop's attitude toward
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Brazil. This motto suggests her unconditional love and giving toward both
Lota and Brazil.
In the title poem of the volume, the speaker talks about a "connection."
The meaning of this "connection" is not limited to a link between "the
crudest wooden footwear" and "the wooden fantasies of wooden cages" to
which it directly applies. Bishop is also thinking of the connection between
the observer and the landscape in which she is immersed and by which she
is fascinated. Through this immersion, she connects "Brazil" and
"Elsewhere," the South and the North of the Americas. Bishop makes the
whole Western Hemisphere hers. She feels at home with the exotic as well
as with the domestic, a feeling that will continue in her late poems, which
will be discussed in chapter six, and that will also shape Bishop’ s
translations, which are the subject of the next chapter. As she wrote in "The
Map," there should be "no favorites" and as she adds in "Filling Station,"
"Somebody loves us all."
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Traduttore, traditore
— Italian epigram
Chapter V: Bringing the Other Americas Home: Elizabeth Bishop's
Translations
A. Theories of Translation
In view of Elizabeth Bishop's vision of herself as a cultural mediator, it is
not surprising that she was attracted to translation as a means of
establishing closer connections between the Americas and also as a means of
m aking "local" or "national" poetry "inter-American." Bishop believed that
translation would facilitate crosscultural communication and contribute to
a transnational or hemispheric understanding. But she was of course also
painfully aware of the difficulties of translation, which always involves a
transfer not merely from one language to another but also from one culture
to another. For the "American" translator, of course, the translation would
be in the similar context of the hemispheric, making it quite a different
problem than, say, the translation of Chinese literature into English.
While Bishop was translating from one culture into another, these were
both Am erican cultures (in the hemispheric sense of the word). The four
m ain cultures of teh Western Hemisphere between which Bishop mediated
in her translations were those of Brazil, Mexico, Anglo-America, and
Anglo-Canada. Apart from the spatial connectedness of these cultures, their
temporal simultaneity also facilitated Bishop’ s task as a translator and as a
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cultural mediator. While her translations, like her late poem "Santarem,"
do not attempt to obliterate the distinctions between American cultures,
they enjoy the interplay and connectedness of these cultures. With regard to
the Western Hemisphere's diversity, Elizabeth Bishop's original writings as
well as her translations reveal her to be not an "either-or" but a "both-and"
Am erican.
Cultural distinctions within the Americas did not prevent Elizabeth
Bishop from translating Minha Vida de Menina, the diary of a girl between
the ages of twelve and fifteen growing up in the remote Brazilian mining
town of Diamantina in the state of Minas Gerais in the 1890s; three stories
by Clarice Lispector for The Kenyon Review; numerous poems by Brazilian
poets mainly of the first half of the twentieth century, which she
subsequently integrated in An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Brazilian
Poetry, a collection she co-edited with Emanuel Brasil; as well as several
poems by Octavio Paz, on which she worked together with him, putting the
hemispheric associations into action.
Bishop seems not to have been interested in theories of translation, but
instead in the practice of it. However, theories of translation abound and
there are extreme views which assert that translation is impossible, that
only a word-for-word translation is legitimate, or that all communication is
already a form of translation. Jacques Derrida, in "Des Tours de Babel"
(1985), offers a close analysis of various translations of the Babel episode in
the Bible. He concludes that "Translation . . . becomes necessary and
impossible, like the effect of a struggle for appropriation of that name,
necessary and forbidden in the interval between two absolutely proper
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names [those of "Bavel" or "Babel” and "God"]" (Derrida 223). Derrida
believes that God "pleads for a translator" because "At the moment when
he imposes and opposes his law to that of the tribe, he is also a petitioner for
translation. He is also indebted. He has not finished pleading for the
translation of his name even though he forbids it. For Babel is
untranslatable" (Derrida 227).
Despite some theorists’ claim of its impossibility, translation has been a
part of literary creation since the times of the Roman Empire. The Romans
tried to incorporate subject matters of a foreign culture into their own
language without paying particular attention to lexical or stylistic
characteristics of the original source-language texts. "For the Romans,
translating literary and philosophical works meant looting those elements
from Greek culture that would enhance the aesthetic dimensions of their
own culture" (Schulte/Biguenet 2). With the Romans, the target language
directed the rules of translation. "Latin cultural and linguistic imperialism .
. . despises the foreign word as something alien but appropriates the foreign
meaning in order to dominate it through the translator's own language"
(Friedrich 19). While the Romans valued an appropriation of content,
Renaissance translators explored the possibility of enriching their own
language through linguistic structures from other languages. But in the
middle of the eighteenth century, with writers like Denis Diderot and
D'Alembert, Schleiermacher and von Humboldt, the source language came
to be considered equal to the target language, which enhanced a desire to
adjust and adapt to the foreign.
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Into the twentieth century the status of the translator remained an
inferior one, since he was usually not considered an original writer. Notable
exceptions to this rule were Pope's translation of Homer and Golding's
translation of Ovid, which Ezra Pound praised so highly. But in his 1932
essay, "Some Versions of Homer," Jorge Luis Borges questions the marginal
status of the translator: "our superstition that translations are inferior-
reinforced by the age-old Italian adage traduttore traditore— is the result of
our naivete," he proclaims (Borges, "Versions" 1136). Borges applied Ezra
Pound’ s dictum "make it new" to the task of the translator, whom he sees
as making the old (text) new (in the context of another language, time, and
culture).
In recent decades, poststructural theorists have asserted that translational
thinking is fundamental to all acts of hum an communication. Some
believe that all acts of communication are acts of translation. In this respect,
a theoretical chain can be established from A rthur Schopenhauer, to Roman
Jakobson, Jacques Derrida, and Michael Riffaterre. Similarly, Hans Georg
Gadamer believes that "Reading is already translation, and translation is
translation for the second time. . . . The process of translating comprises in
its essence the whole secret of human understanding of the world and of
social communication" (quoted in Schulte/Biguenet 9). This notion runs
through many translation theories of the twentieth century. George Steiner,
for example in his influential book After Babel (1975), writes that since
language changes constantly, "Any thorough reading of a text out of the past
of one’ s own language and literature is a manifold act of interpretation"
(Steiner 17). Steiner speaks of an "interpretative transfer" that takes place
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within one and the same language as well as from one language to another
(Steiner 28). Therefore, he concludes, "translation proper, the interpretation
of verbal signs in one language by means of verbal signs in another, is a
special, heightened case of the process of communication and reception in
any act of hum an speech" (Steiner 414).
In his essay "Translation: Literature and Letters" (1971), Octavio Paz
seems to be following a similar line of argument. He writes that
When we learn to speak, we are learning to translate;
the child who asks his mother the meaning of a word is
really asking her to translate the unfamiliar term into
the simple words he already knows. In this sense,
translation within the same language is not essentially
different from translation between two tongues, and the
histories of all peoples parallel the child's experience.
(Paz, "Translation" 152)
According to Paz and poststructuralist theory, translation takes place
between languages as well as within the same language because language is
essentially a translation. But Paz wavers when it comes to the issue of
originality in poetry. If all communication is merely translation, can
communication (and translation) be original? It seems that Paz is trying to
have it both ways, arguing at the same time for the originality of
translations and for the impossibility of any original texts:
while translation overcomes the differences between
one language and another, it also reveals them more
fully. Thanks to translation, we become aware that our
neighbors do not speak and think as we do. On the one
hand, the world is presented to us as a collection of
similarities; on the other, as a growing heap of texts,
each slightly different from the one that came before it:
translations of translations of translations. Each text is
unique, yet at the same time it is the translation of
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another text. No text can be completely original because
language itself, in its very essence, is already a
translation— first from the nonverbal world and then
because each sign and each phrase is a translation of
another sign, another phrase. However, the inverse of
this reasoning is also entirely valid. All texts are
originals because each translation has its own
distinctive character. Up to a point, each translation is a
creation and thus constitutes a unique text. (Paz,
"Translation" 154)
The notion that "all texts are originals" leads to the question if
translation is mainly an enrichment of the target language and culture or an
exploitation and possibly a falsification of the source language and culture.
Both views have been held. Wilhelm von Humboldt, for example, in the
introduction to his translation of A gam emnon (1816), sees the German
language enriched through his translation. Walter Benjamin, too, considers
translation an enrichment and a liberation of the target language. In "The
Task of the Translator" (1923) he writes,
It is the task of the translator to release in his own
language that pure language which is under the spell of
another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work
in his re-creation of that work. For the sake of pure
language he breaks through decayed barriers of his own
language. (Benjamin 80-81)
Like Rudolf Pannwitz, whose book Die Krisis der europaischen Kultur
inspired Benjamin's essay, Benjamin supports the idea that it is necessary to
enrich one's own language through translation and to move the translation
jand its audience toward the original source language text rather than vice
jversa. Benjamin quotes Pannwitz, who had postulated that "our
itranslations, even the best, proceed from a false premise. They want to
Igermanize Hindi, Greek, English, instead of hindi-izing, grecizising,
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anglicizing German. They have a much greater respect for the little ways of
their own language than for the spirit of the foreign works” (quoted in
Benjamin 81). Enrichment of the target language here goes hand in hand
with respect for the source language.
Jose Ortega y Gasset, in his dialogic essay "The Misery and Splendor of
Translation" (1937), voices the same opinion. He concludes that "What is
imperative is that, in translating, we try to leave our language and go to the
other— and not the reverse, which is what is usually done" (Ortega y Gasset
112). Ortega y Gasset believes that a translator should not worry about
bending the rules of the target language in order to render the turns of the
original. This bending of rules, for example, is one of the characteristics of
Ezra Pound's translations, in which the poet intended to give the English
language something it had not possessed before.
A contrary view on enrichment versus exploitation is held by Tejaswini
Niranjana in Siting Translation (1992). Niranjana examines translation in
the context of "contesting and contested stories attempting to account for, to
recount, the asymmetry and inequality of relations between peoples, races,
languages" (Niranjana 1). She sees translation as shaped by
the asymmetrical relations of power that operate under
colonialism. What is at stake here is the representation
of the colonized, who need to be produced in such a
manner as to justify colonial domination . . .
Translation thus produces strategies of containment. By
employing certain modes of representing the other—
which it thereby also brings into being— translation
reinforces hegemonic versions of the colonized,
helping them acquire the status of what Edward Said
calls representations, or objects without history.
(Niranjana 2-3)
205
While Niranjana offers examples to justify her claims in the context of
British representations of India, a consideration of translation in general as
necessarily disempowering the translated author, text, or culture m ust be
contested.28 The claim that translation produces "hegemonic versions of the
non-Western other" (Niranjana 4) does certainly not apply to Elizabeth
Bishop's translations from the Portuguese and Spanish. Her non-W estern
Helena Morley is, for example, far too similar to the (largely
autobiographical) Nova Scotian girl of "In the Village" to justify
Niranjana's claim. By contrast, a translator like Bishop, who considers
herself a cultural mediator, is trying to overcome notions of otherness in
her translations instead of reinforcing them.
The preservation or reduction of the original text's otherness is linked to
the freedom a translator may take in the recreation of the original. How
much freedom a translator can legitimately take is a point of contention on
which many translators— such as Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop— have
often clashed. John Dryden (1680) distinguished between "metaphrase, or
turning an author word by word, and line by line, from one language into
another;" "paraphrase, or translation with latitude, where the author is kept
in view by the translator, so as never to be lost, but his words are not so
28 Niranjana would probably not go so far as to assert that all translation is
post-colonial exploitation since she writes that her goal is "to reclaim the
notion of translation by deconstructing and reinscribing its potential as a
strategy of resistance" (Niranjana 6). One of her ways of accomplishing this
goal is through a questioning of the notions of "representation" and
"original." As the ultimate solution for avoiding post-colonialism in
translation and historiography Niranjana favors "hybridity . . . the sign of a
post-colonial theory that subverts essentialist models of reading while it
points toward a new practice of translation" (Niranjana 46).
206
strictly followed as his sense;" and "imitation, where the translator . . .
assumes the liberty . . . to vary from the words and sense (Dryden 17).
Dryden favors the middle way and thinks that both imitation and word-for-
word translations should be avoided. Friedrich Schleiermacher (1813) also
classifies translations either as "paraphrase," which he considers a
translation of the meaning, or as "imitation." The translator's two basic
choices, writes Schleiermacher, are as follows: "Either the translator leaves
the writer alone as much as possible and moves the reader toward the
writer, or he leaves the reader alone as much as possible and moves the
w riter toward the reader" (Schleiermacher 42). But Schleiermacher warns of
a mixture of these two strategies.
In twentieth-century America, Vladimir Nabokov (1955) is one of the few
voices who believe in the desirability of strictly literal translation rather
than paraphrase or imitation. In his opinion, 'The clumsiest literal
translation is a thousand times more useful than the prettiest paraphrase"
(Nabakov 127). The translator’ s only task, says Nabokov, is "to reproduce
w ith absolute exactitude the whole text, and nothing but the text. The term
literal translation’ is tautological since anything but that is not truly a
translation but an imitation, an adaptation or a parody" (Nabokov 134).
Robert Lowell's view with regard to the legitimate extent of the
translator's freedom is diametrically opposed to Nabokov's. In his
Imitations (1962), which he dedicated to Elizabeth Bishop, Lowell does not
attempt to give exact translations, but instead writes poems inspired by the
originals or responding to them. In his "Acknowledgements" he writes, "I
have been so free with my texts that it is perhaps an impertinence for me to
207
thank those people, more expert in languages than I for their scattered help"
(Lowell, Imitations xiv). And in his "Introduction" he explains,
This book is partly self-sufficient and separate from its
sources, and should be first read as a sequence, one
voice running through many personalities, contrasts
and repetitions. . . . I have been reckless with literal
meaning, and laboured hard to get the tone. (Lowell,
Imitations xi)
But when he sent Elizabeth Bishop his translations from the French for her
comments, she was not convinced that he had actually gotten the tone of
the original poems.
For Lowell, translation is not mechanical, but instead it is very similar to
writing an original poem: "I believe that poetic translation— I would call it
an im itation-m ust be expert and inspired, and needs at least as much
technique, luck and rightness of hand as an original poem" (Lowell,
Im itations xii). Since he was aiming at imitations rather than faithful
translations, Lowell felt free to drop, move or add verses and stanzas and to
change images and meters. But Bishop reacted skeptically to Lowell's
changes and told him that some of them sounded like mistakes. She
cautioned him, "The Rimbaud and Baudelaire poems are all so well known
that I don't think you should lay yourself open to charges of carelessness or
ignorance or willful perversity" (quoted in Kalstone, Becoming 204). Bishop
thought, for example, that Lowell gave Rimbaud a darkness that is not
present in the original poems. She told Lowell, "I just can’ t decide how
208
'free' one has the right to be with the poet's intentions" (quoted in Kalstone,
Becoming 205).29
But what both Bishop and Lowell seek to do in their translations is to
preserve the effect of the original. This goal has been articulated, among
others, by A rthur Schopenhauer, Wilhelm Schlegel, W alter Benjamin, Ezra
Pound, Jorge Luis Borges, and Octavio Paz. Due to the lack of exact
equivalents between languages Schopenhauer (1800), however, is skeptical
about the possibility of reproducing an effect. He believes that often only
"directions of meaning" can be rendered: "Rarely can a characteristic, terse,
and significant sentence be transplanted from one language to another so
that it will produce exactly the same effect in the new language"
(Schopenhauer 32-33). But not withstanding such warnings, translators
have long aimed at a sameness of effect. Wilhelm Schlegel, for example,
commented on his Shakespeare translations into German, "I have tried to
render the nature of the original according to the impression it made on
me. To try to smooth it over or to embellish it would be to destroy it"
(quoted in Schulte/Biguenet 4).
Walter Benjamin may have articulated most forcefully this position,
which is also, by and large, that of Elizabeth Bishop. Benjamin writes,
The task of the translator consists in finding that
intended effect flntentionl upon the language into
which he is translating which produces in it the echo of
the original. . . . Unlike a work of literature, translation
29 Analyzing Bishop’ s suggestions for Lowell's translations, David
Kalstone concludes, "What disquiets Bishop over and over is the force and
scale of Lowell's language, and the word she keeps coming back to is 'over
riding'" (Kalstone, Becoming 206).
209
does not find itself in the center of the language forest
but on the outside facing the wooded ridge; it calls into
it without entering, aiming at that single spot where the
echo is able to give, in its own language, the
reverberation of the work in the alien one. . . . The
intention of the poet is spontaneous, primary, graphic;
that of the translator is derivative, ultimate, ideational.
(Benjamin 77)
Benjamin thinks that a word-for-word translation cannot reproduce the
meaning or effect of the original. Octavio Paz agrees with Benjamin that the
achievement of the same effect is more important than the preservation of
literal meanings. "The ideal of poetic translation," he writes, consists in
"producing analogous effects with different implements" (Paz,
"Translation" 160).
In order to achieve such "analogous effects" a translation, especially a
poetic translation, must be a re-creation rather than a mechanical
transposition. An authentic re-creation, Schleiermacher and von Hum boldt
believe, has to retain a "feeling of foreignness" (Schleiermacher 46) or "a
foreign flavor" (Humboldt 58). But in order to move the reader towards the
world of the writer, von Humboldt clarifies that rather than creating
unnecessary "foreignness" ("Fremdheit") what should be retained in a
translation is the "foreign" ("das Fremde"). Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
(1819) also considered a re-creation in which the reader is moved toward the
w riter’ s world the "highest" kind of translation: "the goal of the translation
is to achieve perfect identity with the original, so that the one does not exist
instead of the other but in the other's place" (Goethe 61). Here the translator
"more or less gives up the uniqueness of his own nation" (Goethe 61). But
Walter Benjamin cautions that a translation should not strive to have
210
"likeness to the original," so much as to be a "transformation and a renewal
of something living" (Benjamin 74). Benjamin adds that while content and
language form a certain unity in the original, they do not in a translation,
where the language remains alien to the original's content. "As translation
is a mode of its own, the task of the translator, too, may be regarded as
distinct and clearly differentiated from the task of the poet" (Benjamin 77).
Especially with regard to poetry, Roman Jakobson (1959) has pointed out,
"Only creative transposition is possible" (Jakobson 151).3 0
Ezra Pound, Jorge Luis Borges, Robert Lowell, and Octavio Paz, on the
other hand, do not believe that there is a marked difference between the
w ork of the poet and that of the translator. Hugh Kenner has pointed out
that for Pound
Translating does n o t. . . differ in essence from any other
poetic job ["the rendering, without deformation, of
something, w ithin him or without, which he has
clearly apprehended and seized in his mind"]; as the
poet begins by seeing, so the translator by reading; but
his reading must be a kind of seeing. (Kenner 10)
In order to translate, Pound believes, the translator must "absorb the
ambience of the text into his blood . . . and when he has done that, what he
writes is a poem of his own following the contours of the poem before him.
30 Jakobson distinguishes three kinds of translation: "intralingual
translation or rew ording" in the same language; "interlingual translation or
translation proper:" and "intersemiotic translation or transm utation." an
interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal systems, e.g.,
from verbal art into music, dance, cinema, or painting (Jakobson 144).
Although he does not make it clear in which of his three categories he
would put the "creative transposition" of poetry, this seems to be a sub
category of "translation proper."
211
He does not translate words. The words have led him into the thing he
expresses" (Kenner 11).
Jorge Luis Borges, who expressed his admiration for Pound’ s translations,
wrote in 1932 that the original text is a "model to be imitated" and that
different translations of the same text are "different perspectives of a
mutable fact, . . . a long experimental lottery of omissions and emphases"
(Borges, "Versions" 1136). In his famous essay "Pierre Menard, Author of
the Quixote" (1939) Borges expands on his concept of the translator as (re-)
creator. Here he tells the story of an imaginary French writer, Pierre
Menard, who endeavored to compose a contemporary Quixote:
Needless to say, he never contemplated a mechanical
transcription of the original; he did not propose to copy
it. His admirable intention was to produce a few pages
which would coincide— word for word and line for line-
-with those of Miguel de Cervantes. (Borges, Labyrinths
39)
Instead of mechanically translating the original text, Menard wants to re
enact the Quixote in his own world and times: "To be, in some way,
Cervantes and reach the Quixote seemed less arduous to him— and,
consequently less interesting— than to go on being Pierre Menard and reach
the Quixote through the experiences of Pierre Menard" (Borges, Labyrinths
40). But a re-enactment of the original text for another language, time, and
culture does not necessarily mean changing the text, as Borges illustrates
212
w hen he compares a passage from the original and from Menard's Quixote,
j which are verbally identical,3 1
i
Octavio Paz, in "Translation: Literature and Letters," seems to agree with
Borges. Paz writes that translators of poetry should not use "the foreign
poem as a point of departure toward their own;" instead, for a "good
translator" the "intended destination is a poem analogous although not
identical to the original poem. He moves away from the poem only to
follow it more closely" (Paz, "Translation" 158). This must also have been
i Octavio Paz's goal in translating some of his poems into English together
with Elizabeth Bishop while both were teaching at Harvard University.
Except for some remarks in her introduction to An Anthology of
Twentieth-Century Brazilian Poetry Bishop herself never expressed her
views on translation in print. But her manuscripts in the Vassar College
collection include two pages of undated typed notes for what was probably a
class lecture on translation 32 The notes are entitled "Remarks on
jTranslation," after which Bishop adds "Of poetry, mostly." Rather than
offering a translation theory, Bishop's notes present practical examples.
p i Especially in later years, Borges seems to have come to approve more
strongly of literal translations. In a 1972 seminar at Columbia University he
told his audience,
, I think there are two legitimate ways of translating. One way is to
j attempt a literal translation, the other is to try a re-creation. The
I paradox is— and, of course, 'paradox' means something true that at first
appearance seems false— that if you are out for strangeness, if you want,
let's say, to astonish the reader, you can do that by being literal.
(Borges, Writing 104)
32 This assumption is substantiated by Bishop referring to, for example,
"My trouble with the student who wrote on Lorca" ("Translation" 2).
213
i Inspired by one of Robert Lowell's aphorisms, Bishop starts out with the
j question "is it that translation has always to be done badly?" ("Translation"
1). She plans to show her students examples of what she considers bad and
good translations.33
Because of her own experiences as a translator Bishop is very aware of the
difficulties:
Some say that only the images of poetry can be
translated, & some that the images and ideas can... Well
- here we should remember the story of Mallarme and
Degas... and of course the words can’ t be transferred -
except possibly where the languages are very close, as in
Portuguese & Spanish, or where the Latin root-
meanings have not changed - but that's rare... And
even images! - one has to go cautiously here. A
rainstorm in Panama may be quite different from a
rainstorm in England . . . a "small something" in the
U S A might be "big" in the Orient - and so on (more
& better of this) ("Translation" 1)
j
jAlthough Bishop does not state clearly what exactly her opinion on what
i
can and what cannot be translated is, she advises her students to translate
j "cautiously " and to be aware that translation is not just a transposition from
one language to another but also from one culture to another.
,33 Laying out the organization of her lecture, the notes read:
Anyway, what I'm going to talk about now (very hit-or-miss-Iy, I’ m
afraid) is my feeling that it doesn't have to be done as badly as it
i frequently is... I'm going to read you some bad examples of translation
(or so I think), then some better ones - and some that perhaps might be
| called "good" - I'm also going to discuss some very small details, |
! perhaps you'll find them petty, - Mistakes or that never fail to j
; astound me in translation of contemporary - or recent - or "modern"
poetry... - You-undoubtedly think I'm an old fuddy duddy. (Are you
translators - or readers of translations only - or what? ("Translation" 1) !
214
Like Ezra Pound and Octavio Paz, Bishop believes— although with certain
j reserves— that the immersion in the foreign is a prerequisite for good
1 translation:
TRANSLATING IS HARD, IF NOT IMPOSSIBLE... it is
true that sometimes - R. Lowell is a good example here -
one has a feeling right or wrong - that one does know
what the poem says - a feeling like that "feminine
intuition" possibl[y]... Out of this feeling can come a
whole cluster of emotions, intuitions, appreciations, etc.
- 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. . . . When I read in
"A season in Hell" - Me voici sur la plage
arm oricaine..." (which is Brittany) I thought I
understood Rimbaud. And I looked up all the words. . .
. This was a beginning, and I think it is a beginning in
the right way, more or less. But one can rarely 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 BUT
("Translation" 1)
i
|The word "atmosphere" which Bishop uses here is a clue to her own
!
(translations, in which she tries to preserve the atmosphere of her originals
I
While also mediating it for her North American audience. In The Diary of
"Helena Morlev". for example, Bishop would preserve num erous
Portuguese words, partly because there is no exact English expression for
i
them, and would explain them in footnotes.
| In order to preserve the atmosphere of the original, Bishop thought, a
translator should change as little as possible. Hence her problems with
Lowell's Imitations, some of which she may have put in the category she
215
calls "plain carelessness~or is it egotism?" ("Translation" 2). With regard to
i translations of poetry, Bishop believed that the translator must try to
> recreate the formal aspects of the original, even if that is very difficult. If this
cannot be done, she writes, "write a literal translation in prose... That wd. be
more polite..." ("Translation" 2). Like Friedrich Nietzsche, Bishop thinks,
"What is most difficult to translate from one language into another is the
tempo of its style: that which is grounded in the character of the race or, to
speak in a physiological manner, in the average tempo of its metabolism "
i
(Nietzsche 69). Therefore Bishop was always very diligent in trying to
recreate lovingly for her Northern audience what she considered "the
character of the [Brazilian] race."
Jose Ortega y Gasset writes that a translation "is not a duplicate of the
original text," but "a path toward the work . . . that brings us closer to the
work without ever trying to repeat or replace it" (Ortega y Gasset 109). And
in bringing her Northern readers closer to the works she translates,
Elizabeth Bishop also brings them closer to the culture out of which these
I works come and thus makes her audience sympathize and empathize with
I
| the other Americas. Like Hans Erich Nossack (1965), Bishop believes that a
|
j translation must come out of empathy with and love for the original text
and that one of its aims should be to make us "recognize that things are no
different anywhere else, which relieves us momentarily of our sense of
'isolation as hum an individuals" (Nossack 235).
216
B- The Diary of "Helena Morlev"
Elizabeth Bishop recounts that shortly after first arriving in Brazil at the end
of 1951 she asked some Brazilian friends which Brazilian books she should
read. Apart from works by the well-known Machado de Assis and Euclides
da Cunha the recommendations included the anonymously published
Minha Vida de Menina [literally: My Life as a Girll. The book is a diary kept
by a girl between the ages of twelve and fifteen in the remote mining town
of Diamantina in the state of Minas Gerais between 1893 and 1895. It was
first published in 1942, when Dr. Augusto Mario Brant put together and
edited the pages from his wife's diary. Although the author's name is Alice
Brant, or Dona Alice, the girl in the diary calls herself Helena Morley, a
combination of names inspired by the English ancestry on her m other’ s side
of the family. In one of the book's first entries, Helena explains the
beginnings of her writing. On her third day of "Normal School," she
decides, "I'm going to begin a new life. The Portuguese teacher advised all
| the girls to form the habit of writing something every day, a letter or
whatever happens to them" (Diary 8). Out of this resolution emerged what
l
Bishop critics usually call a "Brazilian classic." However, the book seems to
be less widely known in Brazil than Bishop scholars commonly assume.34
34 Dilvo Ristoff, a Brazilian literature professor at the Universidade Federal
de Santa Catarina, actually told me in June 1991 that he had never heard of
the book and that it was definitely not a "Brazilian classic." His view was
confirmed by Maria Luiza Cyrino Valle from the Universidade Federal de
Minas Gerais in Belo Horizonte in my conversation with her in November
1992.
217
Bishop started reading Minha Vida de Menina in 1952 and, as she writes
in her introduction, when she was about halfway through the book she
decided to try to translate it into English. Elsewhere she said that she started
translating the book as an opportunity to practice and improve her
Portuguese, which must still have been rather shaky at that time. She
acknowledges Lota de Macedo Soares' help in the translation and thanks
her for ’ ’ reluctantly but conscientiously [going] over every word of the
translation with me, not once, but several times" (Diary xxxiii).
In her translation, Bishop tries to strike a balance between keeping the
Brazilian atmosphere of the original (a goal she mentions in the lecture
notes discussed above) and translating as well as transposing it into English
and into the culture of North America. Since the original author had
already used the Nordic, English name Helena Morley, Bishop’ s translation
of the diary is in a sense a translation back into English. Bishop explains,
i
In general, I have used the English forms, but wherever
it seemed to give the atmosphere better I have used the
third person.
For the same reason I have kept the Portuguese
proper names although it got me into difficulties . . . I
j have tried to avoid as many other Portuguese words as I
j could. (Diary xxxv)
i
| Keeping the original’ s "atmosphere" and, following Walter Benjamin’ s
; theory, re-creating the original’ s effect were definitely two of Bishop's main
| concerns in this translation. Actually, she leaves numerous words in the
Portuguese original and then explains them in square brackets or in
footnotes. In this manner, Bishop preserves for her Northern audience the
exotic nature of Minha Vida de Menina while at the same time making this '
218
exotic atmosphere more accessible for her readers. In Schleiermacher’ s
terms, she is "moving the reader toward the writer" and her exotic world.
In her introduction, Bishop also tries to establish connections between
the diary and works of Western literature with which her audience would
be more familiar:
The scenes and events it described were odd, remote,
and long ago, and yet fresh, sad, funny, and eternally
true. The longer I stayed on in Brazil the more Brazilian
the book seemed, yet much of it 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. Certain
pages reminded me of more famous and "literary"
ones: Nausicaa doing her laundry on the beach, possibly
with the help of her freed slaves; bits from Chaucer;
W ordsworth's poetical children and country people, or
Dorothy Wordsworth's wandering beggars. Occasionally
entries referring to slavery seemed like notes for an
unwritten, Brazilian, feminine version of Tom Sawyer
and Nigger Jim. But this was a real, day-by-day diary,
kept by a real girl, and anything resembling it that I
could think of had been observed or made up, and
written down, by adults. (An exception is Anne Frank's
i diary; but its forced maturity and closed atmosphere are
tragically different from the authentic childlikeness, the
classical sunlight and simplicity of this one.) I am not
sure now whether someone suggested my translating it
or I thought of it myself, but when I was about halfway
! through the book I decided to try. (Diary x)
By the time she started translating the diary, Bishop had overcome her
severe allergic reaction to the cashew fruit which had originally forced her
j to stay longer in Brazil than she may have intended and she had made a
'conscious decision to make Brazil her adopted home for some time. The
emotional warmth she must have felt in Brazil as well as her life with Lota
219
prepared her for a loving immersion in the diary's world.35 As she points
out, the diary seemed to her "odd, remote, and long ago, and yet fresh, sad,
funny, and eternally true." The book must have combined for Bishop a
sense of the oddness and strangeness she experienced in Brazil with a
feeling of the universality and the universal truth of the diary's events.
A dded to this attraction was what Bishop refers to as the diary's "authentic
childlikeness." This childlike quality also characterizes a num ber of the
poems and stories Bishop wrote and revised between 1952 and 1956. Specific
examples of the diary's attraction for Bishop will follow.
In the passage quoted above, Bishop also stresses that these are "real"
events and she suggests that in Brazil reality may be similar to what fiction
is in other cultures. Fifteen pages later she repeats that "it really happened:
everything did take place, day by day, minute by minute, once and only
once, just the way Helena says it did" (Diary xxvi). These remarks suggest
that Bishop is so enchanted by the world of the diary (and of her adopted
home, Brazil) that she also has to remind herself of the reality of these
surroundings. Moreover, in her role of cultural mediator, she hereby
increases her Northern audience's acceptance of the diary as real rather than
fictitious. She invites her readers to join in her adm iration of Helena's
honesty: "If she is not always quite admirable, she is always completely
l
1 herself; hypocrisy appears for a moment and then vanishes like the dew"
I (Diary xxviii). In both her 1957 and her 1977 introductions to her translation
'35 Bishop recounts, for example, that when she first met Dona Alice she
jwas overwhelmed by the cordiality with which she was received: "This
w arm th and ease in meeting strangers is a Brazilian characteristic especially
: charming to Nordic visitors" (Diary xii).
220
Bishop admiringly writes that Dona Alice's "book . . . has kept her
childhood for us, as fresh as paint" (Diary xxxiv).
Introducing the 1977 edition of The Diary of "Helena Morlev" Bishop
adm its that the "possibly excessive length and detail [of her introduction to
the book's original 1957 edition] are probably due to the pleasure and
excitement I felt in translating the book and then actually seeing all the
places, and even some of the people, mentioned in it" (Diary vii). Bishop
spent a week in Diamantina in 1955. She writes about this mining town,
"Remote, sad, and impoverished as it was, I liked the little town very much,
perhaps because it seemed so close to the Diamantina of Helena's
childhood, the writing coming off the pages of her diary, and turning to life
again, as it had happened" (Diary viii). And establishing a link between
herself and other visitors of the town Bishop adds, "the fantastic landscape,
i the m inute churches and houses, the narrow economy and the
j
| characteristics of the people have changed very little. Diamantina today
seems to strike other visitors very much as it struck me then" (Diary viii).
jln this way, Bishop is linking herself and her perception of Diamantina to
|that of other visitors and, by extension, invites her Northern audience to
share her excitement about the diary’ s setting.
The world of Minha Vida de Menina is enchanting to Bishop. Her
description of Diamantina in the translation’ s introduction is reminiscent
of the enchantment and the feeling of being overwhelmed that characterize j
»
the beginning of "Brazil, January 1, 1502": "There are unexpected streams
I
among the rocks; slender waterfalls fall into small black pools or the streams
fan out glittering over beds of white sand. . . . But the air is crisp and
221
delicious and the horizon is rimmed all around w ith clear-etched peaks of
rock" (Diary xvi). In the same way that we enter Diamantina— with and
through Bishop— we also enter into the person of the young Dona Alice or
of her Helena Morley. Helena does not hold back in her diary; she opens
herself up and in this way pulls her readers into her world. Even some
dreams are recorded in the diary, which probably increases our invites the
readers’ greater sympathies. At one point Helena recounts,
: Dreaming that I'm at Mass at the Cathedral in the
middle of the crowd in my underwear, is something
horrible that’ s always happening to me. Lots of times
I've dreamed I was at School in my bare feet, without
knowing where to hide them. It's a constant
martyrdom. (Diary 165)
This is definitely an instance where, as Bishop wrote, the diary reminds
readers of more "literary" texts. Here the similarity is to Ernesto Cardenal's
"Prayer for Marilyn Monroe.” Cardenal writes about his subject,
i
When she was a child, she dreamed she was naked in a
church
(according to Time)
standing in front of a prostrate multitude, heads to the
ground,
j and had to walk on tiptoe to avoid the heads. (Cardenal,
i Apocalypse 31)
i
Both passages call up the audience s compassion for the dreamer.
The French poet Georges Bernanos read Minha Vida de Menina in Rio
;de Janeiro in 1945 and wrote to the book’ s author,
! You have written one of those books, so rare in any
literature, that owe nothing to either experience or
talent, but everything to ingenium, to genius . . .
Because these recollections of a simple little girl of
Minas present the same problem as the dazzling poems
222
of Rimbaud. As vastly different as they may appear to
the stupid, we know that they are both of them derived
from the same mysterious and magical fountain— of life
and of art.
. . . You have made us see and love everything that you
saw and loved yourself in those days, and every time I
close your book I am more than ever convinced that its
secret will always escape me. (Diary xxxviii).
Bishop's response to the book must have been a similar one. And,
moreover, it called up her own small town experience in teh North.
Therefore she wanted to share her love of the diary with a wider audience
in N orth America.
She must also have been attracted to Helena's desire to make no
distinctions between people and to feel close to everybody. Because of her
lifelong status as an outsider, which has been discussed in chapter II,
Elizabeth Bishop tried to be a nexus between people, groups of people, or
cultures. To a minor degree this desire is also discernable with Helena. She
does, for example, not see any justification for ethnic distinctions. But when
Helena gets up at night to calm a crying black baby, her mother reprimands
her:
I think that if the little girl had been white, mama
w ouldn't have minded. But she always scolds if we
I nurse Negro babies. Is it their fault if the poor little
! things are black? I don’ t make any distinction, I like
them all. (Diary 98)
| What must have been a further endearing quality of the diary for Bishop
is the adolescent point of view of Minha Vida de Menina. Bishop herself
i
lused this perspective in some of the poems (like "First Death in Nova
Scotia") and stories (like "In the Village") on which she was working at the
time and which brought back for her her own life as a little girl in Nova
223
Scotia.36 Both the Helena of the diary and the little girl who is the speaker of
"First Death in Nova Scotia," for example, fail to understand the
significance of certain religious rituals. Helena writes in her diary,
Today was the first time I saw the Holy Eucharist go
into grandm a's house.
It's sad to see the Eucharist going into other houses.
But at the chacara it was almost like a party, although I
did feel sorry for Andreza.
Some people receive the Eucharist without even
cleaning house; I've seen it in other houses. But
grandma receives it like a procession. (Diary 12)
The young speaker of "First Death in Nova Scotia" is similarly concerned
w ith externals, not quite understanding the ritual she is witnessing at her
cousin's funeral:
Arthur's coffin was
a little frosted cake,
and the red-eyed loon eyed it
from his white, frozen lake.
Coupled with this adolescent point of view is the loving and endearing,
often humorous, presentation of Helena’ s world. Bishop must occasionally
J
have recognized her own thoughts about life in Brazil and also about
growing up in Nova Scotia in Helena's stories. In fact, in a letter of March
! 12, 1958, to her aunt Grace Bulmer she writes, "It was hard to make it sound
; I
natural and quite often when I got stuck about how to translate some of the
36 David Kalstone has spoken of "Bishop's reawakened sense of the !
(recuperative powers of childhood, the secrets of survival," which he sees in i
! the Diary and in the fiction on which Bishop was working during those j
|years. Kalstone also points out that Helena may have been a model for i
,Bishop because she "had the toughness Bishop associated, often guiltily,
iwith her own powers to survive a blasted childhood" (Kalstone, Becoming
1 156,158). j
224
I grandm other's remarks or expressions, and I couldn't translate them
literally, I’ d try to think of what Gammie [her maternal grandmother]
would have said! I think it worked pretty well."
Bishop also saw the diary confirming some of her impressions of Brazil.
A scene that is reminiscent of the title character in her poem
"Manuelzinho," for example, is that of a black servant of Helena's Aunt
Carlota bringing milk to Helena's family:
Everybody began to notice that the milk had a lot of
water in it. Today mama said to the little girl, "Maria,
tell Carlota that the milk is getting very watery. She
should give more corn or beans to the cow to make the
milk richer." The little girl said, "Watery? That cow's
milk is so strong that Sia Carlota has to put water in it
every day, to thin it." (Diary 19-20)
Instead of commenting on such events Helena and Bishop merely invite
their audiences to join them in benevolently laughing at this world.
But underneath such laughter there is an acceptance of the way things
are. Like the narrator of "In the Village," Helena believes that while her life
is not ideal, the status quo is satisfactory. When her father tells Helena, for
example, that the local government "could even have a railroad built from
I
i here to Ouro Preto," she thinks, "If there’ s something I have no hope for in
Diamantina, it’ s a railroad. But we don’ t really need one. Horseback is good
enough" (Diary 168).
!
: Occasionally, however, there is a sense that Helena, like Bishop, is
j somewhat detaching herself from her surroundings and looking dow n
| upon it. Helena seems again to be echoing Bishop's own feelings about
1 \
, Brazil in the following scene: j
225
This year the Ash Wednesday procession, that hadn't
taken place for many years, went through the streets. I
don’ t know why they hadn't held such an im portant
procession, with so many saints. There are so many
saints that not even grandma or my aunts know them
all. They say that they didn't parade for so long because
some of the saints are missing and a lot have got
broken. Seu Broa was saying to Uncle Joaozinho that at
the Church of the Luz they'd had to put the head of one
on the body of another, and ask around at the other
churches in order to be able to send the procession on
the streets. Saint Domingos went out with the cheese
and the knife, and at grandma's they explained to me
that one can tell if a couple is happy or not if the wife is
able to cut the cheese exactly in the middle. But I don't
believe that Saint Domingos really carries the cheese to
make tests like that, and nobody could give me any
explanation why Saint Jose has the Child Jesus on his
arm and a ball in his hand. Grandma's Negroes used to
tell me that the ball was the world, and if it fell to the
ground the world would be destroyed. When I was little
I used to believe it, but now I know that's silly. . . .
Everybody said they'd never seen Saint Roque with a
beard before. Seu Broa said that in the sacristy of the
Luz, in the confusion of starting the procession they
had got some of the heads mixed up. (Diary 17)
This description is at the same time somewhat condescending or critically
detached and endearing. Judging from her letters and from Brazil as well as
the planned Black Beans and Diamonds, these seem to have been exactly
Bishop's own feelings about her adopted home.
This condescension toward the efforts of the Ash Wednesday procession
]
is mirrored in Helena's (and Bishop's) skepticism toward magic and
folklore that seem to get interwoven with reality in Diamantina, in Brazil,
J
I
■ and in Latin America in general. As Mario Vargas Llosa writes in The Real
Life of Alejandro Mavta about Peru,
226
Tales. . . . I'm not surprised that reality contradicts these
rumors. Information in this country has ceased to be
objective and has become pure fantasy . . . Since it is
impossible to know what's really happening, we
Peruvians lie, invent, dream, and take refuge in
illusion. (Vargas Llosa 246)
Helena gives many examples of such "refuge in illusion." She recounts, for
example, her difficulties in determining whether her father or her Uncle
Conrado is older, since both men tell her conflicting stories about the past.
Helena simply concludes, "I think they're funny to be so stubborn, each one
wanting to be younger than the other" (Diary 19).
Elsewhere Helena tells of a mysterious thief who is supposed to have
chameleon-like powers. But she does not share the general conviction:
He ran away with the people after him. When he got
near the Church of the Gloria, and they’ d almost caught
him, he turned into an ant-hill. Emfdio and Jose Pedro
told us about it, scared to death.
I'm doubtful about this story, because if they saw the
| m an turn into an ant-hill they could have taken the
i ant-hill and locked it up in jail and it would have to
turn back into a man again. I don't believe this story
about a man turning into an ant-hill or a tree-trunk or
anything else. But just the same he frightens us terribly.
! (Diary 18)
! Helena voices the skepticism that Bishop and her Northern audience must
i
1 have felt and thereby she functions as a bridge between her Brazilian
background and her translator's Northern world.
i
j Bishop certainly shares Helena's ironic detachment and occasionally
j gives a sense of cultural superiority. But such instances are usually not
i
characterized by rejection. The laughter is a loving one. In her translation's
introduction Bishop tells her audience, for example, that in Diamantina
"There are also a Kubitschek Street and a Kubitschek Place with his head in j
227
bronze in it, less than life-size, as if done by the Amazonian head-shrinkers"
(Diary xxii). Here Bishop identifies with her Northern readers in order to
bring the Southern setting closer to them. Also, when she describes men
looking for diamonds in a river, Bishop sees them with a Northern eye:
"The bent heads and concentration of these figures, in that vast, rock-
studded, crucifix-stuck space, give a touch of dementia to the landscape"
(Diary xxv-xxvi). But, to use Schleiermacher's terms again, on the whole,
Bishop's intention is to move her Northern audience toward this Southern
world instead of inviting her readers to ridicule it.
Much stronger than Bishop's occasional detachment and skepticism is
her desire to immerse herself in the world of the original text and to re
create it (following Walter Benjamin's dictum) in a way that will elicit a
loving response from her Northern readers and that will show them that
their own world is not that dissimilar from that of Helena Morley since
both are part of one and the same Western Hemisphere.
| C. Stories by Clarice Lispector
: For the Summer 1964 issue of The Kenyon Review. Elizabeth Bishop
translated three stories by the Russian-born Brazilian short-story writer and
i
j novelist Clarice Lispector, who is considered by many to be the most
; im portant female Brazilian writer. As yet, these translations have not
received any attention in Bishop criticism, although they reveal affinities
228
between Bishop and Lispector, especially with regard to the attraction of
these two American women writers to outsider figures and to the interplay
of the strange and the familiar. These stories may also contain some sources
or inspirations for passages in Elizabeth Bishop's own work, particularly in
Questions of Travel.
"The Smallest Woman in the World" ("A menor mulher do mundo"),
"A Hen" ("Uma galinha"), and "Marmosets" ("Macacos") are grouped in
this issue of The Kenyon Review under the heading "Five Stories From Hot
Countries." Apart from Lispector's three stories, the section includes one
story each by V.S. Naipaul and by Khushwant Singh. Two years before her
translations of Lispector's stories were published Bishop had written in her
Brazil book that "women are now prominent in Brazilian letters. Cecilia
Meireles is one of Brazil's best poets, and Clarice Lispector is a short-story
j writer and novelist of considerable originality. There are many others"
l
(Brazil 117).37 In a section of the appendix entitled "Famous Brazilian
Cultural Figures and Their Principal Works," Bishop mentions two books
by Clarice Lispector, A Maya no Escuro IThe Apple in the Dark] and La^os de
Famflia [Family Ties!. The latter is a collection of thirteen short stories
j which was first published in 1960 and which has been re-issued many times
, since. "The Smallest Woman in the World" and "A Hen" are taken from
| this book, while "Marmosets" is taken from A Legiao Estrangeira [The
1 Foreign Legionl.
, 37 Bishop goes on to say that Rachel de Queiroz is "the best known of all" |
! contemporary Brazilian woman writers (Brazil 117). I
229
Like a number of Bishop's poems, "The Smallest Woman in the World"
I moves from a seemingly factual beginning into the miraculous and
unbelievable. It tells the story of the French explorer Marcel Pretre, who is
looking for the smallest pygmies:
In the Eastern Congo, near Lake Kivu, he really did
discover the smallest pygmies in the world. A nd— like a
box within a box within a box— obedient, perhaps, to the
necessity nature sometimes feels of outdoing herself—
among the smallest pygmies in the world there was the
1 smallest of the smallest pygmies in the world.
("Smallest" 501)
i
The apparent difficulty in describing the unbelievable world that is being
entered here is reminiscent of the speaker of the first three poems in
Questions of Travel, who feels similarly overwhelmed and who is
struggling to find the appropriate words for conveying her first impressions
i
I of Brazil. The image of "a box within a box within a box" m ust also have
I
appealed to Bishop, who is never satisfied with remaining at the surface but
i instead, as she announces in "Arrival at Santos," always wants to be
"driving to the interior," where magic might be awaiting the explorer; or, as
she had written in her early poem "Cape Breton, she is enticed by "the
interior, / where we cannot see, / where deep lakes are reputed to be."
Lispector's story opens in the interior of the African jungle and then moves
to the interior of the pregnant smallest woman in the world as well as to the
I views of people who learn of her existence.
| Bishop may partly have seen herself in the French explorer. His reaction |
after discovering the smallest woman in the world is similar to Bishop's |
' I
i own after her arrival in Brazil: !
230
Feeling an immediate necessity for order and for giving
names to what exists, he called her Little Flower. And
in order to be able to classify her among the
I recognizable realities, he immediately began to collect
; facts about her. ("Smallest" 501)
And also not unlike Bishop, the explorer takes a picture of Little Flower,
which subsequently appears in newspapers.
Moreover, Bishop must have been drawn to Lispector's depiction of the
endangerm ent of these small people. She translates Lispector as follows:
Besides disease, the deadly effluvium of the water,
insufficient food, and ranging beasts, the great threat to
the Likoualas are the savage Bahundes, a threat that
surrounds them in the silent air, like the dawn of battle.
The Bahundes hunt them with nets, like monkeys.
And eat them. Like that: they catch them in nets and eat
them. The tiny race, retreating, always retreating, has
finished hiding away in the heart of Africa, where the
lucky explorer discovered it. ("Smallest" 501)
i This description sounds somewhat like Bishop's reference to the treatment
of the indigenous Brazilian population through the Portuguese conquerors
in "Brazil, January 1, 1502":
Directly after Mass, humming perhaps
L'Homme arme or some such tune,
they ripped away into the hanging fabric,
i each out to catch an Indian for himself—
! those maddening little women who kept calling,
calling to each other (or had the birds waked up?)
and retreating, always retreating, behind it.
: The images of cruelty and persecution are similar and the use of "retreating,
! always retreating" (a literal translation— except for the substitution of a
comma for "and " — of Lispector's "sempre a recuar e a recuar," La^os 78)
definitely suggests that these two texts, which were published in the same
' year, are interrelated. With and through Lispector, Bishop presents the
231
oppression and persecution of the weak or of outsiders like herself as a
i
universal phenomenon, to which she wants to direct the attention of her
readers, who would, for the most part, be members of the stronger,
persecuting society.
When she translated the reactions to Little Flower’s picture, Bishop may
also have thought of potential reactions of her poetry's audience to her own
depictions of Brazil. In Lispector’ s story, the responses to the news of Little
Flower’ s existence illustrate what Bishop may have feared could happen to
|
I her own poetic Brazilian pictures and what she thought had happened to a
degree to her Brazil book: some believe that Little Flower’ s emotion "isn't
hum an sadness" and a "clever little boy" suggests,
"Mummy, if I could put this little woman from Africa
in little Paul’ s bed when he's asleep? When he woke up
w ouldn't he be frightened? W ouldn't he howl? When
he saw her sitting on his bed? And then we’ d play with
her! She would be our toy!" ("Smallest" 503)
Little Flower is regarded as a prized possession, for "who hasn't wanted to
own a hum an being just for himself?" ("Smallest" 504). It was partly to
dispel such Northern notions of superiority and condescension that Bishop
had written her poems about outsiders and Brazil as well as the Brazil book
■ and that she had translated The Diary of "Helena Morlev". As she told
! Ashley Brown in an interview, she assumed that not only uneducated
I
| North Americans might have misguided conceptions of Brazil: "Most New
s
| York intellectuals' ideas about 'underdeveloped countries’ are partly
j mistaken," she says, "and living among people of a completely different
i
culture has changed a lot of my old stereotyped ideas" (Brown, "Interview" !
232
| Later in Lispector's story, the mother of the boy who would like to have
1 Little Flower as a toy tries hard to pull herself and her son away from
something or someone who is "black as a monkey," as the French explorer
had put it ("Smallest" 504). She parades "a deliberately refined and social
smile, placing a distance of unsuperable millenniums between the abstract
lines of her features and the crude face of Little Flower. But," Lispector and
Bishop continue, "she knew that this was going to be a Sunday on which
she would have to hide from herself anxiety, dreams, and lost
millenniums" ("Smallest" 504). The mother's distancing is thus
underm ined and her underlying unhappiness is revealed.
Such questioning of the (Northern) audience's superiority paves the way
for a valorization of Little Flower. This new perception is achieved through
the story's entrance into the small woman's feelings. Although she only
speaks a rudimentary language, she is now given some kind of voice:
She loved that sallow explorer. If she could have talked
and had told him that she loved him, he would have
been puffed up with vanity. Vanity that would have
collapsed when she added that she also loved the
explorer's ring very much, and the explorer's boots.
And when that collapse had taken place, Little Flower
would not have understood why. . . . [In her mind,] her
profound love for the explorer would not have been at
all diminished by the fact that she also loved his boots.
| ("Smallest" 505).
Transposed to the scenario of cross-culturalism and North and South,
Marcel Pretre here becomes the North with its differing notions of love out
of which misunderstandings with the South arise. Even after learning to
communicate somewhat with the small woman, the explorer still projects
jhis ideas into her world, believing, for example, that she must think it is
233
nice to have a tree of one’ s own, "good to own, good to own, good to own"
("Smallest" 506). Especially this ending must have appealed to Bishop, as it
offered her a way of making her readers in the North more aware of
cultural differences and of the need for respect of other cultures that might
be perceived as inferior. She herself, like Lispector’ s explorer, probably
started out projecting her Northern mindset and experiences onto Brazil, as
she does, for example, in "Arrival at Santos," where she calls the Brazilian
flag "a strange and brilliant rag" and speaks of "inferior" glue on postage
stamps. But Bishop herself made the transition from distanced foreigner to
sympathetic observer and participant in Brazilian life, as poems like
"Manuelzinho" and "The Riverman" illustrate.
"A Hen," by situating the outsider in ordinary surroundings, makes an
even stronger case for the need to respect the foreign or the disempowered.
The story presents "a Sunday hen" that "was still alive only because it was
i
not yet 9:00 o’ clock" ("Hen" 507). Like "The Smallest Woman in the
World," "A Hen” sympathizes with the outsider by assuming that she, too,
has emotions: "No one would ever have guessed that she had a desire"
i ("Hen" 507). In an endearing scene that could just as well be set in Helena
Morley's Diamantina or in Bishop's Great Village, the hen escapes when
she is supposed to be caught and killed. She flies to the neighbor’ s terrace
and onto a roof.
i
! There she remained like a misplaced weather vane,
t hesitating, first on one foot, then the other. The family
! was urgently called and, in consternation, saw their
lunch standing beside a chimney. The father of the
family, reminding himself of the double obligation of
eating and of occasionally taking exercise, happily got
234
into his bathing trunks and resolved to follow the
itinerary of the hen. By cautious jumps he reached the
! roof, and the hen, trembling and hesitating, quickly
picked another direction. ("Hen" 507)
A similar scene appears in Gabriel Garcia Mdrquez' Love in the Time of
Cholera. Here Dr. Urbino’ s parrot escapes onto a mango tree. When the bird
says "Royal parrot," it elicits its owner's fatal attempts to catch it. Dr. Urbino
puts on his boots, walks towards the parrot, and holds out his walking stick
to the parrot, which, much like Lispector's hen, "sidestepped and jum ped to
the next branch, a little higher up" (Garcia Marquez, Love 42).
But whereas Garcia Marquez concentrates on what is happening to Dr.
Urbino, Lispector and Bishop have more sympathy for the hen:
Alone in the world, without father or mother, she ran,
out of breath, concentrated, mute. Sometimes in her
flight she would stand at bay on the edge of a roof,
gasping; while the young man leaped over others with
difficulty, she had a moment in which to collect herself.
Then she looked so free. ("Hen" 507)
The hen's position of powerless outsider is underlined when she is
described as "Stupid, timid, and free. Not victorious, the way a rooster in
flight would have looked" ("Hen" 507). This is a literal translation of
jLispector’ s "Nao vitoriosa como seria um galo em fuga" (Layos 32). The
j
sentence must have reminded Bishop of her poem "Roosters," where, in
contrast to the timid hens, "the roosters brace their cruel fe e t. . . / while
from their beaks there rise / the uncontrolled, traditional cries." Like
|"Roosters," Lispector's story expresses sympathy for the
*
I
hen/disem pow ered/outsider and skepticism or antipathy for the
rooster / pow erful/ insider: "The hen is a being. It’ s true, she couldn’ t be
counted on for anything. She herself couldn't count on herself— the way a
235
rooster believes in his comb" ("Hen 507-508). The story’ s diction continues
to express sympathy for the outsider, calling her, after her capture, a
"prisoner" who is treated "with a certain violence" ("Hen" 508).
A girl, who is reminiscent of the narrator of "In the Village," watches in
amazement as the hen lays an egg in the kitchen and succeeds in having the
hen's life spared. Now the animal starts living in the kitchen and she
"became the queen of the house. Everyone knew it except the hen" ("Hen
509). In view of her eventual slaughter the hen is justified in retaining "the
ancient and by now mechanical terror of her species" ("Hen" 509). Although
she seemed to have been transferred to an insider position, the hen ends up
being a victim of power relations.
More so than "A Hen" and nearly as much as 'The Smallest Woman in
the World," "Marmosets" presents the outsider figure as almost human. In
Lispector's original, the story is entitled "Macacos," which is the general
term for monkeys. Bishop, however, uses "Marmosets," thus clarifying the
kind of monkey that appears in the story. She also makes a slight change in
the story's first sentence. In the original, it reads, "Da primeira vez que
tivemos em casa um mico foi perto do Ano Novo" [The first time that we
had a marmoset at the house was around New Year's.] (Legiao 45). Bishop
ileaves out the "at the house" or "at home" and interprets "perto do" as "just
I before" instead of "around" or "close to," a choice that is vindicated at the
I
! end of the first paragraph. Her translation starts, "The first time we had a
i
(marmoset was just before New Year’ s" ("Marmosets" 509).38
1 38 jn this case, a more literal translation, which is Bishop's usual technique, (
would have been preferable since it would have prevented the possible
m isunderstanding of "had" in the sense of "ate."
236
As is the case in "A Hen," the animal/ outsider is presented
sympathetically and admiringly:
dumbfounded, I saw the present enter the house,
already eating a banana, examining everything with
great rapidity, and with a long tail. It looked like a
monkey not yet grown; its potentialities were
tremendous. ("Marmosets" 509)
The marmoset's likeness to a human outsider is underlined w hen the
narrator, a woman whose son wants a marmoset as a playmate, refers to the
j animal as a "happy man" and a "laughing man" ("Marmosets" 509, 510).
f
She is draw n to the monkey but at the same time she resents its "filthiness"
and calls it a "gorilla" ("Marmosets" 509, 510).
After happily getting rid of the first marmoset almost immediately, the
narrator buys a female one a year later. Now the animal is even more
humanized, first of all by being given a name, Lisette, and then by being
i outfitted with human attributes and clothes:
i
I
She could almost fit in one hand. She was wearing a
skirt, and earrings, necklace, and bracelet of glass beads.
The air of an immigrant just disembarking in her
native costume. Like an immigrant's too, her round
eyes. ("Marmosets" 510)
The elliptic and poetic last sentence of this passage recreates the word order
; of the original: "De imigrante tambem eram os olhos redondos" ["Of an
' immigrant, too, were the round eyes."] (Legiao 46). Similarly, Bishop
|
i translates "E ali mesmo comprei a que se chamaria Lisette" [And right there
I bought the one that would be called Lisette."] as "Then and there I bought
I
„ the one who would be called Lisette" (Legiao 46, "Marmosets" 510). In this
237
way, Bishop gives her translation's syntax a certain exotic quality, which
complements the story's exotic content.
Although she is loved, Lisette, the outsider, soon dies.
After three days with the narrator and her children she is taken to a pet
clinic, where she receives oxygen "and she wanted to speak so badly she
couldn’ t bear being a monkey; she was, and she would have had much to
tell" ("Marmosets" 511). After Lisette's death, the older child tells the
mother, "You look so much like Lisette!" ("Marmosets" 511). Bishop must
have considered this final equation of the marmoset and the mother an
opportunity for suggesting to her Northern readers that the roles of outsider
and insider, of the powerless and the powerful may not always be draw n
sharply. In poems like "The Fish," "The Armadillo," or "The Moose,"
Bishop, too, obfuscates these distinctions as well as the boundaries between
animals and people. The fact that "Marmosets" is a first-person narrative
and that the narrator is the one who moves from rejecting the outsider
figure to liking her and finally being likened to her makes the blurring of
distinctions even more forceful.
All three stories by Clarice Lispector which Elizabeth Bishop chose to
| translate present outsiders that eventually become victims of existing power
relations. Similarities to the outsiders in Bishop's own poems and a hidden j
; use of these outsider figures as metaphors and synecdoches for Brazil are
! obvious. All three stories present a meeting of two spheres, cultures, or
i
| groups. The initial superiority of one of these spheres is then underm ined
; and distinctions become questionable, just as they will in the "watery,
dazzling dialectic" of Bishop’ s late poem "Santarem," where "conflux"
238
supplants divergence and distinction. In her— for the most part exact, literal—
translations, Bishop adopts the voice of a Brazilian woman writer, i.e. an
outsider to North American literature, in order to empower it by providing
a wider audience for it. Furthermore, she joins Lispector in challenging the
common exertion of power over outsiders in general. What must also have
been an attractive feature of these stories for Bishop is the intrusion of the
extraordinary into the ordinary. The stories are metaphors for Bishop’ s own
' writings about Brazil and their intrusion into the consciousness of
N orthern readers.
D. Carlos Drummond de Andrade and An Anthology of Twentieth-Centurv
j Brazilian Poetry
i
Elizabeth Bishop's major contribution to a mediation between the Americas
via translation is probably An Anthology of Twentieth-Centurv Brazilian
Poetry (1972). Together with Emanuel Brasil, Bishop edited this collection of
i
selected works by fourteen Brazilian poets of the first half of this century.
The anthology's publication was sponsored by the Academy of American
Poets. In contrast to earlier efforts of translating Brazilian poetry, these
i
I translations have been praised because here "considerable effort was
expended to ensure quality" (Araujo 27). After having lived in Brazil for
almost two decades, Bishop felt that with this anthology she could give
239
something back to the country that had been her home for so long. She told
I
her aunt Grace Bulmer in a letter of November 24, 1968,
I am working on an anthology of modern Brazilian
poetry - a Brazilian, a nice young man who works at the
UN in N Y, and I are doing it together. It will have the
Portuguese on one page and the English on the facing
page. This is a lot of work and I don't enjoy it too much,
but felt it was a sort of duty.
Bishop's cultural mediation comes out of her desire to do something for
Brazil and the reputation of its twentieth-century poets. While she wrote
her Tim e/Life Brazil book for the honorarium that she was offered, she
edited this anthology out of her gratitude to Brazil.
Bishop must have admired and envied the high esteem in which poets
and poetry are held in Brazil. The editors' introduction to the anthology
starts,
Poets and poetry are highly thought of in Brazil.
Among men, the name of "poet" is sometimes used as
a compliment or term of affection, even if the person
referred to is a businessman or politician, not a poet at
j all. . . . In the United States only a Pound or a Ginsberg
receives as much attention from the press, but for
different reasons and in different tones. (Anthology xiii)
The description as well as the comparison with the United States are
i
; Bishop's means of suggesting to her North American audience that there
I are areas in which the United States may have something to learn from
| Brazil. But Elizabeth Bishop and Emanuel Brasil, although they present
j Brazil and the situation of poets there as exotic and for the most part
i
j desirable, certainly do not suggest that poets live ideal lives in Brazil. They
speak, for example, of the sheer impossibility of making a living by writing
240
j poetry in Brazil. The editors also observe (in parenthesis, thus underlining
the marginal status of women poets) that "until very recently poetry has
been exclusively a masculine art in Brazil" (Anthology xiii). The only
woman poet represented in this collection is Cecilia Meireles. Interestingly,
all five poems by Meireiles which are contained in this anthology were
translated by a man, James Merrill, a close friend Bishop's, who also visited
Bishop in Brazil.
Bishop and Brasil clearly considered this anthology an attempt at
bringing North and South America closer together. They call their
collection "a modest attempt to present to the American reader examples of
the poetry written in Brazil during this century" (Anthology xv). But the
difficulties of this mediation are apparent. The editors explain that since
"Portuguese is a relatively unknown language in the United States," it was
I "hard to find good American poets willing to undertake translation, much
I
of which necessarily has to be done from literal prose translations of the
Brazilian poems" (Anthology xv). Apparently led by the problematic
assum ption that something like a "literal prose translation" can indeed be
created (problematic, because especially in poetry form and content, sound
and semantic component are two sides of the same coin), the translators of
; this collection follow John Dry den's maxim with regard to the
i permissibility of "deficiencies" in the translator's mastery of source and
I target language.39 However, Bishop and Brasil praise the translators, whose
j w ork they consider to read like poems rather than translations:
39 Dry den had written,
The qualification of a translator worth reading must be a mastery of
1 the language he translates out of, and that he translates into; but if a
241
The editors feel that the translators have done
extremely well, keeping close to the texts and yet
managing to produce "poems" preserving many of the
characteristics of the originals. (Anthology xv)
Preserving as many characteristics of the originals as possible has always
been one of Bishop's main goals in translation, which is why she was so
skeptical of Robert Lowell's "imitations."40
In their role as cultural mediators between South and North, the editors
give a very brief history of Brazilian poetry, starting with the romantic
period and highlighting the "Modern Art Week" of 1922, the literary
deficiency is to be allowed in either, it is in the original, since if he be
but master enough of the tongue of his author as to be master of his
sense, it is possible for him to express that sense with eloquence in his
own, if he have a thorough command of that. (Dryden 30).
Bishop herself, while her Portuguese had much improved by the time she
translated most of the poems for this anthology, had also followed this
principle when she translated The Diary of "Helena Morlev" with the help
of Lota. But she never really felt confident in Portuguese: in 1966, after
almost fifteen years in Brazil, she told Ashley Brown, "I don't read it
[Portuguese] habitually— just newspapers and some books. 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" (Brown, "Interview" 291).
40 While preserving as much of the originals as possible, Bishop too, in her
translations of Brazilian poetry, attempts to write "poems,” not literal, un-
English transpositions. Praise for Bishop's poetic translations from the
Portuguese has come, among others, from Ashley Brown, who is struck by
the naturalness of tone, diction, rhythm, and meter in Bishop's English j
versions. Brown, one of the translators of An Anthology of Twentieth- !
Century Brazilian Poetry, writes,
Elizabeth Bishop's translations from Brazilian poetry are not
| extensive, but they have set the standard for the rest of us who have
I attempted this. Pre-Bishop translations are mostly lumps of words that
have no rhythmic life in English, and part of her superiority certainly
| comes from her verve and control of the meter. As an adm irer of
; Marianne Moore she always uses the most natural order of words in
i an English sentence. (Brown, "Brazil" 237) I
242
heritage of the Brazilian poets represented in the anthology. They
characterize the "Modernist poetic movement" as "using the material of
everyday life," a choice with which Bishop must have strongly agreed
(Anthology xx). But developments of this poetic movement after 1950 are
largely absent from this collection. The editors write that while they were
unable to represent in this anthology the "younger poets, many, diverse,
and talented, including the Concretionists and others whose work takes the
I form of song lyrics," they "hope to introduce them in a second volume, in
order to give the American reader a more complete picture of the variety,
profundity, and originality of Brazilian poetry today" (Anthology xxi). This
second volume was eventually published in 1983 as Brazilian Poetry 1950-
1980, edited by Emanuel Brasil and the Canadian William Jay Smith, thus
I enlarging the South/N orth mediation aspect of the book to include Canada,
at least with regard to one of the editors. The anthology is dedicated "To the
memory of ELIZABETH BISHOP."
i
i In terms of the poems Elizabeth Bishop chose to translate herself, several
of which had appeared in journals before the publication of the anthology
j and some of which were already included in her Complete Poems of 1969,
| there is a definite affinity in subject matter to Bishop's own work.
i
i Childhood, the problematic nature of family, the individual's position in
I
; and relation to the world, the fate of outsiders, connectedness, and the
! universality of Brazilian experiences are all themes which also appear in
Bishop's own writing and because of which she must have felt related to
, these Brazilian poets. Bishop believed that she understood their concerns
243
and that, in turn, they and their poems expressed what she herself had
experienced and expressed.
Manuel Bandeira's "My Last Poem" ("O ultimo poema"), the first poem
in this anthology, could be seen as a description of the kind of poetry Bishop
was writing. She translates Bandeira as follows:
I would like my last poem thus
That it be gentle saying the simplest and least intended
things
That it be ardent like a tearless sob
That it have the beauty of almost scentless flowers
The purity of the flame in which the most limpid
diamonds are consumed
The passion of suicides who kill themselves without
explanation.
These are certainly also a very fitting attributes for what was to be Bishop's
own last published poem, "Sonnet." Like in all her translations, Bishop's
I
rendering of Bandeira is very faithful to the original; her version is an
almost completely literal translation and her use of free verse mirrors
Bandeira’ s rather irregular alexandrine. Bishop changes only "O ultimo
poema" ["The Last Poem"] of the title to "My Last Poem" and "Que tivesse a
beleza das flores quase sem perfume" ['That it would have the beauty of
flowers almost without scent"] to "That it have the beauty of almost
! scentless flowers." The price she pays for literalness, however, is the loss of
! the easy flow of the language in the original, especially in the last two lines
| of her version.
! Childhood and its mystification as well as the losses it has led to is the
!
i subject of two poems Bishop translated for the anthology, one by the not
! very widely known Joaquim Cardozo and one by Carlos Drum m ond de
244
Andrade, arguably the most famous and important Brazilian poet of the
j twentieth century. Cardozo's poem, "Cemetery of Childhood" ("Cemterio
i
i
da infancia"), which was originally written for the 1953 "Children's Week,"
creates an uncanny atmosphere, dramatizing the loss of childhood. Those
qualities relate it to Bishop's own "First Death in Nova Scotia." Cardozo's
speaker enters a "cemetery of Childhood," which is referred to as "my own
country." He knows that "Of the smiling faces I saw / I'll remember very
few." This pain is coupled with an otherworldly mysteriousness:
Here the wings of the angels
Fell off. Homely paths
A dorn the small graves
With thorns and white nettles;
My steps came closer, closer,
Too close, stealthily:
The souls flew up from the ground:
A flock of little birds.
Bishop's translation is again very literal, except for "rudes caminhos" [’ ’ rude
paths’ ’ or ’ ’ uncultivated paths”] being rendered as "homely paths."
Although the speaker appeals to the cemetery to reveal its mysteries ("Oh!
cemetery of Childhood, / Reveal your secret light," a slightly altered
I
j translation of "Abre a luz do teu segredo" ["Open to the light your secret."]),
! the poem concludes that "Flesh, ash, and earth / Feed mortal mysteries." As
i
! in Bishop's "One Art," childhood is irrecoverably lost and therefore
i
becomes mysterious. Loss also appears in Bishop's translation of Cardozo’ s
i
' "Elegy for Maria Alves" ("Elegia para Maria Alves"). Here there is a deep
connection between the grieving speaker and the deceased Maria: Maria's
flowers are in "Waters wept for me, for you, for all of us."
245
Carlos Drummond de Andrade’s "Infancy" ("Infancia") provides a
I
counter-perspective to Cardozo's somberness. The editors of An Anthology
of Twentieth-Centurv Brazilian Poetry write that Drummond is "usually
considered the greatest living Brazilian poet" (Anthology xiv). About one
fourth of the anthology’ s pages are devoted to seven poems by Drummond,
all of which were translated by Elizabeth Bishop. Although Bishop and
Drummond supposedly only met once, and by chance, their work shares
num erous characteristics and concerns. Similar concerns which they share
include a preoccupation with childhood, the ordinary, and the domestic;
they are both playful, use masks, strive for immediacy, and create a sense of
foreignness or strangeness in their work. These two poets— both, I would
argue, poets evincing a hemispheric imagination— corresponded with each
other and, in public, repeatedly expressed their admiration of each other's
work. Bishop must have started translating Drummond at least as early as
1963, for in a letter of September 9, 1963, Drummond gratefully writes to
Bishop,
Senti-me tao bem, vestindo a roupa inglesa que voce
me preparou com tamanha perfcia a tao fina percep^ao
de valores! Posso avaliar os problemas da transposixjao
j poetica em geral, e particularmente os da constru^ao da
ponte portugues-ingles. Mas voce os resolveu como era
de se esperar de sua alta virtuosidade artfstica e de sua
nao menos aguda e experiente sensibilidade. . . .
, O que ressalta de suas duvidas e esclarecimentos e,
I para mim, uma li^ao de poesia: o escrupulo minucioso
i e constante, o senso delicadfssimo de matizes, o respeito
I carinhoso pela obra traduzida, que caracterizam o seu
trabalho. Muito e muito obrigado, cara Elizabeth.
[I felt so well, dressed in the English clothes you
prepared for me with such skill and such a fine
perception of values! I can appreciate the problems of
246
poetic transposition in general, and particularly those
1 that construct a bridge between Portuguese and English.
But you resolved them, as was to be expected from your
high artistic virtuosity and from your no less sharp and
experienced sensibility. . . .
What emerges from your doubts and clarifications is,
for me, a lesson in poetry: the minute and constant
scrupulousness, the very delicate sense of tone, the
affectionate respect for the translated work, which
characterize your work. I am very much obliged, dear
Elizabeth.]
Responding to Bishop’ s question about which North American journal
i
j Drum mond would like Bishop to approach w ith her translations of his
j poems, the Brazilian poet gives her carte blanche, writing, "Eu nao poderia
i
aspirar a melhor honra do que a de ser apresentado em lingua inglesa por
um poeta de sua qualidade e de seu nobre recolhimento” ["I cannot aspire to
a higher honor than to be represented in the English language by a poet of
your quality and of your noble contemplation."].
Carlos Drummond de Andrade’ s poem "Infancy” ("Infancia") shows
similarities to Elizabeth Bishop's "In the Waiting Room." Drum m ond's
little Carlos is analogous to Bishop’ s little Elizabeth reading National
Geographic in the dentist's waiting room:
A small boy alone under the mango trees,
I read the story of Robinson Crusoe,
the long story that never comes to an end.
i
; Whereas Bishop's Elizabeth becomes, through her reading and through her
aunt's cry, painfully aware of her connectedness to others, Drum m ond’ s
; I
! Carlos, although he did not think so during his childhood, becomes
I
reconciled with his losses and comes to value his situation. The boy's story
247
therefore also has elements of Bishop s "One Art" in it. Losses and lacks are
| relegated to the background for a valorization of what one has:
Away off there my father went riding
through the farm's endless wastes.4 1
And I didn't know that my story
was prettier than that of Robinson Crusoe.
In her own life, after her return to the United States, Bishop was to compare
her situation to that of Robinson Crusoe in "Crusoe in England," where she
projects her own feelings about the emotional lack created by her return
into Defoe's character. As a letter to Robert Lowell reveals, Bishop must
have started working on "Crusoe in England" at the same time that she was
translating Drummond's "Infancy." Apparently, these two poets expressed
themselves through a similar imagination of the hemisphere and so could
easily mutually fecundate each other's work without directly "influencing"
one another. In Gustavo Perez Firmat's terminology, these two poets of the
Americas could be connected in an appositional approach.
Another important theme of Drummond's poetry to which Bishop was
attracted concerns relations in the family, a unit to which both poets have
an ambivalent relationship. For Drummond and Bishop, the idea of family
I is something very desirable, while the reality of it is often problematic and
j painful. "Travelling in the Family," "The Table," and "Family Portrait" all
illustrate this duality.
Drummond appears to have been very pleased with Bishop's English
’ version of his "Viagem na famllia" ["Travelling in the Family"]. In a letter
; 41 Bishop’ s use of "wastes" is not an exact translation. The "mato" of the
1 original means "wood" or "forest."
248
of August 12, 1963, he thanks Bishop for her translation, apparently
responding to Bishop's doubts about Drummond's approval:
Como poderia eu nao gostar de seu trabalho, prezada
Elizabeth Bishop? Tenho a mais viva admira^ao pela
sua poesia, e desse sentimento decorre plena confian^a
nos seus dons de recriadora poetica em lingua inglesa.
[How could I not like your work, esteemed Elizabeth
Bishop? I have the most vivid admiration for your
poetry, and from this feeling emerges my full
confidence in your gifts of poetic recreation in the
English language.]
Because of the loss of her own father when she was only eight months old,
Bishop could certainly identify with the situation of Drum mond's poem, in
which the speaker is guided on an imaginary journey through the family's
places and members by his dead father. One reason for Drum mond's praise
may have been that he detected in the translation the effects of Bishop's
personal involvement in "Viagem na famflia." The poem involves
| autobiographical aspects of Drummond's life: in the first and last line he
mentions the setting as the desert of Itabria, which is the part of Minas
Gerais in which Drummond grew up.
The (imaginary presence of the) father takes the poem's speaker by the
hand and leads him through a mysterious world. The scene has an unreal
’ quality: "it was neither day nor night.” This twilight is complemented by the
i figure of the father, who has died years earlier and who now leads his son
j on a journey back in time and place. To add to the speaker's disorientation,
! many of the stanzas end in "Porem nada dizia," which Bishop translates as
249
"But he didn’ t say anything.” 42 In the same way that Bishop locates the
mysterious in the places of her childhood such as Great Village, Nova Scotia
(in "In the Village" or "First Death in Nova Scotia, for example) and in
Worcester, Massachusetts (in "In the Waiting Room," for example),
Drum mond locates the mysterious in the Itabria of his own infancy. The
changes that greet Drum m ond’ s speaker on his journey m ust have
rem inded Bishop of the changes she observed during her visits to Great
Village, where she went especially to see her aunt Grace Bulmer and where,
for some time, she was planning to buy a house to retire in:
We have come a long way.
Here there was a house.
The mountain used to be bigger.
So many heaped-up dead,
and time gnawing the dead.
And in the ruined houses,
cold disdain and damp.
Out of these lines also speaks the skepticism Bishop occasionally expressed
about returning to places. With experience and age the speaker's perception
has changed. Therefore the mountain no longer appears as high to him as it
did in his childhood.
After first taking its speaker through the town, the poem goes on to
I
' "travel" through the family members themselves:
; Stepping on books and letters
j we travel in the family.
^ Marriages; mortgages;
42 in the original, the phrase's reference is not gender specific, however. In
some cases it can also refer to other members of the family, whom the
speaker sees on his imaginary journey and who also do not say anything.
! This w ider reference gets lost in the translation.
250
the consumptive cousins;
the mad aunt; my grandmother
I betrayed among the slave-girls,
i rustling silks in the bedroom.
The speaker and his father are moving "into the forbidden / time, forbidden
places" located in a "lost kingdom." In Bishop's case, this lost kingdom is
her happy Nova Scotia childhood, which she knows she can only return to
in her imagination. Like Drummond's speaker, Bishop m ust have regretted
the occasional "grief, misunderstanding" and division mentioned in
"Travelling in the Family." And like him, she must have w anted to say to
her father, "Speak speak speak speak," since she was probably too young
when he died to be able to remember his voice. But this plea remains
unheard: toward the of the poem, the father's coat turns to clay and the
father himself becomes a shadow, his guidance a "ghostly embrace." Finally,
'The waters cover his moustache, / the family, Itabira, all." The speaker
stops remembering, but is left with a sense of loss. Drummond's use of
]
water must have appealed to Bishop who also employed water for its power
to subsume and unite.
An equally ambivalent view of family, replete with remembrance and
regrets, appears in "The Table" ("A mesa"), which Bishop started translating
! early in 1963, while living in Brazil and which she finished in 1969, while
living in San Francisco. In his letter of August 12, 1963, Drum m ond thanks
!
Bishop for intending to translate this poem "pelo que este poema representa
para mim" ["because of what this poem means for m e1 ']. And six years later,
W April 29, 1969, Drummond tells Bishop that her translation of "A mesa"
touched him ["deixou-me emocionado"]:
E um poema em que coloquei bastante de mim mesmo,
e sua recria^ao em outra lingua desperta no autor nova
ressonancia, gramas h for^a e a finura das solugoes
verbais encontradas pelo poeta admiravel que o
traduziu.
[It is a poem in which I have put a lot of myself, and its
recreation in another language awakens in the author a
new resonance, thanks to the force and finesse of the
verbal solutions that were found by the admirable poet
who translated it.]
Gratefully, Drum m ond refers to Bishop's translation as "'nosso' poema"
["'our' poem "].43
In this very long poem, which is not divided into stanzas, the speaker
voices the thoughts of a "we" group, the children of a ninety year-old man,
for whom they would like to give a dinner party. As in "Travelling in the
Family," the situation of the poem and the connectedness of the family are
imagined rather than real. And as in "Travelling in the Family, the father is
idealized; he is perceived as all-forgiving and proud of his children. The
children, for the most part men in their fifties, are
i
i
I keeping in our breasts
i that young boy's innocence,
43 While Carlos Drummond de Andrade seems to have had only praise for
Bishop's translation of his poems, other translators are not so generous,
iAlthough she generally praises Bishop’ s versions of Drum mond, Virginia
!de Araujo criticizes Bishop for being too "literally accurate." She picks out
Drum m ond's lines "Oh que ceia mais celeste / e que gozo mais do chao!"
from "A Mesa," which Bishop translates as "Oh, w hat more celestial supper
7 and w hat greater joy on earth!," while de Araiijo makes them into "God!
W hat a holy supper! / What pleasures of the earth!" De Araujo comments,
The tone of the original is still ugly with resentment: the sons and
daughters are at table feasting their old father: they are at once the
disciples gathered around Jesus and the lamb of the sacrifice being
served. The Bishop version has chromed over the corrosion w ith high
diction. The phrase "gozo mais do chao" also has orgasmic
implications. (Araujo 31-32) _________
252
that running off to the woods,
1 that forbidden craving,
! and the very simple desire
to ask our mother to mend
more than just our shirts,
our impotent, ragged souls ...
This desire to retain some element of childhood was also Bishop's, as can be
seen in the "childlike quality" of many of her poems, of which her critics
have m ade so much.
Like Bishop's "A Miracle for Breakfast," "A Mesa" moves from
conditional to simple present tense, thus implying that the imagined scene
is becoming more and more real, at least for the speaker. But at the end of
both poems, it is revealed that the hope of a "miracle" or of a real dinner
w ith the father that had been evoked through the movement of tense and
aspect is illusory because, as Bishop has Drummond say, all we do is "delude
ourselves / at a table that is / empty." Drum m ond’ s longing for a family
and for family reunions is also Bishop's longing. Although she leaves
w ords like "m ineiro," T utu." "farofa," and "cachaca" in the original
Portuguese and then explains them in footnotes, Bishop did certainly not
think of this poem's content as specifically Brazilian. In a more global sense,
there might even be a suggestion that the poem's fatherless children are
i
; similar to the nations of the New World which have abandoned their
i
m other countries.
; Another lost family that the speaker cannot quite manage to bring back to
j life appears in Drum m ond’ s "Family Portrait" ("Retrato de familia").
Drum m ond's poem has definite affinities to Bishop's own "Poem." While
Bishop's speaker is reminded of her family and of the place where she grew
up by a small sketch which her great-uncle painted, Drum m ond s poetic
253
voice contemplates a dusty family portrait into which it projects its
| memories and anxieties. In "Retrato de famflia" as in ’ ’ Poem,” the speaker’ s
, memory adds what the picture does not show. His or her interaction with
the representation transforms what is being represented. Bishop has
Drum m ond's speaker say,
Twenty years is a long time.
It can form any image.
If one face starts to wither,
another presents itself, smiling.
i
As in "Poem," the representation becomes alive through the speaker’ s
projections: the figures representing family members could, if they wanted
to, "fly" and "live inside the furniture / or the pockets of old waistcoats."
Because of the portrait there is a conflux of the living and the dead and a
subsequent questioning of the idea of family:
i The portrait does not reply,
j it stares; in my dusty eyes
it contemplates itself.
The living and dead relations
multiply in the glass.
I don't distinguish those
that went away from those
that stay. I only perceive
i the strange idea of family
travelling through the flesh.
The speaker of Bishop's "In the Waiting Room" will also question what
unites a family: here the almost seven year-old Elizabeth asks, "What
!
j similarities— / boots, hands, the family voice / I felt in my th ro a t. . . — /
held us all together / or made us all just one?"
254
Related to doubts about one's position in the family and about the nature
of the family unit are uncertainties about one’ s position in the w orld in
general. These are the subject of three other poems by Carlos Drum mond de
A ndrade which Bishop translated. "Seven-Sided Poem," "Don't Kill
Yourself," and "In the Middle of the Road" all ask about the speaker’ s role
in the world. Like the Elizabeth of Bishop's "In the Waiting Room," the
speaker of Drum mond's "Poema de sete faces" ("Seven-Sided Poem")
illustrates the uncertainty of an individual's connectedness to the world at
large. Drum m ond writes,
M undo m undo vasto mundo,
se eu me chamasse Raimundo
seria um a rima, nao seria uma solugao.
M undo m undo vasto mundo,
Mais vasto e meu cora^ao.
[World, world, vast world,
if I were called Raimundo
! that would be a rhyme, not a solution.
World, world, vast world,
Vaster is my heart.]
Through the playful rhyme of "Raimundo" with "mundo," D rum m ond
i implies that there could be a certain congruence of self and world. But, he
! continues, a name that rhymes w ith the universe is merely a rhyme, not a
i
! solution. Bishop translated this stanza as
Universe, vast universe,
if I had been named Eugene
! that would not be what I mean
j but it would go into verse
j faster.
' Universe, vast universe,
i my heart is vaster.
255
Here there is no sense at all of an individual’ s relation to the world. Instead,
j Bishop problematizes the naming of a person and the desire to see a name
| as something other than arbitrary. Interestingly, she uses here, apart from
"universe"/"verse" and "Eugene"/"mean," the rhym e pair
| "faster"/"vaster," which will reappear in her "One Art." Commenting on
I
Bishop's change of this stanza Drummond wrote to her on September 9,
1963, "entendo que o meu Raimundo nao pode queixar-se de passar a
Eugene, dada a imposibilidade de achar equivalentes sonicos para a estrofe"
["I understand that my Raimundo cannot complain about becoming a
Eugene, given the impossibility of finding sound equivalents for the
stanza."].
Drummond's speaker is trying to define himself. He starts the poem,
When I was born, one of the crooked
angels who live in shadow, said:
Carlos, go on! Be gauche in life.
This is a literal translation of Drummond's first stanza. Bishop, too, must
have been attracted to the gauche figure that is invoked here. H er early
"Man-Moth," for example, or her "Manuelzinho" are examples of poems in
I which she puts on a gauche mask herself. The word "gauche" also appears
! in "A Mesa," where Bishop translates "tipo gauche" w ith "awkward poses."
As a gauche figure, the speaker remains on a quest for his self and his J
I
relation to the world. Perception is questioned when "The houses watch the j
men." Like in so many of Bishop's poems, there is in "Seven-Sided poem" a
certain reticence:
I oughtn't to tell you, '
but this moon
256
and this brandy
play the devil w ith one's emotions.
Bishop, of course, had herself experienced the effects of alcohol on one's
desire to share personal concerns.
Likewise, Bishop must have seen herself in Drummond's "Nao se mate"
("Don't Kill Yourself"). This poem’ s "It’s useless to resist / or to commit
suicide. / Don't kill yourself. Don't kill yourself!" may have rem inded
Bishop of her own feelings during times of depression or of severe asthma
attacks. It might also have brought back to Bishop thoughts of what she
should have told Lota (and maybe even did tell her) after Lota had lost her
civil service employment and had become depressive. The poem's ending
m ust also have reminded Bishop of the pressures of her relationship with
Lota. She has Drummond say,
Love in the dark, no love
in the daylight, is always sad,
sad, Carlos, my boy,
but tell it to nobody,
nobody knows nor shall know.
Bishop's relationship with Lota was a "love in the dark" in many respects
and Bishop must have felt that Drummond understood the pressures
' w hich such a relationship involves.
A much more playful perspective is presented in Drum mond's "No
i
meio do caminho” ("In the Middle of the Road"). But, as in so many of
Bishop’ s own writings, underneath the apparent simplicity of this poem,
I there is a deeper philosophical meaning: I
I
i In the m iddle of the road there was a stone
there was a stone in the middle of the road
there was a stone
257
in the middle of the road there was a stone.
Never should I forget this event
' in the life of my fatigued retinas.
Never should I forget that in the m iddle of the road
there was a stone
there was a stone in the middle of the road
in the middle of the road there was a stone.
W ith very ordinary means this poem illustrates the never-ending obstacles
in life. The uneven length of the different verses, which is taken over from
D rum m ond’ s original, recreates the uneven steps in life, while the last
w ord "stone" as well as the repetition of the first line as the last one argues
that the struggle continues. This presentation of life as a continuing struggle
may have rem inded Bishop of her "Man-Moth," who tries repeatedly to
climb towards the moon, but never succeeds:
Up the facades,
his shadow dragging like a photographer's cloth behind
him,
1 he climbs fearfully, thinking that this time he will
manage
to push his small head through that round clean
opening
and be forced through, as from a tube, in black scrolls on
the light. .. .
! But w hat the Man-Moth fears most he must do,
although
he fails, of course, and falls back scared but quite
unhurt.
While "The Man-Moth" lacks the playfulness of "In the Middle of the
Road," it illustrates the same truth as Drum mond's poem. And playfulness
!
j is, of course, a strong presence in a number of Bishop's own poems.
| \
The struggle and outsider position of Bishop's "Man-Moth" find another !
I
echo in Joao Cabral de Melo Neto's Christmas play "Morte e vida Severina,"
258
from which Bishop translated several sections as "The Death and Life of a
Severino." Like Drum mond's speaker in "Seven-Sided Poem /’ Cabral de
Melo Neto's Severino tries to define himself, which is difficult since he has
no Christian name and since "There are lots of Severinos." He is a kind of
Everyman. All those who share his name have a hard life, struggling w ith
unfavorable natural and social conditions:
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.
As in Bishop’ s "Roosters" or "A Miracle for Breakfast," the poem's
sympathy is w ith the powerless. In Joao Cabral de Melo Neto's verse play
the disenfranchized help each other and form a community, but this is no
use in view of the unchanging harsh, unjust social conditions. A Severino
is killed for the scarce fruits of his industrious labor and there is no hope for
him or the likes of him. The play concludes, "this river, always blind, /
j opaque from eating dirt, / that never reflects the sky, / has adorned itself
' w ith stars." There are also similarities between this play and Bishop's "The
j Burglar of Babylon," although in that poem, the speaker's sympathy w ith
; the persecuted man is less apparent.
. Because the harsh inequalities which Joao Cabral de Melo N eto’ s verse !
| j
j play illustrates and which Bishop experienced first hand in her life and I
i w ithin the Western Hemisphere, she argued for connectedness, most {
notably in "In the Waiting Room" and "Santarem." Therefore the "Soneto ]
259
de intimidade" ("Sonnet of Intimacy") of her intimate friend Vinicius de
Moraes, a popular singer and poet, who was Bishop's supporter and lover
after her return to Brazil following Lota's suicide, must have appealed to
her.
Vinfcius, as he is commonly referred to in Brazil, wrote to Bishop (in
English) on February 22, 1968, while he was staying in Ouro Preto and she
was living in San Francisco, "The other day I went to the Pouso and sat
there, at my 'escritorio,’ and I missed your lovely being and the gentle chats
we used to have." Three and a half years later, telling her of his sixth
marriage and responding to a letter in which she had asked for permission
to translate poems of his for The New Yorker. Vinfcius wrote to Bishop on
November 18, 1971, "Pode dizer a seus amigos do New Yorker . . . que voce
estd sempre autorizada a fazer o que bem quiser com meus poemas" ["You
can tell your friends from The New Yorker that you are always authorized
• to do whatever you please with my poems."]. He seems to have adm ired
i
Bishop as a poet, as a translator, and as a person:
Acho voce— mesmo sem entrar nos meritos do poeta—
j um a m ulherzinha muito amoravel. Com execegao de
1 minha querida Gabriela Mistral e voce, a maioria das
I mulheres poetas que eu conheci sofriam de
intelectualismo agudo, e eu, come voce deve imaginar,
nao sou muito chegado a intelectuais.
[I find you— even without entering into your merits as a
, poet— a very lovely [the word "amoravel" is Vinfcius’
l creation; it is a composition of "lovable" and
j "admirable"] woman. With the exception of my dear
| Gabriela Mistral and you, the majority of woman poets I
have come to know suffer from acute intellectualism,
and I, as you can imagine, am not very fond of
intellectuals.]
260
But Vinfcius was fond of Bishop and she of him.
His "Sonnet of Intimacy" is reminiscent of Walt Whitman and his
expressions of man's connection to the natural world. Vinfcius illustrates
this connectedness in his characteristic popular, down-to-earth manner:
Farm afternoons, there’ s much too much blue air.
I go out sometimes, follow the pasture track,
Chewing a blade of sticky grass, chest bare,
In threadbare pajamas of three summers back,
To the little rivulets in the river-bed
For a drink of water, cold and musical,
And if I spot in the brush a glow of red,
A raspberry, spit its blood at the corral.
The smell of cow manure is delicious.
The cattle look at me unenviously
And w hen there comes a sudden stream and hiss
Accompanied by a look not unmalicious,
All of us, animals, unemotionally
Partake together of a pleasant piss.
Although she was never that unabashed about the pleasure taken in one's
| connectedness w ith nature, Bishop must have welcomed Vinfcius' poem,
!
the only one by him which she translated for this anthology, as a mask she
could use to express this same feeling which she had voiced more reticently
and in a more piquant manner in a poem like "The Fish." In fact, Bishop's
translation already subdues the raciness of the original poem, in which the |
; last stanza reads: t
! |
| Seguida de um olhar nao sem malfcia e verve
; Nos todos, animais, sem como^ao nenhum a
Mijamos em comum num a festa de espuma.
[Following a look not without malice and verve j
All of us, animals, without any commotion !
261
Piss together in a feast of spume.]
Meter was certainly one reason for Bishop's change. In the last line of her
translation, as in many others, she manages to produce perfectly regular
iambic pentam eter as a reflection of Vinfcius' alexandrine. Thereby, despite
toning dow n the original and adapting it somewhat to more N orthern
cultures, Bishop, even in such a case, manages to follow W alter Benjamin's
maxim of producing in the target language an "echo of the original" which
re-creates the original poem’ s effect on its original audience (Benjamin 77).
While Vinfcius' poem illustrates the connectedness of m an and animal
or m an and nature, with which his translator clearly sympathized, Bishop
was also striving to express a wider connectedness, namely that of the
various Americas. An opportunity to show this connectedness presented
itself w ith Manuel Bandeira’ s "Tragedia Brasileira" ("Brazilian Tragedy"). In
her translation, Bishop takes some of the "Brazilianness" out of the
I
j original. Bandeira's poem tells the story of an older m an who marries a
1
j younger prostitute. She is constantly unfaithful to him and therefore the
I
couple often move to other towns until at last the husband kills his wife. By
; translating some of the place names into English— "Estacio," for example,
^ becomes "Junction City" and "Rocha" becomes "Boulder"— Bishop suggests
that this couple's tale need not necessarily be a "Brazilian Tragedy." What
can happen in an "Estacio" can also happen in a "Junction City;" w hat can
; happen in Brazil can also happen in North America.
' Manuel Bandeira was apparently one of the first Brazilian poets Bishop
i
met and with whom she corresponded. He may also have been the first one
she attem pted to translate. As early as October 12, 1953 Bandeira writes to
Bishop thanking her for her translation and for the raspberry jam she sent
him w ith it.44 Her unpublished and undated poem "To Manuel Bandeira,
w ith a Present” seems to have been written at that time. In that playful light
verse poem, Bishop expresses her gratitude for Bandeira's books and stresses
their connection as translators of each other's languages:
Your books are here; the pages cut.
Of course I want to thank you, but
how can I possibly forget
that we have scarcely spoken yet?
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!"
Translators of each other’ s tongue!
(I think that I may make this claim.)
The greater, relatively young,
sculptured in bronze and known to Fame!
In the following stanzas, Bishop continues to express her adm iration and
praise for Bandeira. She closes with a playful reference to the gift that
accompanies her letter and poem:
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.
Although she declared in a 1965 interview that living in Brazil "has
m ade a great difference" in her own poetry, Bishop did not consider
44 x n this letter as well as in another one of December 25, 1953, Bandeira j
also thanks Bishop for books by e.e. cummings, and for orange marmalade, j
His invitation for her to see the view from his new Rio apartm ent would !
indicate that the two poets had met during Bishop’ s first two years in Brazil j
or were at least planning to do so. !
263
twentieth-century Brazilian poetry to be closely related to twentieth-century
N orth American poetry. She told Ashley Brown,
Living in the way I have happened to live here,
knowing Brazilians, has made a great difference. The
general life I have known here has of course had an
impact on me. I think I've learned a great deal. Most
New York intellectuals' ideas about "underdeveloped
countries" are partly mistaken, and living among
people of a completely different culture has changed a
lot of my old stereotyped ideas.
As for the literary milieu in Brazil, it is so remote
from ours. In Rio for example, the French influence is
still powerful. I find the poetry very interesting, but it
hasn’ t much to do with contemporary poetry in
English. O ur poetry went off in a different direction
m uch earlier.
Interview er: When you say our poetry went off in a
different direction, what do you mean?
Miss Bishop: What happened with Eliot and Pound as
early as 1910— modernism. The Brazilians' poetry is still
more formal than ours— it's farther from the demotic. It
is true, of course, that they had a m odernism o
movement in 1922, led by Mario de Andrade and
others. But they still don’ t write the way they speak.
And I suppose they have still never quite escaped from
romanticism. . . .
To summarize: I just happened to come here, and I
am influenced by Brazil certainly, but I am a completely
American poet, nevertheless. (Brown, "Interview" 290)
But despite this us/them dichotomy and despite the assertion of her
(North-) Americanness Bishop was definitely attracted to twentieth-century
Brazilian poetry.
Indeed, the fact that she considers the poetry of Brazil and of the United
States so dissimilar may well have reinforced her decision to act as a
m ediator between these two traditions through her translations. In this way
she constructs a bridge between South and North and she does her part in
264
achieving the "conflux" of which she was to speak in "Santar^m." The
| dissimilarities on which she concentrates are of a formal nature. Therefore
she took the liberty of making formal changes in her poetic translations,
transforming, for example, an alexandrine into iambic pentameter, thus
eliminating some of the foreignness which might otherwise have struck
her N orthern audience. But thematically Bishop was closely related to the
Brazilian poets she translated. Her cultural mediations were appreciated by
her N orth American readers; they were gratefully acknowledged by many of
the poets to whom she gave an English voice (chiefly among them Carlos
Drum m ond de Andrade and Manuel Bandeira); and they were also
honored by the Brazilian government, which aw arded Elizabeth Bishop in
1971 the Order of Rio Branco.
E. Octavio Paz
Elizabeth Bishop and Octavio Paz were connected through their literary and
! poetic interests, through the times when they were both teaching at H arvard
University, through their mutual appreciation as poets, and through a close j
I
personal friendship. In the summer of 1975, for example, Bishop and Alice j
Methfessel stayed with Paz and his wife Marie Jo in Cuernavaca for several |
| days. Marie Jo was also the person to whom Bishop turned for advice about j
French translations that had been prepared of her poetry and that were :
; i
■ awaiting her approval. And after a phone conversation at Christmas in 1978
Paz wrote to Bishop on January 21 1979, "While we talked with you on
j Christmas eve we saw with the 'mind's eye' the view of the bay, the snow
and all of you around the table— we saw ourselves, not as ghosts but as
echoes of your voices."
Both Bishop and Paz are attracted to the idea and the possibility of
"conflux," as Bishop calls it in "Santarem," or of "Confluences," as Paz calls
it in the title of one of his collections. This conflux works on a variety of
levels: between people, between cultures, between time periods, between
artistic representation and the object of this representation, between art and
life. Because of this belief in some degree of universality and because of
their desire to aid in bringing about a certain confluence, both poets took on
the role of cultural mediator. In his essay on translation, Octavio Paz
expresses his belief in the possibility of cross-cultural communication and
connectedness and in the necessity of cross-cultural mediation:
Although language is not universal, languages
nevertheless form part of a universal society in which,
j once some difficulties have been overcome, all people
can communicate with and understand each other. And
they can do so because in any language men always say
the same things. Universality of the spirit was the
! response to the confusion of Babel: many languages,
one substance. . . . The modern age destroyed that
assurance. (Paz, "Translation" 152)
Therefore translators need to reestablish that assurance, Paz implies, all the
, while aware of the differences between and within cultures.
j It is probably because of his belief in these differences that Paz rejects
i
literary translation, which he calls "servile":
266
I do not mean to imply that literal translation is
impossible; what I am saying is that it is not translation.
It is a mechanism, a string of words that helps us read
the text in its original language. It is a glossary rather
than a translation, which is always a literary activity.
W ithout exception, . . . translation implies a
transformation of the original. That transformation is
not— nor can it be— anything but literary, because all
translations utilize the two modes of expression to
which, according to Roman Jakobson, all literary
procedures are reduced: metonym and metaphor. The
original text never reappears in the new language (this
would be impossible); yet it is ever present because the
translation, without saying it, expresses it constantly, or
else converts it into a verbal object that, although
different, reproduces it: metonym or metaphor. (Paz,
"Translation" 154-155)
In order to be a literary creation or re-creation rather than a mechanical
transposition, translation must be accompanied by an adaptation to the
target language's culture, Paz believes.
He considers poetry a means of cross-cultural communication. Therefore
he objects to the notion that poetry is untranslatable, because that notion
"conflicts w ith my personal conviction that poetry is universal" (Paz,
’ Translation" 155). Like Elizabeth Bishop, Paz believes that in poetry
different cultures, nations, and eras can flow together:
Throughout the ages, European poets— and now those
of both halves of the American continent as well— have
been writing the same poem in different languages.
And each version is an original and distinct poem.
True, the synchronization is not perfect, but if we take a
step backward, we can understand that we are hearing a
concert, and that the musicians, playing different
instruments, following neither conductor nor score, are
in the process of collectively composing a symphony in
which improvisation is inseparable from translation
and creation is indistinguishable from imitation. (Paz,
"Translation" 160-161)
267
[
i Although Bishop would certainly not have gone as far as Paz in asserting
j the universality of poetry, she had come to see, though her life and her
| translations, the desirability of conflux in and through poetry and poetic
translation.
The professional contact between these two poets started at least as early
as 1972, w hen Paz sent Bishop several poems of his which he had selected
for translation into English. He tells her in his March 13, 1972 letter, "I am
so happy to know that you will translate one or two!"45 Even more so than
w ith Manuel Bandeira, to whom Bishop had written that both of them are
"Translators of each other's tongue," Bishop’ s relationship w ith Octavio Paz
in terms of translation was a two-way street. Between 1973 and 1979 she
published five English translations of poems by Paz and he published at
least that many Spanish translations of poems by Bishop.46 Both poets
: commented on each other's renderings of their work, making clarifications
and suggestions.47 In the case of Bishop commenting on Paz’ s translations
of her poems— more so than in the opposite direction— , there seems to have
■ 45 o f the five poems Paz sent her together with this letter Bishop translated
; only "La llave de agua" ["The Key of Water"].
46 p az chose to translate three poems by Bishop for Plural in 1973. These
were followed by his translation of "The End of March" for the same j
journal in 1975, and of "North Haven" in 1979 for an issue of Vuelta in j
| memoriam of Robert Lowell. j
| 47 Paz started translating poems by Bishop in 1973. On March 26, 1973, he i
j writes to Bishop, "Te envio tres traducciones. Ojala que te gusten. Saldran j
: en Plural, en el numero proximo. Pero, por favor, dime si hay errores o i
m istranslations. jGracias!" ["I am sending you three translations. Hopefully j
you will like them. They will come out in Plural, in the next issue. But,
please, tell me if there are any errors or mistranslations. Thank you!"]. j
268
been a strong desire for accuracy and for preventing mistranslations from
getting into print. In 1975, for example, after he had sent her his Spanish
version of "The End of March," Bishop told Paz of several inaccuracies in
his translation. On August 26, 1975, Paz thanks Bishop for her help and
acknowledges his errors: "Gracias por tu carta y por los hints. Fue una gran
ayuda. jCuantos errores! Corregf los mas notables y creo que la traduction ha
mejorado un poco" ["Thank you for your letter and for the hints. It was a big
help. What a lot of mistakes! I corrected the most striking ones and I think
the translation has improved a little."]
As could be expected from the meticulousness w ith which she
commented on Paz's translations of her poems, Bishop's own translations
of Octavio Paz are very exact and often literal. But at the same time they are
poems rather than mechanical transpositions. The first poem by Octavio
j Paz, which Bishop probably started translating in 1972 is "La Have de agua"
j ("The Key of Water"). It is likely that the reason why Bishop picked out this
I
poem from a list of five poems which Paz sent her in 1972 is that here Paz
makes the natural surroundings homely through domestic metaphors,
m uch the way Bishop domesticates nature in a poem like "Crusoe in
; England," where waterspouts become "Glass chimneys, flexible, attenuated,
I sacerdotal beings of glass":
I
The glass horizon
‘ breaks among the peaks.
, We walk upon crystals,
i Above and below
[ great gulfs of calm. (Paz, Poems 285)
Paz's setting of the Ganges river and his situating of homeliness and
: mystery in it must have appealed to Bishop and may have rem inded her of
269
her own 'The Bight." In both poems, there is a sense that water holds the
i key to deeper mysteries. In its last line, Paz's poem moves from the contact
I
w ith nature to sexual contact. The Paz version ends, "Esta noche moje mis
manos en tus pechos" (Paz, Poems 284). In her first published translation,
which is reprinted in Bishop’ s 1979 Complete Poems, Bishop translated the
line as "That night I laved my hands in your breasts." But when, in his
letter of January 21, 1979, Paz suggested to Bishop to change her "laved" to
"dipped," Bishop immediately accepted the revision. But her initial word
choice and Paz’ s suggestion demonstrate a difference between these two
poets: Bishop remains the more reticent one, coloring over a sexual act
through an archaic word without sexual connotations, while Paz prefers
"moj£" and "dipped," both of which have sensual connotations. Bishop's
unconditional agreement with Paz on the change ("Yes - I think "dipped" is
better than "laved" in La Have de agua. "Lave" is an awful w ord and I can’ t
remember now why I felt I had to use it," she tells him on February 8, 1979)
may be connected to her increasing loss of shyness in the 1970s, which, in
her own work, shows most prominently in her 1979 "Sonnet."
The next poem by Octavio Paz which Bishop translated is "Por la calle de
Galeana" ("Along Galeana Street"). More so than "The Key of Water," this
poem internalizes its setting. Paz's movement from the external to the
; internal is a movement from the description of an unsafe street to the
|
1 speaker's reaction to this street. The poet's and his translator's
1 I
concentration on the effects of the setting rather than on externals
i
; universalizes this Galeana Street, making it not a nationally specific place
but one that could exist in almost any city.
270
Reaching the first houses
the summer oxidizes
Someone has closed the door someone
speaks with his shadow
It darkens There's no one in the street now
not even this dog
scared to walk through it alone
One's afraid to close one's eyes (Paz, Poems 347)
A word choice like "oxidizes" (or the original's "se oxida") for the summer
creates an effect of metallic coldness and of forlornness. This sense of
anonymity is stressed through the repetition of "someone,” while the lack
of punctuation mirrors the speaker's disorientation. The resulting fear is
further reinforced through the oncoming darkness and the street's
desertedness. And in its final line the poem sums up the speaker’ s reaction
to the situation, thus making the poetic creation of this street similar in
| terms of technique to Bishop's own inner landscapes.
Another inner landscape is presented in "La arboleda," which Bishop
translated as The Grove,” although she tells Paz that she never liked that
word. Here the inner landscape is established through a personification and
hum anization of nature:
I
i
Enormous and solid
but swaying
beaten by the wind I
but chained !
m urm ur of a million leaves
1 against my window. (Paz, Poems 349)
I
| In this passage, Bishop translates Paz's "rumor" ["rumor," "babble"] as j
| i
j "murmur," thus making nature more hum an in a positive sense. But both |
poets present the natural surroundings as mysterious. However, Paz tries to
271
I name w hat lies behind the mystery of nature, while Bishop would not
| necessarily do so because, for her, the exploration of the mystery would
dim inish the scene's mysteriousness:
The grove,
suddenly still,
is a web of fronds and branches.
But there are flaming spaces
and, fallen into these meshes,
— restless,
breathing—
is something violent and resplendent,
an animal swift and wrathful,
a body of light among the leaves:
the day. (Paz, Poems 349)
In two lines from this passage Bishop inverts Paz's original in order to
create an equivalent for the musicality and (in the second case) the
assonance of Paz's words: she translates "es un tejido de ramas y frondas"
! ["is a web of branches and fronds"] as "is a web of fronds and branches" in
! order to create a regular trochaic verse and she renders "un animal iracundo
y rapido" ["a wrathful and rapid animal"] as "an animal swift and
wrathful," using two trochees in the verse's second half. Concerning her
I choices and the changes she made to Paz’ s own literal English translations
| of those portions of the poem which he had revised in 1978 for a
forthcoming bilingual edition of his poetry, "I may have changed a word or
I
two, or their order, for the sake of a little alliteration!" But commenting on
^ his literal English translations in general, Bishop tells Paz, "I think you
I
I
j scarcely needed to send me The Grove at all— your own English translation
is perfectly good."
272
; After contemplating the animated day, the poem's speaker sees in the sky
j "a tile-blue basin." Bishop suggested this translation to Paz for "el azuleo de
una cuenca" ["the blue of a pool"] in her letter of February 8, 1979, thus
combining resonances of the Spanish "azulear" ("to turn blue"), "azular"
("to color [something] blue), and "azulejo" ("tile"). In Bishop's translation of
Paz's original version, the expression had been the more flat "the blue blue
of a basin."
Later in the poem, the grove is called a "bower" ("enramada") and after
"drops of ink / spattered / on a sheet of paper inflamed by the west," "The
bow er / turns copper, shines." The thought of writing has transform ed the
object of the poem. In an interplay which resembles that of Bishop’ s own
"Poem," realistic re-creation becomes the artistic creation of something new.
But w hat results in Paz's poem is "empty space: neither light nor shade."
While her translation of the first three fourths of the poem is rather
literal, Bishop makes more changes toward the poem's conclusion. Paz
writes,
El bote de basura,
la maceta sin planta,
ya no son,
j sobre el opaco cemento,
sino sacos de sombras.
iA literal translation would be:
i
The trash can,
the flower pot without plants,
are no more,
on the dark cement,
just sacks of shadows.
273
But Bishop makes these lines into:
And now the trash can,
the empty flower pot,
on the blind cement
contain nothing but shadows. (Paz, Poems 350-351)
Bishop adds a "now," makes the cement "blind" rather than "dark," and she
leaves out the "are no more," as well as the "sacks." Through her "now" she
clarifies a turn in the poem that is present but not emphasized in the
I original. The omissions in her version make the poem's language more
i
economical, using the minimum number of w ords necessary w ithout
substantially changing the meaning. Bishop also eliminates Paz's apparent
contradiction: his version states that the trash can and the flower pot no
longer existing, but should they still exist they would only be sacks of
shadows. Thus Bishop clarifies what Paz was apparently trying to express.
But she also adds a new element: by translating "opaco" as "blind" she
personifies the cement and projects the onlooker's sympathy onto it.
Commenting on her use of "blind," Bishop wrote to Paz on February 8, 1979,
"Blind" is not a very good try for "cement" - or not here
- but I didn't like "opaque." Now I see the OED gives as
the first meaning of "opaque ” - "lying in shadow,
darkened, obscure" - so probably the word has kept a
j better meaning in Spanish than in English. (Here it
now only seems to mean that you can't see through it!)
So I'd suggest that that word be changed - in English it
sounds oddly flat and obvious.
So in this case Bishop took it in her hands (with Paz's approval) to add to
i
the original text. This addition was motivated by personal preference more
than by cultural or linguistic difference. Such licence is in line w ith the
desire Bishop expressed in her introduction to An Anthology of Twentieth-
274
Century Brazilian Poetry, where she speaks of the goal to produce "poems”
i
I rather than mechanical translations.
The artist’ s transformation of reality, which is one of the themes of "The
Grove," or the transformation of experience into art, is at the center of
"Objects & Apparitions" ("Objetos y apariciones"), a poem w ritten in honor
of the artist Joseph Cornell. This poem appeared in the collection which Paz
entitled Confluencias [Confluences 1 . a concept toward which Bishop was, of
course, very inclined. A further clue to Bishop's appreciation of this poem is
that it is the only translation she ever included in one of her collections.
Lorrie Goldensohn has commented that in this poem, Bishop saw that
"both language and object meet in a glancing state of equality in their
reflection of the enduring inner world. . . . Symbol-making, for Bishop, was
always both verbal and pictorial" (Goldensohn 120).48 This characteristic
unites Bishop w ith Octavio Paz and Joseph Cornell and accounts for the
j poem ’ s expression of adm iration for Cornell's artistic representations in
j boxes. "Objects & Apparitions" starts:
Hexahedrons of wood and glass,
scarcely bigger than a shoebox,
with room in them for night and all its lights.
i 48 Later, Goldensohn writes,
The translation demonstrates how the geographer's, or the mapper's, j
urge to delineate place, and secondarily thing, serves to project
i personal history. In the Paz translation, two scales of m easurement '
I converge: the scale that enlarges small objects and magnifies their j
j properties into emotional affiliation; and the reverse scale, which j
contracts bodies into toy and doll counters— displacing, distorting, and |
skewing the orders of our responses as the world of thing and person, !
or subject and object, intersect in alternately diminishing and
enlarging forms. (Goldensohn 266) j
275
This first stanza sets the mood for the idea that artistic representation need
i
j not occupy vast amounts of room in order to be true or truthful.
Exemplariness is what these three artists value most. Echoing the mixture
of materials Cornell uses in his works, Bishop (like Paz) mixes her poetic
materials: her translation's meter is neither regular nor consistent. As in
this first stanza, there is a mixture of iambic and trochaic verses, but there
are also free verse lines. The use of various meters may be considered
another manifestation of Bishop's and Paz's desire for conflux or
confluence.
Both poets admire Cornell's ability to make things appear in a new light
in his works:
"One has to commit a painting," said Degas,
"the way one commits a crime." But you constructed
boxes where things hurry away from their names.
(Paz, Poems 405)
Paz detected a similar transformative power in Bishop's poetry. He
characterizes her work thus: "things become other things w ithout ceasing to
be the things they are. This leap has two names: one is imagination, the
other is freedom. They are synonymous" (Paz, "Reticence" 15). W ith regard
to "Objetos y apariciones" Paz was appreciative of Bishop's solution for
" Hay que hacer un cuadro', dijo Degas, / 'como se comete un crimen’."
[literally: "'One has to make a painting,' said Degas / 'the way a crime is
' ■ committed.'"]. He wrote to her on March 16, 1974,
!
j Tu traduction es perfecta. No hay que cambiar nada,
' absolutamente nada. No solo es fiel sino que a veces es
mejor que el original. Por ejemplo, yo escribo—
traduciendo literalmente, "platement," del francos—
"hacer un cuadro como se hace un crimen" pero tii
276
dices "to commit a painting the way one commits a
crime." jMagnffico! Darla no se que por haber escrito ese
"to commit a painting."
[Your translation is perfect. Nothing needs to be
changed, absolutely nothing. Not only is it true [to my
original], sometimes it is better than the original. For
example, I write--translating literally, "flatly," from the
French— "hacer un cuadro como se hace un crimen" but
you say "to commit a painting the way one commits a
crime." Magnificent. I would give a lot to have written
this "to commit a painting."]
In "Objects & Apparitions" there is— like in "The Map," where Bishop
wrote, "More delicate than the historians' are the map-makers' colors"— a
valorization of non-historical representation:
Minimal, incoherent fragments:
the opposite of History, creator of ruins,
out of your ruins you have made creations.
Theater of the spirits:
objects putting the laws
I of identity through hoops. (Paz, Poems 407)
i
| The implication is that these "creations" might be more truthful than
I historically accurate or factual accounts. Bishop was certainly draw n to the
idea of "putting the laws / of identity through hoops," which she, too,
f practiced in her dissolution of boundaries. This technique connects Bishop,
i Paz, and Cornell, as does the "inner eye" [”ojo mental"] that is mentioned
three stanzas later. In the poem's final couplet, the idea of the
l
connectedness of writer and visual artist is again reinforced: "Joseph
■ Cornell: inside your boxes / my words became visible for a moment."
I Another translation which, in Paz's view, succeeded very well is
! Bishop's rendering of "Primero de enero" ("January First"). After seeing
i Bishop's draft of her translation Paz wrote to her on September 5, 1975,
277
"Finally I received your translation. I like it very much— so much that I
prefer it to the Spanish original."49 Like "Objects & A pparitions/' "The
Grove," and Bishop’s "Poem," "January First" is in part about poetic
representation:
Last night you told me:
tomorrow
we shall have to think up signs,
sketch a landscape, fabricate a plan
on the double page
of day and paper.
Tomorrow, we shall have to invent,
once more,
the reality of this world. (Paz, Poems 596)
As in a num ber of his poems, Paz problematizes authorship. Distinctions
between the creation of an external reality and the poetic re-creation of such
j a reality blur. Like in the "watery, dazzling dialectic" of Bishop's
j "Santar&m," distinctions become unimportant.
! Because of the blurring of distinctions, the poem can then argue for
| connectedness, an argument that Bishop also uses in many of the poems of
i
j Geography IIL on which she was working while translating Paz's "January
I
J First." She has Paz say,
I
I
For a second of a second
I felt what the Aztec felt,
on the crest of the promontory,
lying in wait
| for time's uncertain return
| through cracks in the horizon. (Paz, Poems 595-597)
49 But in the same letter he adds his literal English translation of a passage
that does not have a clear referent in Spanish and that Bishop seems to
have m isunderstood.
278
A lthough this connectedness is seen as transitory and although the poem
presents hum an existence as mysterious and unforseeable (especially
through the final couplet "Well open the doors of the day, / and enter the
unknown;" Paz, Poems 597), there is a sense of a connectedness across times
and cultures in the Western Hemisphere.
Bishop and Paz saw this connectedness also between themselves. Their
appreciation of each other's poetic visions and their convincing renderings
of each other's poems into their own language indicate that confluences
between Bishop's Anglo-American and Paz's Latin-American traditions are
far from improbable. Both poets strove to be cultural m ediators by making
each other's work accessible to their respective cultures. In the year of her
death, Bishop was still working on translations of Paz. But she died before
she could finish them. On February 8, 1979 she wrote to her Mexican
colleague, friend, and admirer,
What I'd like is to work some more on the almost
completed rhym ed poem [of yours] about the jeep in
India - 1 got stuck with it several years ago but just
might be able to finish it when I go home (this
afternoon) - but maybe not!
' F. Bishop's Choices for Cultural Transmission
i
I
1 Although she affirms that she is an "American poet," meaning a poet
j
writing in an Anglo-American tradition, Elizabeth Bishop came to
| appreciate some parts of the Western Hemisphere that were largely
279
unknow n to her contemporary compatriots. Living in Mexico for almost a
year and in Brazil for almost two decades, while it also made her aware of
her different background, helped Bishop move from a superficial encounter
of Latin-American cultures to a deeper understanding and an even deeper
love for them. Out of this love came her desire to share her adm iration of
several Latin-American writers with her North American audience. This
desire was intensified through Bishop's feeling of homelessness: her
cultural transmissions were for her also a way of enlarging the concept of
home and of uniting different parts of the Western Hemisphere into her
spiritual home.
Alice Brant's Minha Vida de Menina. the three stories by Clarice
Lispector, the thirteen poems she translated for An Anthology of
Twentieth-Centurv Brazilian Poetry, and the five poems by Octavio Paz all
spoke to Bishop and made her realize her connection to their authors and to
i
the cultural backgrounds of those authors. These texts seemed to Bishop to
be im portant enough to merit her efforts as a translator because they all
expressed experiences to which she could relate or about which she had
w ritten herself. Although The Diary of "Helena Morlev" seemed to Bishop
! quintessentially Brazilian, it reminded her in numerous instances of the
Great Village of her childhood. On the other hand, Bishop had come to love
things quintessentially Brazilian after a warm and liberating time w ith Lota
1 and her relatives in the early 1950s and therefore she was attem pting to let
i 1
I i
j her N orthern audience partake in this love, possibly hoping to revise her j
J
readers' views of her new-found home. I
280
While Helena’ s Diamantina recalled for Bishop her Great Village, the
three stories which she translated by Clarice Lispector must have appealed
to her because of their concentration on outsider figures, some of whom are
or are like animals. Bishop had gone to Brazil in part to escape her
unhappiness as an outsider in the United States, but in Brazil, despite the
I ;
emotional warmth, she experienced a different kind of outsider status,
caused above all by cultural and linguistic difference. Therefore outsider
figures have always been prominent in her own poems and stories.
I
Another quality of her own work which Bishop also detected in Lispector is
the dramatization of the strange or the otherworldly.
Although she delineated her own work and poetic tradition from
Brazilian poetry in terms of formal elements, numerous works by Brazilian
| poets appealed to Bishop because of their subject matter. The subjects on
j which she translated poems for An Anthology of Twentieth-Centurv
I Brazilian Poetry include, apart from the strange and magical and outsiders,
I
childhood, the problems associated with family, the individual's position in
and relation to the world, connectedness, and the universality of (Brazilian)
experiences.
! Connectedness and the universality across cultures of certain experiences
can also be seen in some of the poems by Octavio Paz to which Bishop
i
turned after the publication of the anthology. But in Paz she found still
f i
I other characteristics and concerns of her own writings: the creation of inner !
j i
! landscapes through a movement from external setting to internal reaction, j
1 the intricacies of representation and its relation to the external world, and j
I the dissolution of boundaries. f
281
A part from the appeal of their works, numerous Latin-American writers
were also dear to Elizabeth Bishop because of her personal contact with
them. Exchanges of books and presents with Manuel Bandeira, of affection
w ith Vimcius de Moraes, of appreciative letters with Carlos Drum m ond de
Andrade, or of collegial advice with Octavio Paz are only a few of her
connections to Latin Americans. Bishop was a cultural transm itter into
Anglo-American as well as into Latin-American cultures. And these
transmissions were appreciated by both sides. After reading her translation
of his "Poema de sete faces," for example, Carlos Drummond de Andrade
wrote to Bishop on September 9, 1963 that the Raimundo of his poem "estd
m uito orgulhoso de fazer-lhe companhia em seus momentos de 'feeling
blue' - e o autor tambem" [Raimundo "is very proud to keep you company
in your moments of feeling blue - and his author is too."].
i
i
i
282
Relations stop nowhere,
j — Henry James, Roderick Hudson
i
Chapter VI: "That Watery. Dazzling Dialectic": Home Internalized
A. Retrospect, Reconciliation, Representation: Geography III
When Elizabeth Bishop returned to the United States for good in the fall of
1970 to accept a teaching position at Harvard University, she brought with
her the loved memory of Brazil.50 Her adopted home of almost two decades
remained a powerful presence in Bishop's mind and in both 1971 and 1972
she went back to Ouro Preto for visits. Although Lota’s death had
dramatically altered Bishop's attitude toward Brazil as a "home," Bishop's
continued love of Brazil and, more generally, her lifelong search for a home
resonate and are represented in the poems of Geography III (1976). With
regard to the places she came to love in the Western Hemisphere and to
consider a kind of home and which reappear in this last collection, Bishop
w ent back beyond Brazil to the Nova Scotia and the Massachusetts of her
childhood. But since she had by then internalized these various homes,
I
j - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
i 50 jn "Large Bad Picture," a poem from her earliest collection, Bishop had,
| to a degree, foreshadowed what she would be doing after her return from
Brazil to the United States: teaching and painting a picture of places she had
i experienced in the past:
i Remembering the Strait of Belle Isle or
some northerly harbor of Labrador,
before he became a schoolteacher
a great-uncle painted a big picture. ,
283
they are not presented in immediate descriptions of the settings, as had been
the case in the Brazil poems of Questions of Travel. The immediacy has
been shifted: instead of an immediacy of sense impressions there is, in the
late poems, an immediacy that recreates the workings of the speaker's or
poet's memory. Longing (for the past and for past homes) is one
characteristic of these poems, but there is also a deliberate sense of
acceptance and reconciliation, expressed especially in "One Art." As Bishop
illustrates in poems like "One Art," "Poem," and "Crusoe in England," part
of w hat makes this reconciliation with the past and with past losses possible
is the act of writing about these experiences, of representing them in
pictures and words.
What is being represented in Bishop's late poems are not so much the
places where she has felt at home but rather her past emotional responses
to these places. Once again, and more so than ever, Bishop is creating in
Geography III what David Kalstone has called "inner landscapes" (Kalstone,
Five 40),5 1 These are shaped both by Bishop's memories and by her situation
t
at the moment of recollecting and of representing her past experiences.
While the late poems are characterized to a large degree by "retrospect," as
| Robert Dale Parker has written, they should not be considered exclusively
, under that aspect (Parker 121). Those poems in which Brazil resonates show,
I for example, an interplay of present feelings and past experience.52 While
j Later, Kalstone commented that "The poems in Geography I I I . . . revisit ■
1 her earlier poems as Bishop herself once visited tropical and polar zones, j
1 and ... they refigure her work in wonderful ways" (Kalstone, Becoming 252). j
I
I
52 John H ollander has argued that what he calls the "important poems" of J
Geography III seem "to derive their immense power both from the energies |
284
Questions of Travel is dedicated to Lota de Macedo Soares, who had
experienced together with Elizabeth Bishop a number of the places that
appear in that collection, Geography III is dedicated to Alice Methfessel,
whom Bishop met at H arvard University and who therefore did not share
Bishop's intimacy with most of the places depicted in this last collection.
With regard to the connection of creative present and created past, the
poems of Geography III are aligned with those of the "Elsewhere" section of
Questions of Travel, where Bishop's Brazilian present partly shaped her
| view of her Nova Scotian past. But in the late poems retrospect and conflux
are far more im portant than they were in the earlier collection. Now, as
Bonnie Costello has pointed out, "Bishop more explicitly links her themes
of travel and memory, geography and history" (Costello, Mastery 200).
Travel is no longer concentrated on place and geography but moves inward,
following the movements of the mind more than those of the body.53 Since
they concentrate on their speaker's interior, the poems of Geography III are
also Bishop's most autobio graphically revealing and, if one may use the
term Bishop so abhorred, they are the closest Bishop ever came to
| P
of the poet's creative present and from the richness and steadfastness of her I
i created past" (Hollander 245). But Hollander does not recognize that the
center of this "created past" are the emotional responses of the poet at that
past moment more than the actual place she was perceiving.
i
i !
p3 Thomas J. Travisano has convincingly shown that "In Bishop's last
iwork, travel becomes less and less literal, more and more enigmatic and
symbolic. The now familiar oppositions between vicarious and real travel,
between the fictive and the historical, reappear in newly formulated terms" !
(Travisano 184).
285
i confessional poetry. Here she is no longer as intent on hiding herself
through cryptic allusions as she was in earlier works.
The title page illustration of the original edition of Geography III shows a
globe, a geographer's tools, a pen in an ink-pot, and four books, one of them
open. Considering that apart from her 1969 Complete Poems her last
collection is Bishop's fourth book, the illustration suggests the late poems'
underlying combination of recollected geography and (poetic)
representation. After this illustration, Bishop quotes a series of questions
from the 1884 First Lessons in Geography of Monteith's Geographical Series.
This may in part be a hint at the importance of the (poet's) past for this
collection. The first question which is quoted is "What is Geography?" The
answer that follows reads: "A description of the earth's surface." But for
Bishop, geography had never been just that. In her case, we m ight change
the answer to "A description of the earth's surface as it is reconstituted in
j the onlooker." While many of Bishop’ s poems describe the earth's surface,
j they are also interested in the speaker's response to the setting. Bishop's
geographies never attempt to be objective. Even w hen the onlooker or
speaker remains at a distance, the descriptions usually have a component of
i
: the observer in them. This component tends to be especially powerful in the
| poems of Geography III, since here no illusion of the speaker directly
! looking at a geography is being created. Instead, the audience witnesses her
| as she is remembering and recreating the feelings and thoughts that went
i
! through her head while she was experiencing a certain place in the past.
Another question which Bishop quotes from First Lessons in Geography
is "Of what is the Earth's surface composed?" The answer that follows is
286
i "Land and water." Bishop has always delighted in the play and the
combination of land and water, as becomes evident, for example, in "The
Bight," where the water is "Absorbing rather than being absorbed." The next
question which she quotes recalls the first poem in N orth & South: "W hat
is a Map?" The answer is: "A picture of the whole, or a part, of the Earth's
surface." Next comes a question about "the directions on a M ap." which
again reminds readers of the title of Bishop's first collection of poems.
While a concern with geography had been characteristic of Bishop from
the beginning of her career, the questions that follow suggest how the
poems of her last book are different: "In what direction from the center of
the picture is the Island? / North." might be hinting at Bishop s feelings
about being back in the United States after two decades in South America.
One could argue that after living in a variety of places in the Western
Hemisphere, Bishop feels that the "center of the picture" is somewhere in
between Canada or the United States and Brazil. Seen from this center, she
is now in the "North,” i.e. in Massachusetts. Since it describes Bishop’ s
present location, "North" is the last answer she quotes from First Lessons in
G eography. But like the England of her returned Crusoe, Bishop’ s new
found home in Boston must have felt like an "Island" to her. Such an
i
island position allows the poet to put the places of her past and present into
perspective. Then follows a series of unanswered questions, the first of
which is "In what direction is the Volcano?," a concept that will resound in
the collection's first two poems, "In the Waiting Room" and "Crusoe in
England." But remembering that a volcano erupts from inside, one can say
that this volcano is also a kind of self-portrait for Bishop, since the poems of 1
287
this collections come more strongly than any of her others out of Bishop's
interior, containing her recollections of and reconciliation w ith the past.
The collection's first poem, "In the Waiting Room," takes Bishop back to
a childhood experience of the year 1918, when her aunt took her along to a
dentist's visit. In this poem, which David Kalstone has called "a key text in
understanding Bishop's treatment of suffering" (Kalstone, Becoming 245),
Bishop dramatizes her own entrance into self-awareness and into an
awareness of her connectedness to other people, especially to the aunt she
dislikes . But Thomas J. Travisano's claim that in this poem "the roots of a
poetic vocation are uncovered" is largely unfounded (Travisano 184).
Geography (or, more exactly, images from National Geographic) triggers the
process of emerging self-awareness. The resulting inner conflict is
illustrated by a mixture of frightening, surreal images and ordinary, homely
elements. Elizabeth Bishop wrote this largely autobiographical poem after a
life of moving around in the Americas and after decades of uncertainty
about the notion of home. The placement of "In the Waiting Room" at the
beginning of Geography III underlines the importance that the poem's
thesis of a universal connectedness had for Bishop, especially after
J attem pting in her translations and earlier pieces about Brazil, the United
I States, and Canada to establish the connectedness that she saw or at least
wished for w ithin the Americas. As has been discussed in chapter two, for
Elizabeth Bishop, who had been looking for an environment to call home
I
j ever since her forced move to Worcester at the age of five, this
! connectedness might help w iden the concept of "home."
288
Since the poem's speaker is a not quite seven year-old girl, it is fitting that
the free verse trimeter is not impaired by strict adherence to formal
considerations and that the poem's language is simple. The introductory
sentences are characterized by their attempt at giving a factual account of the
childhood experience, situating it clearly in place and time:
In Worcester, Massachusetts,
I went w ith Aunt Consuelo
to keep her dentist's appointment
and sat and waited for her
in the dentist’ s waiting room.
It was winter. It got dark
early. The waiting room
was full of grown-up people,
arctics and overcoats,
lamps and magazines.
The enum eration of what the speaker saw in the waiting room furthers the
account's attempts at factuality. The setting's atmosphere is characterized by
! coldness ("w inter" ) and darkness. Because of the epiphanic experience
| which the speaker undergoes in the course of the poem, there is a reversal
| of this coldness and darkness: towards the end of the poem, "The waiting
j room was bright / and too hot."
j After establishing its locale and the initial mood, the poem continues,
j My aunt was inside
what seemed like a long time
and while I waited I read
the National Geographic
(I could read) and carefully
{ studied the photographs:
I the inside of a volcano,
i black, and full of ashes;
then it was spilling over
in rivulets of fire.
289
The two uses of "inside" in this passage suggest that the speaker is still
"outside" here. She is afraid of the "inside" which seems to her "black, and
full of ashes." As Bonnie Costello's analysis of various drafts of "In the
W aiting Room" shows, the image of a volcano had been prom inent from
the beginning of the poem’ s composition.54 By the end of the poem the girl
has become a part of the "inside” which the volcano introduces. Then she
can say,
The War was on. Outside,
in Worcester, Massachusetts,
were night and slush and cold,
and it was still the fifth
of February, 1918.
After undergoing an experience that will change her outlook on life, the
speaker is now "inside" and looks at the "Outside" she has left behind.
While the "inside" is, at the end of this dramatic monologue, characterized
I by w arm th and brightness (which the speaker experiences as oppressing
j because they are still foreign to her), coldness and darkness are now
! relegated to the "outside" w ith its "night and slush and cold" and "War." In
j view of the February 1918 issue of National Geographic the poem's final
i
i
j
i 54 Costello has called the volcano "the central icon of Geography III;" it is
"highly versatile, being both inside and outside, up and down, dead and
’ alive, deep and high, solid and fluid, cold and hot. It provides Bishop w ith a
metaimage of the world and her own emotional relationship to it. Perhaps 1
i most im portant here, the volcano is a static vertical icon which erupts into a j
horizontal flow" (Costello, Mastery 118). Earlier drafts of "In the Waiting \
Room" included still more details about the volcano as it was depicted in i
N ational Geographic and identified it as Mount Katmai.
290
return to the outside and to World War I are not surprising.55 Thomas J.
j Travisano has speculated that the poem's final return to the waiting room
I and to World War I might be "an implicit generalization about the hum an
condition" (Travisano 188). The cold, distanced factuality, which had
perm eated the poem’s beginning is now relegated to the outside, where
place and date still matter. But the speaker has entered a world in which
other things are of greater importance. Her entrance into this new realm is
foreshadowed and triggered by the pictures in National Geographic. The
I
lava, which is "spilling over / in rivulets of fire" there, is a m etaphor for
Bishop's identification with an "other." The words of her poem act like the
volcano's lava: they mirror the girl’ s experience of connectedness to others
and in turn act as connectors between Bishop and her readers. Since the
change in the speaker's attitude and self-awareness are linked to geography,
there is also a sense that one of Bishop’ s goals in writing this poem may
have been to act as metaphoric lava "spilling over" and thereby connecting
the Americas.
While the image of a volcano and of its lava "spilling over / in rivulets
of fire" is taken from the actual February 1918 issue of National Geographic.
the other exotic images of "In the Waiting Room" are not.56 Bishop
55 w hile the issue contains a long lead article on Mount Katmai in Alaska,
entitled "The Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes," which is accompanied by
numerous photographs, two of the three remaining articles in the issue deal
iwith the War. These are "Helping to Solve Our Allies' Food Problem" and
"Shopping Abroad for Our Army in France."
56 Bishop asserted in an interview with regard to the pictures she attributes
to N ational Geographic. !
291
invented them in order to illustrate that she would like her readers to feel a
i
connectedness with other cultures that may at first strike N orth Americans
as backward or barbaric. Some of the exotic pictures which frighten the girl
in the poem are
Babies with pointed heads
w ound round and round with string;
black, naked women with necks
w ound round and round with wire
like necks of light bulbs.
Their breasts were horrifying.
As in "Crusoe in England," Bishop connects here what Helen Vendler has
called "the otherworldly" with the domestic. As Vendler has written, "in
Bishop's poetry, in the midst of the familiar, and most especially there, we
feel the familiar as the unknowable. This guerilla attack of the alien,
springing from the very bulwarks of the familiar, is the subject of 'In the
W aiting Room’" (Vendler, "Domestication" 24). The domestic simile of the
neck of a light bulb expresses the speaker's attempt to relate the exotic to the
domestic sphere she knows. But despite this attempt the speaker still finds
My memory had confused two 1918 issues of the
Geographic. Not having seen them since then, I
checked it out in the New York Public Library. In the
j February issue there was an article, "The Valley of
10,000 Smokes," about Alaska that I'd remembered, too.
But the African things, it turned out, were in the next
i issue, in March. (Starbuck 318) j
i But upon checking the March 1918 issue of National Geographic one |
’ realizes that Bishop is still creating an imaginative vision of her awakening: j
1 of the five articles in that issue four deal more or less directly w ith World
j War I and the fifth one, 'The Isle of Frankincense" features Arabia. In fact,
j the exotic images Bishop attributes to National Geographic can be found
neither in any of the six issues prior to nor in any of the six issues following
I February 1918.
292
the exotic "horrifying," especially since the depiction of naked women
rem inds her of her own sexuality. The repetition of "round and round"
foreshadows the girl's dizziness in view of a realization that will change her
life. But the speaker also experiences an attraction to the unknown:
I read it straight through.
I was too shy to stop.
And then I looked at the cover:
the yellow margins, the date.
She is at the same time afraid and fascinated by the exotic. Nonetheless, she
tries to pull herself back from it and seeks sanctuary in the safe, known
w orld of factuality; she retreats to "the cover" or "outside" and to "the date."
As Bonnie Costello has written, "She tries to avert her gaze . . . as if to
rem ind herself that what she sees has boundaries that separate her from it"
(Costello, Mastery 121).
The girl makes an effort to remain on the "outside" and in the distanced,
factual w orld w ith which she is familiar. But the events around her and the
reactions they trigger inside her do not allow the speaker to keep her
distance, no matter how hard she she may try:
Suddenly, from inside,
came an oh! of pain
— A unt Consuelo's voice—
not very loud or long.
I wasn't at all surprised;
even then I knew she was
a foolish, timid woman.
I m ight have been embarrassed,
but w asn’ t. What took me
completely by surprise
was that it was me: i
my voice, in my mouth.
W ithout thinking at all
293
I was my foolish aunt,
' I— we— were falling, falling.
our eyes glued to the cover
I of the National Geographic.
! February, 1918.
Bishop pointed out to David Kalstone that the "inside" "does not have a
m ultiple reference and that perhaps rather than mislead readers she should
change the line" (Kalstone, Becoming 246). But especially in view of the
misleading information she gave about the February and March 1918 issues
of National Geographic her assertion cannot be taken at face value. The
"inside" is pulling the speaker back. At first she tries to resist it through her
haughty attitude, but she is unable to escape the epiphanic recognition that
there is a bond between her and her aunt. Linguistically, this bond is
revealed by the merging of "I" and "she" into "we." While the N orthern
w orld of the waiting room and in which Bishop is writing this poem is
; stuffy and cold, the Southern world in which the girl is immersing herself
through the pictures of National Geographic and in which Bishop had lived
for two decades is exotic and mysterious. Because of her previous
immersion in a Southern world the girl can now feel a connection to her
aunt when the aunt's "oh!." the only sound mentioned in the poem, calls
j her back to the Northern world. Likewise, Elizabeth Bishop, because of her
immersion in a variety of American cultures can feel a connectedness to all
of them and between them and tries to evoke in her readers a similar sense
i
of inter-American connectedness.
| I
The girl's recognition of her connectedness causes her disorientation and j
her feeling of "falling, falling" that echoes the earlier "round and round." In
i
this loss of control, heightened through the juxtaposition and repetition of
294
"falling," she tries desperately to cling to the "outside" and to the facts that
she knows: her (and her aunt’ s) eyes are "glued to the cover / of the
National Geographic" and to its date. As Robert Dale Parker has pointed out,
this passage echoes the conclusion of Emily Dickinson's "I felt a Funeral, in
my Brain":
A nd then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down—
A nd hit a World, at every plunge,
A nd Finished knowing— then—
1
While with Dickinson the "Finished knowing" can— characteristically— be
read in two ways, Bishop makes it clear that after the sensation of falling her
speaker enters a new realm of self-knowledge.
Bishop's speaker goes on clinging to externals by reassuring herself of her
age: "I said to myself: three days / and you'll be seven years old." But she is
i unable to prevent the central recognition:
But I felt: you are an I,
you are an Elizabeth
you are one of them.
The girl cannot escape her growing awareness of self: pairing "you are an
Elizabeth" and "you are one of them ," Bishop underlines the girl's
realization that while she is an individual, she is also a member of a group
w ith whom she shares certain characteristics. Although she becomes aware
I
i that individuality goes hand in hand with connectedness, she keeps
j resisting and questioning this realization. Thus the use of several questions:
; !
Why should I be my aunt, |
or me, or anyone? i
W hat sim ilarities— j
boots, hands, the family voice I
295
I felt in my throat, or even
the National Geographic
and those awful hanging breasts--
held us all together
or made us all just one?
Through such questions about her own identity the girl comes to accept her
"inside" position and starts to deal with her feared sexuality. She finally
realizes that the "inside," the connectedness to others, brings w ith it light
and warm th, although those may still feel oppressive: she now experiences
the waiting room as "bright / and too hot." While, unlike the child of
William W ordsworth’ s "Ode: Intimations of Immortality," she is still
uncomfortable with her new-found sense of self, she no longer tries to rid
herself of it.57 She is on the side of both civilization and its discontents—
W ordsworth and Coleridge. Like the volcano that is "spilling over," her
sense of self, too, has spilled over and has made her realize and accept her
connection to others.
The importance of geography in the speaker's self-recognition suggests
that this poem can also be read as a parable. The speaker situates herself
explicitly in Worcester, Massachusetts, which makes the "I" stand, to a
degree, for the United States. But while the poem's "I" is an almost seven
year-old girl, the author's "I" is by the time of completion of this poem that
57 gut in spite of her acceptance the speaker remains unhappy about her
connectedness to others. Bonnie Costello has pointed out that w ith "In the
iWaiting Room" Bishop departs from W ordsworth’ s "Ode: Intimations of
Immortality." Costello writes that while W ordsworth saw the void as
(sublime and had faith in a joyful rebound from the void, Bishop's "gothic
and grotesque qualities, her moods of anxiety and dejection, her sense of
otherness, all identify her as a modern Coleridge." Her feelings echo
Coleridge’ s "Dejection: An Ode" much more than W ordsworth's
Immortality Ode (Costello, Mastery 124).
296
of a wom an in her sixties who has painfully struggled w ith her sense of self
and w ith geographically locating that self. The traum a of forced geographic
relocation from Nova Scotia to Massachusetts, which is narrated in 'The
Country Mouse," the same prose memoir that contains an account of the
dentist s visit that is the occasion for "In the Waiting Room," is connected
to the speaker's self-recognition. Bishop's experience that identity, although
linked to geography, is not confined by it but encompasses instead a variety
of geographies further suggests that, to a certain degree, Bishop may have
considered this poem a parable on national identity. If the "I" stands for the
United States, where Bishop was at the time when the events narrated in
the poem occurred and where she is again when she writes the poem, then
Bishop argues through the "Elizabeth" of her poem for the
interconnectedness of the United States and of other American countries
and cultures. The United States may be sharing the girl's initial haughtiness
and think of the "oh! of pain" which they might hear as coming from "a
foolish, timid" American country. If that is the case, the poem argues, the
United States will need to leave behind their distance and coldness in favor
of a w arm er attitude toward their American neighbors.58 Bishop is here
w riting in the tradition of Walt Whitman, where the "I" stands for all
| Americans. However, like Jose Marti, she enlarges the reference of her
: poem: while W hitman’ s "Song of Myself" represents only the United
| This interpretation is certainly less far-fetched than Bonnie Costello’ s
view that the aunt’ s "oh! of pain" "may be figurative of labor pain, or more
abstractly, the pain of self-delivery into the world of relatedness" (Costello,
Mastery 122).
297
I States, Bishop's "In the Waiting Room" speaks of the W estern Hemisphere.
jA closer look at "12 O'clock News" later in this chapter will reveal a similar
! argum ent in that poem. National Geographic (which has always been
characterized by its internationalism) and nationalism, in Bishop's opinion,
m ust give way to an international geography and to an international
awareness.
Bishop also narrated the events of "In the Waiting Room" in her
memoir "The Country Mouse," which was probably written in 1961
i
although it was not published until after Bishop's death. Here Aunt
Consuelo is referred to by her real name. She is Aunt Jenny, who takes her
niece along to the dentist’ s. The memoir expresses the same shock at self
recognition and at the girl's becoming aware of her connectedness w ith
others as does the poem. While the February 1918 issue of N ational
i G eographic is mentioned in the memoir, volcanoes or the aunt's cry are
not. The memoir leaves it unclear what exactly triggers the girl's self-
awareness:
A feeling of absolute and utter desolation came over
me. I fe lt... myself. In a few days it would be my
j seventh birthday. I felt L L L and looked at the three
I strangers in panic. I was one of them too, inside my
i scabby body and wheezing lungs. "You're in for it now,"
something said. How had I got tricked into such a false
position? I would be like that woman opposite who
smiled at me so falsely every once in a while. The awful
sensation passed, then it came back again. (Prose 32-33)
The question expresses the speaker's incredulity at her new-found sense of |
I
self. But in spite of her reluctance the girl finally has to accept that she is not j
298
i only a separate individual but also a person who is connected with and
j similar to other people.
As mentioned above, this recognition is partly caused by the intrusion of
the exotic or foreign into the domestic or known. In an unpublished poem
entitled "Foreign-Domestic," of which there is only one typescript in the
Vassar College Libray’ s Special Collections, Bishop is also concerned w ith
the interpenetration of these two realms. Situation and setting of that poem
rem ain unclear, but they seem to be related to those of "In the Waiting
Room." The speaker is waiting and observing a scene that surprises her:
I listen to the sweet "eye-fee."
From where I’ m sitting I can see
across the hallway in your room
two bare feet upon the bed,
arranged as if someone were dead,
- a non-crusader on a tomb.
I get up; take a further look.
You're reading a "detective book;"
so that's all right. I settle back.
The needle in its destined track
stands true
In this poem, unlike in "In the Waiting Room," rhyme makes the domestic
l scene more quaint, but it also undercuts the seriousness of the experience
that is rendered here. Although the "foreign" of the poem's title is allowed
to intrude briefly into the "domestic," this intrusion does not result in a
perm anent change for the speaker. She can see that everything is "all right" j
and can "settle back" again. Bishop may have abandoned this poem because
she considered its impact too light and because it does not show the tension
between the foreign and the domestic (and the effect of the one on the '
299
other) as well as "In the Waiting Room" does. As a motto for the poem,
Bishop wrote on the upper right-hand corner of the typescript,
it is three hundred years
or more since the spheres
stopped making music
This motto further indicates that in Bishop's universe there is always a
connection between the foreign and the domestic. The foreign is present
even if it cannot always be seen or heard. And, as happens in "In the
W aiting Room," the foreign may enter the domestic unexpectedly and
deeply affect our sense of security.
The affinity of "In the Waiting Room" to Walt W hitman's "There Was a
Child Went Forth" has been pointed out by Helen Vendler. Like Bishop,
W hitman deals with a child’ s experience of metaphysical doubt and w ith
the realization of a connectedness to others.
There was a child went forth every day,
And the first object he look'd upon, that object he
became,
And that object became part of him for the day or a
certain part of the day,
Or for many years or stretching cycles of years.
The family usages, the language, the company, the
furniture, the yearning and swelling heart,
Affection that will not be gainsay'd, the sense of w hat is
real, the thought if after all it should prove unreal,
| The doubts of day-time and the doubts of night-time,
the curious whether and how,
! W hether that which appears so is so, or is it all flashes
j and specks? (Whitman 364-365)
i There is a resonance here of "every atom belonging to me as good belongs to
you" from the first section of "Song of Myself," W hitman’ s most powerful
statem ent on interconnectedness. But what is added in "There Was a Child
300
! Went Forth" is the doubt about "what is real." Like the Elizabeth of "In the
W aiting Room," Whitman's child is not ready to accept a connectedness
w ith others without questioning it and the reality of which it is a part.
Two short stories by Flannery O'Connor, "Revelation" and "A Temple of
the Holy Ghost," also show numerous similarities w ith "In the Waiting
Room."59 Like Bishop's poem, the second one of these two stories deals
w ith a girl who is frightened to discover her own sexuality. And
"Revelation," which was originally published in the Spring 1964 issue of the
Sewanee Review soon after O'Connor's death, has a doctor’ s waiting room
as its initial setting. It is likely that Bishop, who wrote an article in memory
of O'Connor for the October 8, 1964 issue of the New York Review of Books
and who has called some of O'Connor's stories "just about the best
American stories I have ever read" (quoted in Parker 163, n. 11), had
completed her memoir 'The Country Mouse" by the time she read
j O’ Connor's "Revelation," but had not yet written "In the W aiting Room."
Bishop's waiting room distinctly echoes that of O'Connor, whose story
begins,
The doctor's waiting ro o m , which was very small, was
almost full w hen the Turpins entered and Mrs. Turpin,
who was very large, made it look even smaller by her
presence. She stood looming at the head of the
. magazine table set in the center of it, a living
j dem onstration that the room was inadequate and
j ridiculous. Her little bright black eyes took in all the
patients as she sized up the seating situation. (O'Connor
| 488)
59 While Robert Dale Parker pointed out some of these similarities, more
remains to be said.
301
Mrs. Turpin displays the same condescension that the Elizabeth of "In the
j Waiting Room" displays toward her aunt: for example, she describes a man
in the waiting room as "a lean stringy old fellow with a rusty hand spread
out on each knee, whose eyes were closed as if he were asleep or dead or
pretending to be so as not to get up and offer her his seat" (O'Connor 488).
A nd like Bishop's speaker, Mrs. Turpin "always noticed people's feet"
(O'Connor 490).
Both characters are unsure of their own identity and classify the people
around themselves. But both come to realize that the distinctions between
people, social classes, and cultures are shaky. Bishop's girl asks herself if
there is something that makes us "all just one" and for Mrs. Turpin,
j "Usually by the time she had fallen asleep all the classes of people were
I
moiling and roiling around in her head, and she would dream they were all
crammed in together in a box car, being ridden off to be put in a gas oven"
(O'Connor 492). The conflux of cultures in Bishop's poem is an echo of
j O'Connor's convergence of Southern blacks and whites, expressed most
strongly in the conviction of Mrs. Turpin's husband, who thinks that
"White-faced niggers" will be the result of racial interm arriage (O'Connor
j 496), Both Bishop and O'Connor use a decisive occurrence to bring about
their characters' realization of the interconnectedness of people and the
1 accompanying doubts about their own identities: in Mrs. Turpin's case, a
I college girl who assaults her in the waiting room and calls her "an old w art
| hog" from hell leads Mrs. Turpin to question her self (O'Connor 500). She j
1 comes to ask herself and God, "How am I a hog and me both? How am I ;
saved and from hell too?" (O'Connor 506), similar to Bishop’ s speaker's [
302
question "Why should I be my aunt, / or me, or anyone?" But in the case of
Bishop's Elizabeth the impact of the experience is stronger, since she is at a
more impressionable age than Mrs. Turpin.
Robert Lowell also influenced "In the Waiting Room." Lorrie
Goldensohn quotes a letter from August 1967 in which Bishop asks Lowell
for help w ith her poem because she knows "there's something very wrong
and can't seem to tell what it is" (quoted in Goldensohn 230). In addition to
Lowell's direct comments Bishop is indebted to his "91 Revere Street," a
prose memoir about the preadolescent Lowell's struggle w ith gender roles
and with his masculinity that occurs when his father is ordered back on
duty at the Navy base on Christmas Eve and is therefore draw n between his
military duty and the allegiance to his wife. A "timid father and an
overbearing mother have left him w ith inadequate and distasteful gender
| models," Goldensohn comments (Goldensohn 231). In Lowell's memoir,
the boy tells his mother after she had said that it was "a comfort to have a
m an in the house" that he is "not a man . . . I am a boy" (Life Studies 24).
The son refuses to be forced into premature manhood. He believes that
being a boy is "a status to be held onto" (Life Studies 25), much like Bishop's
I
speaker who resists as well as she can her realization that there is a bond
between herself and others.
Like Bishop's poem, Lowell’ s memoir divides the world into an "inside"
I and an "outside" as well as into an imagined and a real world. Lowell
| remembers that "Outside, I heard real people singing carols, shuffling snow
i
off their shoes, opening and shutting doors" (Life Studies 24). This
im pression and the thought of a sentence from the Boston Evening
303
Transcript (which worries him) give way to a world in which "I imagined
Beacon Hill changed to the snow queen's palace, as vast as the north pole"
(Life Studies 24). But like the mind of Bishop's speaker at the end of "In the
W aiting Room," the young Lowell's returns to the harsh "outside":
"Outside on the streets of Beacon Hill, it was night, it was dismal, it was
raining" (Life Studies 24).
The second poem in Geography III continues exploring the preoccupation
w ith loss and the unwillingness to enter a new phase that had characterized
"In the Waiting Room." Like the first poem, "Crusoe in England" is an
autobiographically inspired dramatic monologue. Here Bishop does not go
back as far as her childhood, but instead she illustrates the situation in
which she finds herself in the early 1970s after returning to the United
States from Brazil. She projects her feelings onto a Robinson Crusoe, who
has traits of the Charles Darwin Bishop so admired. Like Defoe’ s Crusoe
after his return to England, Bishop is disillusioned to find that w hat she
may have considered her home turns out to be at least as foreign as her
"exile home" or Crusoe's island had been. The reality of the place to which
! Bishop or Crusoe return cannot match the longing they were feeling for this
’ place during their exile. But apart from being a personal recollection,
"Crusoe in England" is also a cultural recollection. Since Bishop draw s in
j this poem on Defoe, Melville’s 'The Encantadas," D arw in’ s The Voyage of
' the Beagle and his autobiography, Genesis, and W ordsworth, Bonnie
I
i Costello is justified in asserting that "This is a poem less about the poet’ s
ability to transform personal experience to mythic and epic dim ension than
304
about the nature of memory as both personal and cultural" (Costello,
Mastery 208).60
After their return Bishop and Crusoe are disillusioned. The poem's very
free verse and its uneven stanzas suggest that here Bishop is letting her
memories take their own course without being restrained by rhyme or
meter. Back in England, Bishop's Crusoe can no longer see a "new volcano"
erupting and "an island being bom ” but can only read about and remember
such events, re-creating them in his imagination. While he reads about the
nam ing of a newly formed and discovered volcanic island, Crusoe
complains, "my poor old island's still / un-rediscovered, un-renamable. /
None of the books has ever got it right." In these lines we can also hear
Elizabeth Bishop speaking about her home of two decades. While Brazil had
been discovered and named by its Portuguese colonizers, Bishop feels that
there is a need for Brazil to be discovered and named anew so that it can, in
all kinds of respects, be closer to and more equal to the United States and to
other parts of the Americas. Re-naming and re-discovering Brazil, a process
she tried to foster through her planned collection of stories and essays, Black
Beans and Diamonds, on which she was working while writing and
I
| revising "Crusoe in England," might have contributed to a feeling of
interconnectedness w ithin the Americas.
| 60 Lorrie Goldensohn has pointed out that Bishop may in part also have
| been influenced by Randall Jarrell's "The Island," which was "showing
! Bishop w hat to avoid: the very bravura of Jarrell's heroic Crusoe might
have pushed Bishop toward her flat, laconic, castaway, as a distinguishing
i gesture" (Goldensohn 249).
305
In fact, Bishop had already started working on this poem while living in
Brazil (Kalstone, Becoming 255). By presenting Brazil to her North
American audience in a new light, she must have been hoping to achieve
the feeling of being "all just one," which the girl of "In the Waiting Room”
was fearing. Because she saw herself as a cultural mediator and because she
cared about North America’ s image of Brazil, Bishop wanted to re-create her
"island," Brazil, in writing about her memories of it, or rather, the
memories of her emotional response to Brazil. Black Beans and Diamonds
i
w ould have been Bishop's answer to her complaint that "None of the
[other] books [on Brazil] has ever got it right."
Crusoe says that his "blood was full of" islands and his "brain / bred
islands." Similarly, Bishop's imagination, when she is back in the United
I States, creates a new and different Brazil from memoiy. Like Crusoe’ s, her
i
1 attitude is one of regretful reminiscence. Her Crusoe tries to remember his
island and his volcanoes objectively: symbolic of their being in tune w ith
J the course of time and of Crusoe and Bishop having spent entire years on
their respective "islands," Crusoe counts fifty-two volcanoes, which he
remembers as "miserable, small" and "dead as ash heaps." But this
I
' objectivism vanishes w hen he thinks of his relationship to these volcanoes:
they kept him company and therefore he personifies them. To him, the
I
volcanoes were like people, "naked, leaden, with their heads blown off."
i The emotional connection to his surroundings leads to Crusoe's shift
i
j tow ards subjectivism: "if they were the size / I thought volcanoes should be,
:
i then I had / become a giant." While he becomes a part of his island, he j
i remains a stranger to a degree: there is "a glittering hexagon of rollers /
306
closing and closing in, but never quite." What prevents the "total
immersion" of which Bishop had spoken in "At the Fishhouses" is his
longing for his former home.
Because of his homesickness, the island seems not that desirable to
Crusoe while he is living on it:
My island seemed to be
a sort of cloud-dump. All the hemisphere's
left-over clouds arrived and hung
above the craters— their parched throats
were hot to touch.
These are also metaphoric clouds preventing Crusoe’ s happiness since they
rem ind him of his home in another part of the hemisphere. And if we take
these to be in part Bishop's observations about her "island," Brazil, there is a
sense of Brazil's disadvantaged status within the hemisphere. Brazil is
j getting the clouds and problems which the rest of the hem isphere does not
I
want, but it remains "hot to touch," i.e. a vibrant place. At the time of
writing this poem, Bishop’ s memory and poetic recreation of Brazil is still
1 evolving, as is Crusoe’ s memory of his island. Reflecting on his foregoing
observations, he asks, "Was that why it rained so much? / And why
' sometimes the whole place hissed?"
For Crusoe, his island seems to have been a mysterious world that
overwhelm ed his senses:
The folds of lava, running out to sea,
would hiss. I'd turn. And then they’ d prove
to be more turtles.
This wondrous, new-found exile home is too much for Crusoe's senses to
deal with. Here we are reminded of the first stanza of "Brazil, January 1,
307
1502," where the speaker's senses are overwhelmed by "monster ferns,"
j "giant water lilies," and a variety of colors hitherto unknow n to her:
"purple, yellow, two yellows, pink, / rust red and greenish white."
However, for Crusoe his island remains, in spite of its richness in terms of
animals, plants, and geological features, "Beautiful, yes, but not much
company." These might have been Bishop's feelings about Brazil had she
not had Lota's company. And so Crusoe's question "Was there a moment
when I actually chose this?" is more Bishop’ s own, since she chose to live in
!
Brazil while Defoe's Crusoe was forced by a shipwreck to live on his island.
At the moment of speaking (for Crusoe) or writing (for Bishop) there is a
sense of loss. What has been lost is not only the geography of a place of the
past but also its animal world, "one kind of everything" like in the Garden
of Eden and on Noah's arc, and the contact with Friday, or, in Bishop's case,
with Lota. It does not seem coincidental that Bishop used Crusoe's same-sex
relationship to m irror her own. Crusoe and Bishop realize that their
j
I emotional attachment to another person enabled them to consider their
I
islands a home. Home, they come to understand, is determ ined by one's
j internal responses more than by the external situation to which one
! responds.6 1
i 61 Helen Vendler has convincingly argued that "Crusoe in England"
exposes the imperfection of the domestication of nature so long as love is
I missing. Crusoe's attempts at domesticating his island (making a flute,
I distilling home brew, making a dye out of berries) bring him some pleasure
1 but only after Friday’ s arrival and in company can he truly enjoy
domesticity. "The ultimate locus of domestication," writes Vendler, "is the
, heart, which, once cultivated, retains its 'living soul’ forever" (Vendler
' 107).
308
Since the island came to be a home for Crusoe by virtue of his emotional
attachments, its landscape is rendered through images of domesticity like
t
"hissing teakettles" and "glass chimneys." These images originate in
Crusoe's domestic situation at the moment of speaking as well as in his
ambivalent feelings while on the island. There he was, on the one hand,
trying to think of the island as a home and therefore connecting it in his
m ind to the kind of home he had known before while, on the other hand,
he was dream ing of the domestic amenities he was missing: "(And I'd have
given years, or taken a few, / for any sort of kettle, of course.)" As he has
internalized the concept of home, Bishop's Crusoe recollects not so much
the geography or vegetation of his island as he does his past reactions to it.
"I often gave way to self-pity," he says, but adds, in a problematization of the
notion of home,
With my legs dangling down familiarly
over a crater's edge, I told myself
"Pity should begin at home." So the more
pity I felt, the more I felt at home.
The pose of a child with "legs dangling down," reminiscent of the girl of "In
the Waiting Room" who is sitting on a chair that is too high for her, evokes
for Bishop simultaneously a sense of pity and a sense of home: she pities
herself for a not very happy childhood but realizes that "home" need not be
a happy place. It is no less home if it is linked to sorrow. For Crusoe, the
island is both a home and a place of sorrowful memories, just as Nova
Scotia, Massachusetts, and Brazil are for Bishop. When he christens a
309
i volcano "Mont d'Espoir or Mount Despair," Crusoe's ambivalence is
further illustrated and is extended into the area of verbal representation.62
The free play of his imagination that allows him to play such w ord games
frightens Crusoe while he is on the island. He dreams of other islands close
to his own:
. . . I'd have
nightm ares of other islands
stretching away from mine, infinities
of islands, islands spawning islands,
like frogs' eggs turning into polliwogs
of islands, knowing that I had to live
on each and every one, eventually,
for ages, registering their flora,
their fauna, their geography.
Here Bishop adds to the historian and to the map-maker of "The Map" the
botanist, cataloguing, like Charles Darwin, the flora, fauna and animal life
J 62 This ambivalence extends into an uncertainty about w hat is one's own
1 w orld and w hat is the "other" world. Jeredith M errin has pointed out that
j Bishop
i evokes the uneasy relationship between self and other,
delineating this familiar conflict in complicated terms.
In one way, the objective world is Crusoe's island on
which he is a sort of Adam, ascribing meanings and
i names. In another way, the volcanic island itself
I (meager and sustaining, boring and interesting,
resented and cherished) becomes the inner, subjective
world of the "single hum an soul," and England, to
which Crusoe returns, becomes the other world, out
there. (Merrin 55)
i But ambivalence is not limited to the values ascribed to a place. Susan
I McCabe's explication of the poem shows that its ambivalence goes hand in
I hand w ith a variety of layered meanings. McCabe's reading uncovers, for
! example, "an unobtrusive, but nevertheless potent, reference to women
1 writers and in particular to Mary W ordsworth as she is silenced and made
j unnam eable by the tradition" (McCabe 57).
310
of newly discovered regions, as well as the geographer. Bishop, too, must
i
| have seen herself in Brazil as cataloguing impressions of that world for
herself and for her North American audience. But like Crusoe, she is afraid
that she m ight have set herself an overwhelming task. The passage also
reveals a kind of "fecundity phobia." Bishop senses that m ultiple selves and
end in chaos and that the plurality of connectedness can be overwhelming.
While on the island, Crusoe resists thinking of it as home. What he
remembers best about living on the island is his longing for England while
being away from it. He complains, "The books / I’ d read were full of
blanks," since he can only remember parts of his readings. This situation,
again, mirrors Bishop's frequent complaints in her correspondence while
she was living in Brazil. She, too, tried to refer to books or poems she had
read but did not have with her and was frustrated by the blanks in her
memory of these texts. Crusoe is unable to recite an anachronistic passage
from W ordsworth's "I wandered lonely as a cloud." What he recalls is
"They flash upon that inward eye, / which is the bliss...' The bliss of what?"
"Solitude," the w ord he cannot remember, is not a bliss for Bishop's Crusoe.
In his solitude he is longing for the home from which he was taken: "I'd
i
j shut my eyes and think about a tree, / an oak, say, with real shade,
somewhere." At another time, he imagines seeing "beds of irises" in the
; distance. Like in "Santarem," northern vegetation comes to the speaker’ s
m ind while contemplating an exotic setting and thus complicates the
I
311
notion of home by making North and South flow together in the speaker's
| thoughts.63
But in order for the exotic setting to take on dimensions of "home" an
"other" is needed:
Just when I thought I couldn't stand it
another minute longer, Friday came.
(Accounts of that have everything all wrong.)
Friday was nice.
Friday was nice, and we were friends.
If only he had been a woman!
I wanted to propagate my kind,
and so did he, I think, poor boy.
Here Bishop is also speaking of her own sexual preference. She does not feel
understood by the world at large: "Accounts of that have everything all
wrong," she proclaims. When David Kalstone asked Bishop if there could
not be more about Friday in this poem, she told him, "Oh, there used to be—
1 lots more!" (Kalstone, Becoming 257). Since Bishop had already started
I working on "Crusoe in England" while living in Brazil, the preceding
statement clearly seems to indicate the Friday’ s affinity to Lota.
Furtherm ore, Crusoe's wish for children might also be Bishop's, who, in
j her correspondence, wrote very fondly of the children in Lota’ s extended
family and of the boy with whom and with whose mother she lived in San
63 Bonnie Costello has written that Bishop makes the island "the site of
noble savagery, the emotional equivalent of childhood wholeness"
; (Costello, Mastery 206). In this way, Bishop further aligns England and
Crusoe's island (and, by extension, the United States and Brazil) by not
, lim iting nobility to only one of these places.
Francisco.64 Bishop ends her poem on a note remembering the now
deceased Friday because his memory is so much a part of Crusoe's memory
of his island, as Lota’ s memory is so important for Bishop's retrospective
evaluation of Brazil. Crusoe is implicitly responsible for Friday's death by
exposing him to civilization and its diseases like the measles that kill him.
H er character's feeling of guilt might in part be Bishop’ s attem pt to come to
terms w ith Lota's suicide in New York City, where she had followed Bishop.
After his return to England Crusoe tries to transfer his feelings of home
for the island to the place where he now is. While he is creating a home
m ade image of his island, Crusoe remembers his joy in making "home
brew" and playing his "home-made flute," because now, in the act of verbal
re-creation, he feels that same joy. However, the knife which he also made
on the island illustrates w hat will happen to home-made objects and to the
idea of home in civilization. On the island, the knife "reeked of meaning,
like a crucifix. It lived," but now it is lying on Crusoe’ s table, unused. "The
living soul has dribbled away" from it. Knife and flute, shoes and parasol
j will end up in the "local museum."
j "Home-made, home-made! But aren’ t we all?" asks Bishop, somewhat
! reminiscent of Anne Bradstreet, who, in "The A uthor to H er Book," writes
I
affectionately of her home-made creation, "In better dress to trim thee was
my mind, / But nought save homespun cloth i' th' house I find" (Bradstreet
j 64 Goldensohn recounts as further proofs of Bishop’ s love of children that
i in 1961 Bishop passed a book on painless childbirth on to a pregnant relative
! and that while she was living in San Francisco, Bishop once gave an Easter
egg dyeing party for a group of children.
313
62). Bishop's statement comes in defense of her technique of re-creating a
place of her past in conjunction with her present domestic surroundings
and as a hint at the similarities which, as she writes in "In the Waiting
Room," "made us all just one." Because of these similarities Bishop would
like her audience to share the "deep affection" which Crusoe felt for "the
smallest of my island industries" and which she is feeling for Brazil. As she
argues, in a broader sense, for the similarity of Brazil and the United States,
Bishop diminishes the differences between the place she recreates and the
place in which she re-creates. As Bonnie Costello has pointed out, Bishop
challenges time and space as means of self-location, for in "Crusoe in
England," 'Tim e and space become figuratively intertwined in the poem's
theme of exile" (Costello, Mastery 201). Like Bishop, her Crusoe is unsure
about where to feel at home: "Now I live here, another island, / that doesn't
seem like one, but who decides," he says. Following her Crusoe's example,
i
| Elizabeth Bishop, instead of allowing the place of her past to be forgotten in
a museum, has decided to re-create it in living, home-made images in order
to bring the exotic (that has become home) home to the N orth and to her
: audience in the North. Robert Dale Parker’ s assertion that "'Crusoe in
i
; England' looks back only at the past" is therefore misguided (Parker 129).
Bishop said in an interview that what got her poem started was her
I rereading of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, which made her realize "how really
aw ful” the book was (Starbuck 319). She wanted to "re-see" Crusoe "with all
that [Christianity] left out," Bishop explains (Starbuck 319). Her Crusoe does
1 not have the Christian faith or the Enlightenment confidence in reason that
reassure Defoe's character. The setting in which Bishop puts him is a
314
composite of a variety of places she experienced. When writing the poem,
she was "remembering a visit to Aruba [in the Antilles, north of the
Venezuelan coast] . . . I took a trip across the island and it's true that there
are small volcanoes all over the place" (Starbuck 319). But her Crusoe's
island, she says, is "a mixture of several islands" (Starbuck 317). And the
j blue snail shells are taken from her experience "in the Ten Thousand
islands in Florida," as are the waterspouts (Starbuck 317). Although she does
! not mention them explicitly in the interview, thoughts of Brazil and Lota
m ust also have entered Bishop's creations.
The disappointment about being back in a place one has formerly
considered home also speaks out of "Night City," the poem that follows
"Crusoe in England" in Geography IT T . Bishop adds after the poem's title
that these are observations "From the plane." The poem takes us back to the
kind of imagination Crusoe feared on his island. The cityscape over which
the speaker is flying is mysterious and surreal. Although the poem is more
structured in terms of form than "Crusoe in England" (with ten stanzas of
four mostly unrhym ed lines each that have between two and four stresses),
it is semantically less straightforward.
No foot could endure it,
shoes are too thin.
Broken glass, broken bottles,
heaps of them burn.
I
Over those fires
I no one could walk:
I those flaring acids
I and variegated bloods.
The city burns tears.
A gathered lake
! of aquam arine
begins to smoke.
The city burns guilt.
— For guilt-disposal
the central heat
m ust be this intense.
The combination of formal regularity and irregularity mirrors the poem's
combination of the real and the surreal. The fantastic quality of this
description rem inds one of the surreal "The Weed" or "The Man-Moth" as
well as of magical occurrences like that of the mother's cry of "In the
Village," which is hanging in the air and sounding anew w hen the
lightning rod is flicked. Is this Bishop’ s North American equivalent of the
mysterious world she had presented in "The Riverman"? If so, N orth
America m ust have seemed oppressive and grotesque to Bishop after her
long sojourn in Brazil.
The fire, which is mentioned in each of the four initial stanzas of "Night
City," is presented as a force of both destruction and purification. Like the
purgatorial fire, it "burns guilt." This ambivalence will rem ain throughout
the poem. The speaker seems to imagine a scene of utter destruction,
possibly projecting onto the cityscape her own feelings about returning. In
I
this manner, the poem stands in striking contrast to "Arrival at Santos."
; Although there was a similar projection of the speaker’ s feelings onto the
j setting in the earlier poem, those had been positive expectations of "a
! different world." The rhyme of "Arrival at Santos" had helped establish a
i
pleasant scene and mindset, whereas the irregularities of "Night City"
316
(coupled with the far less positive title) prepare the desolate atmosphere of
that poem.
While "Crusoe in England" and "Night City" deal w ith the arrival after a
journey, "The Moose" describes the beginning of a bus trip from Great
Village, Nova Scotia to Boston. Like in "In the Waiting Room," there is in
"The Moose" an intrusion of the strange into the familiar, w hen the bus
stops for a moose, which is referred to as "grand, otherworldly." Much has
been written on this poem, but Robert Dale Parker’ s designation of "The
Moose" as "a kind of before-the-fact elegy for herself" and its likening to
W hitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" is doubtful
(Parker 125).
Bishop told an interviewer that the occurrence narrated in this poem
really happened on a bus trip she took back to Boston after visiting her aunt,
Grace Bulmer Bowers, to whom the poem is dedicated. Bishop explained,
It was all true. The bus trip took place before I went to
Brazil. I went up to visit my aunt. Actually, I was on the
wrong bus. I went to the right place but it wasn't the
express I was supposed to get. It went roundabout and it
was all exactly the way I described it... I wanted to
finish [the poem] because I liked it but I could never
| seem to get the middle part, to get from one place to the
other. (Spires 62)
David Kalstone, Bonnie Costello, and Lorrie Goldensohn have traced the
!
i actual occurrence back to 1946, when Bishop wrote about the bus journey in
i
j a letter to M arianne Moore. Lorrie Goldensohn's history of the poem ’ s
i
i creation and of the revisions that went into it during the twenty-six years it
I
1 took Bishop to complete it reveals that in the poem's various manuscripts,
: "At least half the central verbs and qualifiers have been placed and re-placed
many times" (Goldensohn 253). By the end of 1956, Bishop m ust have felt
confident that the poem would soon be finished and published because on
December 2, 1956, she writes in her letter to her aunt Grace Bulmer, "I’ ve
w ritten a long poem about N.S. - it's dedicated to you - when it's published
I'll send a copy."
While early drafts of the poem had deliberate rhyme pairs, the final
version contains rhymes scattered unsystematically over all except five of
the poem's twenty-eight six-line stanzas. The rhyme is in accordance with
the homely setting, the inconsistency of it reflects the departure from this
setting and the bum py bus ride. Most verses have three stresses that do not
follow a distinct meter. This rhythm further recreates the bus journey with
its recurrences as well as its unevenness.
Like "Arrival at Santos," the description of "The Moose" starts at the
exterior and gradually moves to the speaker’ s interior. The exterior setting
is reminiscent of "Cape Breton," but the observer of "The Moose" is less
distant from her observations. The poem's first sentence, establishing the
soothing Canadian setting, rims over six stanzas. It creates the homely,
small-town flavor of Great Village, Nova Scotia (as Bishop remembered it
! while living in Brazil and the United States, much like she remembered the
settings of the poems from the "Elsewhere" section of Questions of Travel
while w riting those poems in Brazil). The repeated strophic enjambement
, contributes to the setting’ s atmosphere of wholeness:
! From narrow provinces
of fish and bread and tea,
home of the long tides
where the bay leaves the sea
twice a day and takes
318
the herrings long rides,
where if the river
enters or retreats
in a wall of brown foam
depends on if it meets
the bay coming in,
the bay not at home;
The personification of the bay suggests the speaker's emotional attachment
to the setting and the description of these "provinces" as "of fish and bread"
gives them a religious quality. In addition, "narrow" and "tea" evoke a
small-town atmosphere where one can feel at home and where there is
little contact w ith the outside world. The harmonious interplay of tide and
river further contributes to the soothing quality of this setting. But the
"neat, clapboard churches, / bleached, ridged as clamshells" contain a
suggestion of the speaker seeing this scenery with the eyes of an outsider
who does not live there; these are the impressions of "a lone traveller," as
she calls herself. Here "sometimes the sun sets / facing a red sea, / and
others, veins the flats' / lavender, rich m ud / in burning rivulets." These
"burning rivulets" are not at all like the "rivulets of fire" of "In the Waiting
’ Room." In that poem the erupting lava that causes the "rivulets of fire"
' frightens the speaker, whereas in "The Moose," the "burning rivulets" are
part of the peaceful image of the setting sun "facing a red sea."
The later description of the bus' windshield as "pink" points to the
. subjectiveness of the setting s description, which is colored, as it usually is
w ith Bishop, by the beholder's emotional responses. This subjectivity is j
accompanied by Bishop's playfulness, which has "a collie supervis[ing]” the ;
i
leave taking. When the bus starts its journey, "the fog / shifting, salty, thin,
319
/ comes closing in." Stressed through the rhyme, the fog prepares the reader
for the enclosure of the bus as well as for the almost magical event that is
waiting to happen. So do the two alliterations (its crystals "slide and settle /
in the white hens' feathers, / in gray glazed cabbages"). While the "s"
alliteration recreates the dog’ s quiet approach, the "g" alliteration m ight be
imitating the hens’ clucking. This fog is analogous to the mist of "Cape
Breton," but whereas the earlier poem loses its direction in the mist, which
enables a free play of the imagination, the latter comes back out of the mist
to focus on the animal that interrupts the journey.
In the fog, observations on what is happening inside the bus and on the
outside merge. The "Grandparents' voices" in the back of the bus are
"talking, in Eternity." These are also the voices of Bishop’ s own
grandparents in Great Village of whom she is reminded by the scene. In this
I
(dream-like atmosphere, place becomes less im portant than time. The sleepy
rhythm of the journey and the dreamy state in which it puts the speaker
help release childhood memories of Bishop's own the grandparents. As
Robert Dale Parker has written, Bishop now "concentrates less on w hat
I shows immediately around her, and more on what she can see in retrospect,
jwhat she can see— as if for the first time— perhaps because it's gone. The past
is thus no longer passed; it transforms to the Eternal, with a capital E"
(Parker 123). The overheard conversations contain a reference to a m an
called Amos: "finally the family had / to put him away." This rem ark has a
'ring of Bishop's own mother Gertrude to it, who was reluctantly committed
to a mental institution by her parents. Bishop thus projects her own family
320
memories of Nova Scotia onto the scene and into the overheard
conversations.
These conversations are characterized by
"Yes..." that peculiar
affirmative, "yes..."
A sharp, indraw n breath,
half groan, half acceptance,
that means "Life’ s like that.
We know it (also death)."
This indraw n "yes," on which Bishop also commented elsewhere, expresses
the people's sense of security.65 Even the speaker, while she appears to
distance herself from the apparent certainty of her fellow-travelers, shares
in their sense of peaceful serenity. Now she is free to remember scenes from
her childhood that are linked to the surroundings and atmosphere in which
she finds herself:
Talking the way they talked
in the old featherbed,
peacefully, on and on,
dim lamplight in the hall,
dow n in the kitchen, the dog
65 As Lorrie Goldensohn points out, Bishop wrote about the indraw n "yes"
! in her 1940s Sable Island piece, "The Deadly Sandpile”:
Anyone familiar with the accent of Nova Scotia will
know what I mean when I refer to the Indraw n Yes. In
all their conversations Nova Scotians of all ages, even
i children, make use of it. It consists of, when one is told
a fact— anything not necessarily tragic but not of a
dow nright comical nature,--"yes," or "yeah," while
j draw ing in the breath at the same moment. It expresses
i both commiseration & acceptance of the worst, (quoted
in Goldensohn 258)
But this "Hyeah" is more commonly used as a confirmation that w hat has
been said is inevitably and unsurprisingly correct.
321
tucked in her shawl.
Now, it's all right now
even to fall asleep
just as on all those nights.
This serenity and the feeling of safety make it possible to forget about a need
for protection.
But then this peacefulness is disrupted by a moose that "has come out of
/ the impenetrable wood / and stands there, looms, rather, / in the m iddle
of the road." Although the forest had seemed "impenetrable," the fog has
facilitated the onlooker's entry into it. By virtue of being related to home
and civilization, the moose is integrated into the peaceful atmosphere:
Towering, anterless,
high as a church,
homely as a house
(or, safe as houses).
Just as Brazil m ust at times have been for Bishop, the moose is "grand,
otherworldly. / Why, why do we feel (we all feel) this sweet / sensation of
joy?" The animal has become part of the travelers’ world and is therefore
jgreeted w ith a joy that is rooted in the fascination of the exotic and in the
j entrance of the exotic into the familiar. A similar joy had characterized the
|speaker's relation to cows at the end of Bishop’ s translation of Vinicius de
Moraes' "Sonnet of Intimacy," where "Accompanied by a look not
unmalicious, / All of us, animals, unemotionally / Partake together of a
I
Ipleasant piss." Civilization and nature have met harmoniously in "The
Moose" and the result of their meeting is "a dim / smell of moose, an acrid
322
/ smell of gasoline."66 This harmonious union of the familiar and the
exotic m ust have been a strong concern of Bishop's while revising her
poem, since, as she said in an interview, she started out w ith the first two or
three stanzas and the last one, but it took her years to find a way of
connecting them (Spires 62).67 Like the skunk of Lowell’ s "Skunk Hour,"
Bishop's moose is not afraid of civilization; rather, it blends in w ith it.
Speaker and audience, however, are brought back to civilization through
the smell of gasoline.
In the figure of the moose Bishop has created a vehicle for her desire to
bring the exotic home to her audience. Because of its otherworldliness, the
moose is a synecdoche for the exotic, as is Brazil in other poems. It also
represents the primal, which is reminiscent of the excitement as well as the
threat of the volcano. But since the moose appears in a Nova Scotian
setting, it also illustrates that the exotic need not be spatially remote. And no
66 Bonnie Costello, who defines "excursive vision in Bishop's poetry as a
gradual and tentative constructing of reality from the im m ediate material of
.observation," has argued that "In ’ The Moose' and 'The End of March'
jBishop's excursive vision ceases to be a form of restraint against
[imagination (against the imposition of desires upon the experiential world)
and instead becomes a satisfying integration of imagination w ith experience,
j. . . [As these poems] yield to flux they discover profound satisfaction in
imaginative responses to the elemental world" (Costello, M astery 160).
Since the speaker of "The Moose" opens up her imagination to the animal,
"Excursive vision . . . replaces the mastering structures of domestic vision.
.But excursive vision is rewarded, not with epiphany but w ith a moment of
coalescence that no other structure could provide" (Costello, M astery 161).
I
,67 The moose is also a prim al and mythic object of awe and w onder in cave
paintings. Part of Bishop's problem with the poem's m iddle section may
therefore have been the difficulty of getting from the Paleolithic Age to the 1
tw entieth century. !
323
matter if it is spatially remote or if it appears right in our midst, the exotic,
according to Bishop, should not be emotionally remote. This is why she
emphasizes the joy that results when the exotic is allowed to be received by
the familiar. Implications of this argument for Bishop's desire to bring the
exoticism of other parts of the Americas home to her N orth American
audience need not be spelled out.
As she had done with the exoticism of Brazil in the poems of Questions
of Travel. Bishop allows the exotic moose to come close to her and her
readers by presenting it with immediacy rather than distance. As Robert
Dale Parker has pointed out, Marianne Moore's image of an otherworldly
animal in "Rigorists,"~in her case a reindeer— is a much more distanced one
since the observations are being put in the m outh of "a friend w ho’ d been
in Lapland”:
"One looked at us
w ith its firm face part brown, part white— a queen
of alpine flowers. Santa Claus’ reindeer, seen
at last, had gray-
brown fur, with a neck like edelweiss or
lion's foot— leontopodium more
exactly." (Moore, Poetry 96)
i
In this description the focus seems to be more on the speaker (e.g. on his or
her knowledge of botany) than on the animal. But the final line of Moore's
|poem, which speaks of reading a "reprieve . . . in the reindeer's face," comes
I closer to the connection between animal and speaker or between nature and
civilization that characterizes "The Moose."
324
Another poem from Geography III in which Bishop remembers Nova
Scotia is "Poem." Like "In the Waiting Room," "Crusoe in England," "The
Moose," "One Art," and "The End of March," this poem is characterized by a
conflux. Some of the main currents that flow together in "Poem" are art and
life, memory and present, and Bishop's and her uncle's image of Great
Village. The poem's first two lines present the painting which triggers this
poem as being "About the size of an old-style dollar bill, / American or
Canadian." To a lesser degree, the United States and Canada also flow
together in this poem, partly through their currency, partly through the poet
herself who remembers Nova Scotia while she is writing in Massachusetts.
The immediacy of the workings of the speaker's (and the poet's) memory
that is characteristic of a number of poems in Geography III also appears in
"Poem." Brackets, various question marks, and an exclamation m ark
suggest that we are witnessing the process of recollection.
Painting was one of Bishop's hobbies and she even told Elizabeth Spires,
"I'd like to be a painter most, I think" (Spires 79). She also mentioned to
Ashley Brown, "I think I'm more visual than most poets. . . . All my life
I've been interested in painting. Some of my relatives painted. As a child I
was dragged round the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and Mrs. Gardner's
M useum and the Fogg. I'd love to be a painter” (Brown 296). Bishop was
clearly attracted to painting as a less mediated way of experiencing the
i
: paradox of connection and separation.
At first, her speaker approaches the painting from the exterior, describing
1 it and guessing what it depicts: "It must be Nova Scotia; only there / does j
one see gabled wooden houses / painted that awful shade of brown." The
325
description of the colors in this painting remind the reader of the colorful
and color-filled representation at the beginning of "Brazil, January 1, 1502."
In the earlier poem, the picture that the poet's w ords paint of the Brazilian
scenery was "fresh as if just finished / and taken off the frame." In "Poem,"
there is a similar mingling of the representation, of w hat is being
represented, and of the onlooker’ s reaction: while describing the various
elements of the painting, the speaker inserts, "The air is fresh and cold; cold
early spring." While in the earlier poem the mingling originated in the
reality that is being represented, in the later one it originates in the
representation.
After the first stanza has generally introduced the painting and the
second stanza has described it, the third stanza contains the onlooker's
reaction to it. It becomes clear that the painting is valued for its pow er to
evoke memory charged w ith emotion rather than for any kind of aesthetic
! value. In fact, the poem's irregular iambic pentameter mirrors the
painting's aesthetic imperfections. As we approach the speaker’ s reaction,
an "I" names and reveals itself:
i Heavens, I recognize the place, I know it!
I It’ s behind— I can almost remember the farmer's name.
His barn backed on that meadow. There it is,
titanium white, one dab. The hint of steeple,
filaments of brush-hairs, barely there,
m ust be the Presbyterian church.
j W ould that be Miss Gillespie’ s house?
! Those particular geese and cows 1
I are naturally before my time.
i
Although still filled w ith uncertainties, the speaker now recollects details of i
1 i
the place she knew in her childhood, which connect her to the painter, her j
i
i _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ [
326
great-uncle George. The recollection of the setting triggers, in the following
stanza, the recollection of the conversation that took place w hen she was
given the painting. The sketch's spontaneity, its having been "done in an
hour," is crucial to Bishop's appreciation of it. It allows the spontaneity
created by the ensuing pieces of conversation and is congruent w ith the
speaker's spontaneous reactions to the sketch.
Because she has opened herself up to her uncensored, spontaneous
reactions, the speaker now recognizes the connection which the painting is
establishing between her and her great-uncle through their shared
knowledge of the depicted place:
I never knew him. We both knew this place,
apparently, this literal small backwater,
looked at it long enough to memorize it,
our years apart. How strange. And it's still loved,
or its memory is (it must have changed a lot).
O ur visions coincided--"visions" is
too serious a w ord— our looks, two looks:
art "copying from life" and life itself,
life and the memory of it so compressed
they've turned into each other. Which is which?
The speaker is not sure if she still loves "this place" or rather "its memory,"
since the two merge through artful representation, just like her and her
i
f
! great-uncle's "visions coincided." Her memory of the place merges w ith her
; great-uncle's. As Bonnie Costello has written, with "life and the memory of
i
i it" "all temporal priority is erased in spatial convergence" (Costello, M astery
!
232). But convergence goes further: since the temporal and spatial confluxes
are initiated by representation, art and life merge as well because of teh
feelings to which they are connected.
This kind of conflux also applies to Bishop’ s relationship to Brazil. In
that respect, too, the actual place and her memory of it are both "still loved."
They converge through Bishop’ s poetic representations of Brazil. A nd since
these representations are connected to the United States, where some of
them are being created, there is also a kind of conflux of the Americas in
them. Lorrie Goldensohn's statement that, as illustrated in "Poem," for
Bishop "memory fused with vision not only transfigures, but offers us the
closest alternative to resurrection that we have" also applies to this larger
context, but only if "vision" is taken to be Orphic or ecstatic rather than
purely physical (Goldensohn 260).
Bishop especially pursues the problematization and internalization of
home via retrospect and the reconciliation with the losses or unfulfilled
wishes that have led to a reconciliation w ith a more m odest spiritual notion
1 of home in "Poem," "Crusoe in England," and "One Art." "The End of
i March" shows similar characteristics. As Jeredith Merrin has written, this
poem "makes us see ’ home’ as an imaginative construct composed of
double and conflicted desires: the wish to be part of things and the yearning
to be apart from them; the urge to create and the need to rest" (Merrin 62).
This effect is achieved through a speaker who is walking along the beach in
I
Duxbury, Massachusetts while thinking about retiring in a shack she spots
in the distance but never reaches. In this process, the poem moves from its
i
; initial "we" to "I" and then back to "we." This movement follows her from
I being a communal person to her thoughts about retiring in solitude and
finally back to realizing, like the Elizabeth of "In the Waiting Room," that
she will not or cannot leave the community of which she is a part.
328
i The poem's mood is one of longing, as the speaker is looking for a home.
H er mentioning of "Canada geese" in the poem's first stanza is symptomatic
of Bishop's connection of the concept of home w ith her early childhood in
Nova Scotia. As usual, the described scene becomes a subjective, inner
landscape because it is colored by the onlooker's thoughts about it. For
example, the speaker wonders at "dogprints (so big / they were more like
lion-prints)" and she calls a snarl of wet white string "a sodden ghost." The
poem's setting is "withdrawn as far as possible, / indrawn." Its sense of
enchantm ent is further stressed through a number of unanswered
questions and in this enchanted setting originate the speaker’ s desires for a
hom e:
I wanted to get as far as my proto-dream house,
my crypto-dream-house, that crooked box
set up on pilings, shingled green,
a sort of artichoke of a house, but greener
(boiled with bicarbonate of soda?),
] protected from spring tides by a palisade
of— are they railroad ties?
(Many things about this place are dubious).
The parentheses and questions reveal the speaker's uncertainty and
curiosity about this place. She is looking for a home and at the same time is
distancing herself from it. She sees not her dream house but her "proto
dream-house," which means that she considers this dilapidated shack both a
: first or original dream house but also a primitive one. Since this is also a
I
"crypto-dream-house," she has to decipher it with the help of questions. But
329
those questions rem ain unanswered; the place remains "dubious."68 Home
images like a "crooked box" and a boiled "artichoke” are used to describe
this shack and reinforce its potential to serve as a home. The speaker says,
"I’ d like to retire there and do nothing. / or nothing much, forever, in two
bare rooms." In this way, the "proto-dream-house" becomes m uch like
Edw in Boomer's house of 'The Sea & Its Shore" "a shelter, but not for
living in, for thinking in" (Prose 172). There is also a reminiscence of
Prospero's epilogue in The Tempest here.
The "End" from the poem's title signifies an end of travel and activity in
favor of a home. Therefore there is a further resonance here of Bishop's
Crusoe. Analogous to the retirement from active life contemplated in "The
End of March," Bishop's Crusoe, if we take his volcanic islands as symbols
of creative power, has retired from creative activities:
My blood was full of them; my brain
bred islands. But that archipelago
has petered out. I'm old.
I
The speaker of "Then End of March" all but forgets about the world around
her and instead reinvents the scenery filled with magic and the potential to
j serve as a dream home. As Bonnie Costello has put it, in "The End of
I
68 The shack's movement from "proto" to "crypto" to "dubious," Lorrie j
Goldensohn has pointed out, is a "common dilemma" of the protagonists of
i Geography III:
1 Just as the little girl in the waiting room is yanked back
into history, and Crusoe is made to face England, and
the master loser practices the termination of her one
; art, writing, the hiker in "The End of March" seems
compelled to yield up her fondness for "dubious" and ,
"impossible" dream houses. (Goldensohn 262) !
330
; March" Bishop's concept of home "presents a representational ideal in
J which the facts of the world no longer intrude at all. Autonomy and
completeness are achieved by closing the world out" (Costello, M astery 168).
After seeing the shack and then contemplating the possibility of retiring
there, the speaker imagines w hat her life would be like in this "proto
dream-house." Her projections are interspersed with new observation, but
she concludes that such a retirement would be "perfect! But— impossible."
This conclusion as well as the fact that the speaker never reaches the shack
open up the way for a return from the contemplation of retirem ent in
solitude to a renewed sense of herself as part of a "we" community. Faced
w ith some of the same problems, Jane Addams had built H ull House as a
substitute for her mother’ s body. But in Bishop's case, on the "way back,"
the speaker is unable to concentrate on the reality in front of her. Like the
i
; memory of Brazil for Bishop, the memory of this house is lingering for her
I
j speaker, who retains a sense of her wonder at the enchanted scene, thinking
of a "lion sun" that is reminiscent of the "Indian Princess" of "Florida" and
of Wallace Stevens’ 'The Sun This March," where the "winter's air"
"Brings voices as of lions coming down" (Stevens 134). Bishop’ s is
— a sun who'd walked the beach the last low tide,
making those big, majestic paw-prints,
who perhaps had batted a kite out of the sky to play with.
j The animation and possible personification of the sun express a continuing
I
j sense of wonder. Since she has decided that her "proto-dream-ho use" is
i
! unachievable, the speaker creates another fiction out of some of the
i
ingredients of the earlier one. The desire to internalize home and the
realization that external pressures also need to be considered compete and j
331
result in the final escapism. It does not seem implausible that this
competition between the desire for a magical dream world and the reality in
which she found herself reflects Elizabeth Bishop’ s own feelings after her
return to the United States. The memory of Brazilian exoticism or magic
m ust have remained at odds with her U.S. reality.
A similar competition between escaping into an imagined world (that is
inspired by the scene one contemplates) and realizing that such an escape
w ould be "perfect! But— impossible" characterizes "Five Flights U p/' the last
poem in Geography III. This poem illustrates the regret about being unable
to forget one's burdening past the way animals can. Bishop said in an
interview that this "must be an experience that everybody's h ad ” (Starbuck
317). The speaker, who is probably "Five Flights Up," observes a scene
nearby:
Still dark.
j The unknow n bird sits on his usual branch.
• The little dog next door barks in his sleep
inquiringly, just once.
Perhaps in his sleep, too, the bird inquires
once or twice, quavering,
j Questions— if that is what they are—
' answered directly, simply,
by day itself.
The poem's darkness is symbolic of its uncertainty: it is not completely clear
(also not to the speaker, as evidenced by an expression like "if that is what
; they are") what is going on. The experience of the bird and dog is a
‘ universal one: they are asking questions about their daily lives, which are
I then "answered directly, simply, / by day itself."
\
i
332
In the second of four unequal stanzas, the bird and dog's inquisitive
mood becomes more encompassing: now even the morning is
"ponderous." At the same time, the morning has a certain pow er of
transformation: "gray light streaking each bare branch, / each single twig,
along one side, / making another tree, of glassy veins..." The tree's "glassy
veins" also domesticate and personify the setting and with it the general
inquisitiveness. These "glassy veins" may have been inspired by Robert
Frost's "Birches." Frost, too, domesticates his birches and connects them to
people:
When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy's been swinging them.
But swinging doesn’ t bend them down to stay
As ice storms do.
Soon the sun's warm th makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow crust—
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
(Frost 121)
i
Bishop's poem is less personal (her "I" does not enter the poem until its last
line) and less straightforward that Frost's, but both seek for answers to life in
i
| everyday, natural surroundings.
Frost's boy, who is in communion with nature as "a swinger of birches,"
i may have been an example for Bishop's bird and dog, who are part of
nature, and her speaker, who would like to share their ability to live only in
| the present and to find answers in their surroundings. Bishop's animals
; . . . know everything is answered,
all taken care of,
| no need to ask again.
333
--Yesterday brought to today so lightly!
(A yesterday I find almost impossible to lift.)
The exclamation m ark reinforces the speaker's envy. This sentiment is
juxtaposed with her sadness, that rings out in the last lines' parenthesis.
Here the speaker contrasts herself with the dog and the bird: while they can
find simple answers in nature, she finds it hard to cope w ith her burdening
past. Similar to Frost's speaker, who concludes that "One could do worse
than be a swinger of birches," Bishop's indirectly admits her envy of the
scene's forgetfulness and nonchanlance. But Jeredith M errin's assertion that
in the poem ’ s last line Bishop is "commenting not only upon the
accumulated burden of personal consciousness, but also upon the almost
overwhelm ing Romantic literary inheritance" is too speculative (Merrin
105-106).
A much more pronounced reconciliation with the present characterizes
I "One Art." This villanelle has far stronger autobiographic traits than most
I
I of the poems in Geography III. It is one of the very few poems in which
Bishop followed strict formal patterns. Other than this villanelle, she wrote
two sestinas (twenty years apart), one ballad ("The Burglar of Babylon"), and
three sonnets (the double sonnet of "The Prodigal Son" and her final
: "Sonnet"). In "One Art" she looked to the villanelle, which had been
! restored by Dylan Thomas' "Do not go gentle into that good night" as a form
l
that can deal with serious subjects, after nineteenth-century English poets
! had used it primarily for light verse. Maybe the constraints of this poetic
! form enabled Bishop to constrain herself less in terms of autobiographical
content. There also seems to be an attempt at controlling the grief over j
losses through a controlled poetic form. Bishop is no longer trying to hide j
334
1 herself in her writing, but instead she appears to be using her writing as a
means of reconciling herself with past losses and with her present situation.
Many of these losses are linked to places in the Americas and thereby
contribute to yet another conflux of the Americas in Bishop's work.
Losing, both in the sense of "no longer finding" and of "being defeated,"
is the central topic of "One Art." In the first line, Bishop presents the thesis
which she is trying to prove to her readers and to herself: "The art of losing
isn't hard to master." Poetic representation of her losses aids her acceptance
i
of them. The "quality of resignation" of this first line, as J.D. McClatchy has
term ed it, of this first line continues throughout the poem (McClatchy 36).69
For a moment, Bishop also shifts the responsibility for losses to w hat is
being lost: "so many things seem filled with the intent / to be lost that their
loss is no disaster." She is constantly trying to reduce the importance and
j impact of loss. Part of this strategy is the enumeration of everyday losses like
.
"door keys" and "the hour badly spent." With the latter we move from the
loss of objects to the loss of less tangible things. But all these everyday losses,
69 Robert Dale Parker has seen in this poem a note of "sarcasm," but his
explanation is not convincing. He writes that
i the repetitions of villanelle form intensify her sarcasm
! as she pretends that she can lightly toss off the pains
' from one disaster after another. With each repetition, a
gradually confining inevitability closes in. Every
'master' leads to 'disaster,' until we expect nothing
else" (Parker 128).
1 But why then, would Bishop use the "(Write it!)" in her last line? There is
j little sarcasm, if any, in this poem, just an honest attem pt to control grief in
the face of losses. Parker’ s remark that '"One Art' looks w ith fright from the
past to the future" is similarly misguided in view of the poem's tone of
reconciliation and acceptance and in view of its suggestion that writing may
be a way of coping with loss.
335
i
I the poem argues, should be accepted without much ado. However, the use
j of the im pure rhyme "fluster / master" suggests that such acceptance does
not always come easily.
In the third stanza, the examples of losses still appear general on the
surface, but they reveal painful autobiographical losses underneath. When
Bishop speaks of "losing farther, losing faster," she is also thinking of the
early loss of her father, the first tremendous loss of her life, which, because
she was not even a year old at the time, she felt less in its imm ediate impact,
but which caused a lingering feeling of lack in her life. The poem then
moves on to other losses: "places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel." Although Bishop was still a traveler at the time w hen she
finished this poem, she must have felt the increasing strain which travel
j was putting on her body and must have been resigning herself to the idea
i that she would not be able to travel to all the places she had m eant to.
Until here the poem's tone is schoolmasterly, or, to use Thomas J.
| Travisano's words, it has "the pat assurance of a school-room maxim." In
| the second and third stanzas, this tone is achieved by imperatives, asking
[ the reader to "Lose something every day. Accept the fluster" and to Then
practice losing farther, losing faster." But after the third stanza, which also
concludes the first half of the poem, there is a decided move to the more
openly personal. Significantly, the fourth stanza starts w ith "I." This shift in
i
focus is accompanied by a shift in tense and aspect from the present to the
I
| past and from imperatives to statements. These shifts announce the shift
from general observations on loss to Bishop's own past losses:
336
I lost my mother’ s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
Bishop's loss of her mother’ s watch is as ambivalent as her earlier use of
"farther." While she may have lost an actual watch that used to be her
mother's, the more traumatic loss is that of her mother watching over her.
The lack of the mother’ s watchful eye and the early loss of the father
account for Bishop's continuous homelessness. The reference to losing her
m other's watch introduces the idea of home and leads to the loss of "my
last, or / next-to-last, of three loved houses." Here Bishop is probably
referring to the sale of her Ouro Preto house, which she had christened Casa
M ariana in honor of Marianne Moore. After her house in Key West and
Lota's house in Rio de Janeiro, this had been the third house which Bishop
had considered a home during her adult life. By mentioning this loss
together w ith the loss of her mother Bishop also establishes a connection
between her North American and her South American homes. By the time
she writes this poem, her homes in both continents have been lost, but
Bishop has found a new home in Boston. Therefore she can proclaim with
respect to the loss of home, too, that "The art of losing isn’ t hard to master."
The following stanza further illustrates that North and South America
i
have converged in the poet’ s mind as well as her writing.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realm I owned, two rivers, a continent.
[ I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.
! The repeated use of "two" is reminiscent of the previous stanza's allusion j
to N orth and South America and will reoccur in "Santarem." It would !
hardly be too far-fetched to interpret the "two rivers" as the H udson and th e !
337
Am azon and the "two cities" as New York City and Rio de Janeiro. The two
cities may stand for people or societies Bishop frequented in the past, while
the two rivers may represent landscapes to which she had got attached. On
the surface, the "continent" whose loss is referred to here is South America,
but in view of the shakiness of Bishop's dualities, there is also a suggestion
that the two cities and the two rivers have, at least in the poet's mind, come
together to form one continent, Elizabeth Bishop's hemisphere.
The connection between North and South America, which is established
in the fourth and fifth stanza, leads in the last stanza to a "you" that is
connected in Bishop's memory to both North and South America:
— Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing’ s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
The dash at the beginning of the stanza signals that we are proceeding
further into the poet's personal life, an area which she has always been
reluctant to reveal. This "you," although it is non-gender-specific, as
Bishop's rare love poems— including the two unearthed by Lorrie
Goldensohn and Lloyd Swartz after the publication of The Complete Poems-
-usually are, refers partly to Lota Macedo de Soares, Bishop's friend and
lover of so many years, whom she met and lost in North America and with
; I
: whom she enjoyed the majority of their time together in Brazil.70 In her
j 70 Barbara Page, a Bishop scholar at Vassar College, pointed out to me in a
1 private conversation in December 1992 that this "you" refers to Alice
Methfessel, with whom Bishop had a liaison at the time w hen "One Art"
was published. While this may be true, the poem's earlier references to
Brazil, however, support the idea that this "you" must— at least initially—
also have been connected to Brazil and to Lota.
338
characteristic fashion, Bishop pins down her attraction to Lota to details,
which she recounts in brackets: "(the joking voice, a gesture / I love)." An
earlier version had spoken, more melodramatically, of "azure eyes." The
loss of Lota is definitely the hardest one for Bishop to accept. Therefore the
use of an im pure rhyme in "gesture / master" (reminiscent of the use of an
im pure rhyme in "last, or / master" when she mentions the loss of her
Brazilian house) is not surprising.
i Furthermore, the initial and twice repeated 'The art of losing isn't hard
to master" is here toned down somewhat to the art of losing's not too hard
to master." Losing has now become increasingly difficult. In the first, third,
and fifth stanzas Bishop had written "their loss is no disaster," "None of
these will bring disaster," and "but it wasn’ t a disaster.” This phrase is
further altered in the poem's final line, where it is broken up through the
insertion of "(Write it!)" and the repetition of "like." Here even the
! otherwise regular iambic meter is affected by the difficulty of dealing with
loss. After suggesting that some losses may be harder to master than one
w ould think, Bishop seems to be hinting through the last line's curious
insertion at one possible way of mastering them, that is by writing about
them .7 1 The insertion thus becomes a comment on the whole poem, which
! Bonnie Costello has taken this poem as a point of departure for her book, !
i Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery. Costello notes that apart from |
"broaden[ing] the scope and intensity of loss," "One Art" also ”explore[s] the j
concept of mastery" (Costello, Mastery 1). She believes that for Bishop,
"Poetry is one of the few places where limited mastery is possible. This 'one
art' depends on control and unity. But Bishop sets it to expressing the flux |
and variety of things" (Costello, Mastery 2). ■
339
now appears to be in part a piece of therapeutic writing in which Bishop is
p
attem pting to come to terms with the losses she has had to suffer. The
im perative, which reminds us of the second and third stanzas' imperatives,
is directed at Bishop herself as well as at her reader.72 In using writing as a
means of coming to terms with loss, Bishop is here reminiscent of Aldous
Huxley, who took a trip down the Amazon with Bishop in 1961 and who
also often uses his writing as a defense against the suffering caused by loss.
In February 1970, after two and a half strenuous years following Lota's death
and the ensuing unpleasant experiences in Brazil, Bishop mentions in a
letter to her aunt Grace Bulmer that writing could be a way of dealing w ith
her suffering. She tells her aunt, 'The last two and a half years have been
just too sad and lonely and complicated - if I can get to working again I think
I’ ll start feeling better..."
While the loss of South America is not the culminating one in her life or
in "One Art," it still is the one that introduces Bishop's loss of Lota, her
j principal connection to South America. In her losses, the Americas are no
longer separate, just as Bishop's thoughts of Lota are not exclusively linked
! to only one part of the Western Hemisphere. Instead, the Americas are
united through the losses of which they remind Bishop, into one single
m ental continent.
The idea of the Americas as one unit~or at least as being united in
; Bishop's w ork— is even more foregrounded in "12 O'Clock News," the only
I prose poem in Geography III. Here Bishop highlights representation, and
72 Lorrie Goldensohn sees in the poem's conclusion "the painful
subversion of language and form by feeling" (Goldensohn 31).
340
w ith it the poet's world and work, by accompanying her poem's m ain text
in the m argin with objects that may be on her desk as she is writing the
poem and that reflect the central image of each of the poem ’ s sections: a
"gooseneck lam p" reflects the "full moon," a "typew riter" reflects "small,
peculiarly shaped terraces," a "pile of mss." reflects a "slight landslide,” and
so on. This technique suggests that the "news" of this poem originate on the
poet's desk and that they connect her work with the world at large. As the
i
j poet's desk becomes an emblem for the Western Hemisphere, retrospect,
reconciliation, and representation are again interlinked the way they were
in "One Art," "Poem," and "Crusoe in England." This poem has received
almost no critical attention and the two critics who have commented on it
(Thomas J. Travisano and Lorrie Goldensohn) concentrate on the poem as a
m etaphor for the creative writing process and for the w riter’ s world. While
this is one im portant aspect of "12 O’ Clock News," the poem's expression of
Bishop's desire for a closer unity within the Americas has so far been
overlooked.
The poem starts,
As you all know, tonight is the night of the full
gooseneck moon, half the world over. But here the moon
lam p seems to hang motionless in the sky. It gives
| very little light; it could be dead. Visibility is
! poor.
i
By the "half [of] the world" she mentions here Bishop probably means the
j W estern Hemisphere. Since the moon "gives very little light," there is poor
visibility. That would suggest that, in Bishop's view, the various parts of the
Americas cannot see or appreciate each other very well. Light is sparse and j
341
so are knowledge and understanding of each other. The poem's rem aining
sections will give a variety of examples to illustrate this thesis.
If one accepts the interpretation that the first stanza establishes the setting
of the poem as the Western Hemisphere, then the second stanza is very
revealing w ith regard to Bishop’ s attitude toward the Americas:
The escarpment that rises abruptly from the
central plain is in heavy shadow, but the
elaborate terracing of its southern glacis gleams
typew riter faintly in the dim light, like fish scales. What
endless labor those small, peculiarly shaped
terraces represent! And yet, on them the
welfare of this tiny principality depends.
The metaphoric "escarpment that rises abruptly" from Mexico to the United
States is obscured because of the lack of (metaphoric) light. Moreover,
Bishop may actually want to put it in this "heavy shadow" in order to
minimize differences between what lies to the North and to the South of
the U.S.-Mexican border. To the south of it "elaborate terracing . . . gleams
faintly in the dim light, like fish scales." If one remembers her poem "The
Fish," the emotional attachment that Bishop’ s simile expresses for the
southern part of the Americas becomes obvious. She adm ires (and this is
stressed through the exclamation mark) the "endless labor" that m ust have
gone into "those small, peculiarly shaped terraces." In the w ord "terracing"
there m ight also be a resonance of Mayan or Incan settlements and temples,
w hich Bishop visited.
| In the poem ’ s third section, Bishop speaks of a "slight landslide . . . in the
j n o rth w est. . . The exposed soil appears to be of poor quality: almost white,
I
, calcareous, and shaly." In this way, she undermines the sense of the north's
342
superiority, insinuating that although it may be far more developed in
i
terms of industry, it is not leading in all respects. Bishop presents the north
as "almost white," but she does not necessarily valorize whiteness, since the
kind of whiteness she sees in the north is very fragile like chalk and layered
like shale. She is beginning to pull the north dow n to the same level as the
south, presenting its superiority as superficial. In this way she is trying to
overcome the idea of an "escarpment," with which she had started out.
The next stanza guesses that the "man-made" "large rectangular ’ field, "
which has been discovered "Almost due north," m ight be "An airstrip? A
cemetery?" These two guesses align technological progress (which is a
feature of N orth America) and death, hinting that the north’ s progress is
accompanied by much destruction or metaphoric darkness. What follows in
the next section is an image which counters that of the industrialized north:
In this small, backward country, one of the
j most backward left in the world today,
j communications are crude and
| envelopes "industrialization" and its products
almost nonexistent. Strange to say, however,
signboards are on a truly gigantic scale.
Bishop is probably not talking directly about Brazil here, but her "small,
i
backward country” seems to be an emblem for all Latin American countries,
which, although they may be large in terms of territory, are "small" in terms !
!
of economic and political importance. Latin America is thereby presented in j
: stark contrast to the United States and Canada. It does not have much ^
I
i industrialization, although there is a superficial attem pt at copying the j
I
north through gigantic billboards. |
343
The sixth stanza likens the writer's "ink-bottle" to "a mysterious, oddly
shaped, black structure, at an undisclosed distance to the east." This could be
a reference to either Florida and NASA or, more likely, to the former Soviet
Union. The mysterious structure has a "highly polished surface" and m ight
be "some powerful and terrifying 'secret weapon,"' but it is probably
"nothing more than a num en. or a great altar recently erected to one of their
gods." Out of these words and out of "the sad corruption of their leaders" in
the poem's last sentence, speaks the disregard Bishop has for politicians,
i
which was certainly increased through Lota de Macedo Soares’ constant
struggles w ith Brazilian politicians.
The next stanza peoples Bishop's mysterious imagined world. This world
is, as Travisano has called it, "a strange and destitute planet" (Travisano
193), but at the same time Bishop's imagined planet is very m uch like our
| own:
|
j At last! One of the elusive natives has been
spotted! He appears to be~rather, to have
typew riter been— a unicyclist-courier, who may have
eraser met his end by falling from the escarpment
because of the deceptive illumination.
If one bears in mind that the "escarpment" probably referred in the poem's
second stanza to the U.S.-Mexican border, the "elusive native" of this stanza
w ould be a U.S. American. Through his fate Bishop hints at the dangers of
; U.S. feelings of superiority toward the other parts of the Americas. U.S.
i attempts at being a "courier" to the rest of the Western Hemisphere and at
j
leading other American nations along the U.S. way, Bishop implies, may
backfire because of the United States' lack of attention to or knowledge of j
344
I the differences between itself and other American countries. The
"illumination" of the northern part of the hem isphere is "deceptive."
In the poem's final stanza, there is a harsh comment, although obscured
by a veil of mystery, on the victimization of the common people
(emblemized through soldiers) by corrupt leaders. Considering that the
previous section had spoken of U.S. domination of the Americas, it can be
argued that the last stanza's corrupt leaders are (or at least are related to) the
United States, making others (in the Western Hemisphere) fight their
causes and thereby bringing destruction to the Americas.73 What Bishop
w ould like to see instead of domination and the "escarpment" mentioned at
the beginning of her poem is an equality that would situate the whole
W estern Hemisphere on one plain. This equality would be accompanied by
equal illumination of the various American countries so that accidents like
j the one of her "unicyclist-courier" would be prevented. In Bishop’ s ideal
world, m utual understanding and knowledge of each other would replace
the inequalities and ignorance she decries in "12 O'Clock News."
Bishop was planning to make a very similar argument in her Brazil
book, but the Tim e/Life editors did not print her plea for a closer connection
i between the U.S.A. and Brazil. In the book's last chapter Bishop was going
to argue for the necessity and the m utual benefit of U.S. aid to Brazil in a
variety of areas. Her chapter notes read:
| 73 Thomas J. Travisano has usefully hinted that this poem's intent is to
"satirize the smugness and condescension of N orth American observers
tow ard Brazil," but he does not offer any proof for that observation
(Travisano 193).
345
Undoubtedly the most important country in S A [South
! America] and the most important for us to deal with.
Scholarships - it is easy to win susceptible sensitive
people over to being pro-U.S. - and we have been failing
miserably. We should stop regarding Brazil as a third or
4th rate or whatever it is country diplomatically
speaking - stop letting croks go there - export good
things less of beauty contests, fads, a cheap edition of
Dr Spock, for example - good T V or movie shorts -
classes - education - Point 4 did some good? teams of
workers [,] engineers - cut out all the boasting on BOTH
sides - too often we get into boasting competitions, like
those with Russia - who has the biggest country or the
most ore - or the best "culture" -! these absurd and
purely imaginary problems sidetrack[;] a little more
dignity, respect and sense of history all around.
Remember - Lincoln, Washington, etc are still big
figures in Brazil[.] Franklin - Wilson - translations,
scholarships - a little more education on our part - we
know so little about it. Sensitive, touchy, vain,
suspicious -
As in "12 O'Clock News," Bishop is here openly criticizing her country for
its lack of knowledge about and concern for Brazil and its unwillingness to
share its progress with her adopted country.
Although less so than Questions of Travel, Elizabeth Bishop m ust in part
have seen Geography III as an attempt to promote her Pan-Americanist
ideals. At least she wanted to express her personal feelings about the
i
i Americas and especially about the role of the United States in the W estern
i Hemisphere. Since the majority of poems in her last collection are
connected to spatial and spiritual geographies of which Bishop had first
hand knowledge, Geography III is the most openly autobiographical of
Bishop's books, although she takes pains to avoid the confessional mode
she criticized in other poets. Her geographic autobiography features—
sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly— the variety of American places
346
I from Newfoundland and Nova Scotia to Aruba and Brazil in which she had
lived or which she had visited. Since most of the poems in this last
collection are retrospective, Bishop can allow her memories of various
American places to merge as she makes them into material for her poems.
While "Crusoe in England" illustrates Bishop's divided feelings about
I
having returned from the exotic place of her past to New England and while
especially "Poem" and "The Moose” show that Canada, where she was at
one time planning to retire, is still very much in her mind, "One Art"
dem onstrates Bishop's desire to reconcile herself w ith her present situation
and to cope with the losses (geographic and other) of her past. Representing
her emotions about the geographies of her past and of her present, which
also inspired the creation of imagined geographies like that of "12 O 'clock
News," was for Elizabeth Bishop one way of coming to terms w ith her past
and present life. The "(Write it!)" of "One Art" is probably Bishop's
strongest expression of her attempt to use writing therapeutically to a
degree. A nd as "Poem," where "Our visions coincided," illustrates,
representation can also lead to a connection between artist and audience.
Bishop, too, sought this connection w ith her North American audience,
j whom she wanted to lead out of isolationism and toward more
i
i understanding for the other parts of what she must by that time have
1 considered as her hemisphere. This desire will also characterize three of the
' four poems Bishop published separately after Geography III.
347
I B. Beyond Dichotomy: "Santarem" and "Sonnet"
The four poems which Elizabeth Bishop published in the New Yorker after
Geography III. "Santarem" (1978), "North Haven" (1978), "Pink Dog" (1979),
and "Sonnet" (1979), continue her last collection's concern w ith
remembrance and reconciliation. Especially in "Santarem" and "Sonnet"
Bishop moves further beyond the dichotomies she had challenged in
; Geography III (especially in a poem like "12'0 Clock News"). The speaker of
| "In the Waiting Room" had realized that she and her aunt, although
t
separate, are united by a variety of characteristics. By extension, she
concluded that there may be "similarities . . . [which] held us all together /
or m ade us all just one." Although divisions still exist in "Santarem” and
"Sonnet," they are subdued by the more intense presence of conflux and
harmony, which makes contrasts seem dramatic but a relatively
unim portant aspect of the vision that is central to these late poems. While
she felt obliged to make choices in the poems of Geography III, these late
poems allow Bishop to avoid choosing and instead to combine w hat appear
to be contrasts. The harmony of north and south, past and present,
! remembrance and immediacy, life and art ultimately leads to the poet's
I
im aginative liberation.
I While Bishop wrote "North Haven" in memoriam of Robert Lowell, she
l
: wrote "Santarem" for herself.74 Although published in the same year,
i
I
I
74 Lorrie Goldensohn calls both poems "largely elegiac" (Goldensohn 270). ;
Although she does not make this clear, I assume that by this classification j
Goldensohn means that one of these poems has been triggered by the loss of i
348
"Santarem" had probably already been in the making for almost fifteen
years before Bishop started working on "North Haven." Both poems use a
tow n setting to bring together north and south and, as Lorrie Goldensohn
has pointed out, in both poems there is a "wash of color and light"
(Goldensohn 270). The speaker of both poems resists stability and distinction
in favor of flux and conflux. In North Haven" Bishop writes,
The islands haven't shifted since last summer,
even if I like to pretend they have
— drifting, in a dreamy sort of way,
a little north, a little south or sidewise,
and that they're free within the blue frontiers of bay.
Even though she knows that the geography of North Haven has not
actually changed because of Lowell's death, in her "dreamy" imagination
and in her conversion of life into art it has. Bishop resists the rigidity of the
outside world and the harsh reality of Lowell's death by letting her
im agination and memories interact with and thereby underm ine reality
and its divisions. In the same way in which she wants the islands to be
"free," she seeks freedom for Lowell and for herself rather than consenting
to succumb to constrictions. Bishop goes on to write that "Nature repeats
herself, or almost does." If nature does not quite succeed in repeating itself
and in repeating her life with Lowell, then Bishop's poem will take over
: that task of bringing back the past and making it an integral part of the
j present.
I An effort to bring back the past and to make it flow together with the
i
present is also at the center of "Santarem." Like "North Haven," this poem
Bishop's dear friend, the other has been completed as a way of coming to
terms w ith the loss of her Brazilian world.
349
attem pts to diminish the distinctions between past and present as well as
those between north and south. Instead of separation Bishop is looking for
combination and harmony. While in earlier poems, speaker and reader are
more distanced from the scenery (e.g. in "Questions of Travel” sunset is a
fold of cloth and flowered trees are "noble pantomimists, robed in pink"),
the details of "Santarem" are more immediate and accessible. Instead of
presenting an aerial view of the scene, as she had done in poems like
"Florida," "Sea-scape" or "Little Exercise," in "Santarem" and other late
poems Bishop, as Goldensohn has rightly stated, "plants her feet on the
ground, and makes a habit of speaking in propria persona visibly and
materially; in these poems, she looks up at the heavens, rather than down
through them" (Goldensohn 271). In her late work Bishop no longer
employs the miniaturizing and distant vantage point of a poem like "Cape
Breton." "Santarem" immediately identifies the "I" of its first line as
!
Bishop’ s own, which relates a personal experience of the poet that is
coupled w ith other memories as well as reflections on those memories,
j Bishop here no longer projects her emotions and thoughts onto a landscape
I but instead allows the scene to trigger emotions in her.75
I
j "Santarem" is based on a trip down the Amazon which Bishop took in
1961.76 It appears that she first started working on the poem in 1963, since
(
: 75 Lorrie Goldensohn writes that Bishop's late poems, "calling on vision
i more frequently as they do, . . . make a curricular move toward history and
! literature and further away from geography" (Goldensohn 271). They
become temporal and autobiographical.
76 On February 8, 1979 Bishop writes to Octavio Paz about "Santarem,"
"I've been working on two or three poems and hope to finish two stories
350
the poem's first draft begins, "I may remember it all wrong, / after two
i
years." Memory is already questioned in this first draft and the ensuing
uncertainty is reinforced in later drafts through the use of dashes, question
marks, and such corrections as "the church, the Cathedral, rather." The
poem 's published version starts,
Of course I may be remembering it all wrong
after, after— how many years?
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, Tapajos, Amazon,
grandly, silently flowing, flowing east.
Suddenly there'd been houses, people, and lots of mongrel
riverboats skittering back and forth
under a sky of gorgeous, under-lit clouds,
w ith everything gilded, burnished along one side,
and everything bright, cheerful, casual-or so it looked.
The terms of qualifications at the beginning and end of this passage further
underm ine the reliability of the speaker's memory. But they cannot
obliterate the poem's central theme of division and union.
The "two great rivers," which echo the "two rivers, a continent" of "One
Art," are emblems of division. Since "Santarem" was first started at a time
w hen Bishop was increasingly feeling the strain of her relationship with
Lota, who had by that time become more and more frustrated with the
obstacles which Brazilian governmental bureaucracy put in her way, and in
I a year when Bishop spent two months in New York City, it can be assumed
that "Santarem"’ s two rivers also represent South and N orth America for
before spring, at least... One long poem will be in The New Yorker Feb. 26th '
- it may appall you." ,
351
! Bishop. In the poem's opening passage, division is not limited to the two
rivers: it extends to the separation of water ("lots of mongrel / riverboats"),
land ("houses"), and sky ("gorgeous, under-lit clouds"). But as the two
rivers come together in a "conflux," water, land, and sky, too, flow together.
Everything is "gilded, burnished along one side, / and everything bright,
cheerful, casual."
The city's topography invites the speaker's reflections on dialectics and
division:
I liked the place; I liked the idea of the place.
Two rivers. H adn'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/w rong, m ale/fem ale
— such notions would have resolved, dissolved, straight off
in that watery, dazzling dialectic.77
The speaker's memory moves onto another level as the thoughts of
Santarem trigger a biblical (non-)equivalent and more general observations
j on the meanings of division. Bishop's use of a question and answer is the
| rhetorical reenactment of the scene’ s dialectic and reveals that the speaker is
!
' trying to find a solution to the imminent choice, but does not have this
solution yet.
The preoccupation with choice is still stronger in the poem's early
I versions. "Santarem’ "s first of sixteen drafts begins,
; 77 Commenting on her understanding of the w ord "dazzling," Bishop tells
Octavio Paz in a letter of February 8, 1979 that "somehow 'dazzling' has
taken on a slightly different meaning, I think— to me it suggests a surface
dazzling or scintillation."
352
I may remember it all wrong,
after two years, but
Decided to go no further, stay and rest
at the conflux of two great rivers puring past pouring past
like a
two colors, two Life and-Death Right and Wrong
Choice Choice
whatever grand interpretation you like best
The desire to defer the choice and to "stay and rest" speaks strongly in these
lines. Already in this first draft, the place where the speaker/poet wishes to
stay is a conflux: symbolically, Bishop seems to want to unite the two main
choices (remaining in Brazil or returning to the United States) that are open
to her at the time when she starts working on this poem. While in this first
draft Bishop is ready to associate south and north with "two colors," she
crosses out the association of either with "Life and Death [,] Right and
Wrong." It seems that both south and north seemed to her to be "Life and
Death" and "Right and Wrong" at the same time and that she therefore
hesitated to attribute those qualities to either choice.
The oppressiveness of feeling that a choice has to be made is reinforced in
tthe poem 's second draft through an "oh" and an exclamation mark:
I
!
1 I wanted to go no further, 4 © stay and rest
at this conflux of two great rivers, pouring past
i like a : ? Choice, oh choice!
! two colors, two sp eeds ??? two
] - male, female; right & wrong, life & death
j - whatever grand interpretation one liked best... might like
The use of "wanted" instead of the first draft's "decided" also expresses the
speaker's reluctance to make a decision. What she wants are rest, harmony j
and freedom from having to make a choice. New elements enter the choice j
353
here: the rivers— and with them south and north— are characterized by
different speeds (which reappear in a later draft) and are also associated with
gender. "Male" and "female" substitute the "joy" and "sorrow" which ■
Bishop had tried out in one version of this passage on the second page of
her first draft. Although the choices of "male" and "female" are crossed out
again in the eleventh draft, they ultimately remain in the poem. The use of
these attributes may express Bishop's continuing struggle w ith her sexuality
and (the acceptance of) her sexual preference, which would ultimately lead
to a more open acknowledgement of her sexuality in "Sonnet." While
"right" and "wrong" and "life" and "death" are connected w ith an
Bishop still seems less ready here to suggest that "male" and "female" can
also be simultaneously true, although in the end she uses slashes for all
three pairs. But Bishop diminishes the appropriateness of these attributes in
any way by calling them "grand interpretations." Bishop is critical of
assigning too many meanings to her two rivers and may be trying to
prevent her audience from reading too much into them.
In the poem ’ s third draft, there is a suggestion that the serenity of the
scenery, which, in other drafts, is associated with the Garden of Eden, might
facilitate making a choice. Bishop writes,
f
I like the place; I like the idea of the place:
] two rivers: right and wrong, male and female;
life and death;
- whatever interpretation one chose to put on them,
j But choice - a Gchoice! That evening, one m ight choose
j have chosen.
i While the use of "and" with the interpretations allows the possibility that
both rivers incorporate opposites, the speaker seems to resign herself to the I
354
idea that a choice has to be made and that a quiet and serene moment might
| be conducive to making such a decision. But the idea that "That evening,
one m ight have chosen" is abandoned again after the next version, because
by then Bishop has decided that instead of choosing she would rather have a
j conflux of the various possibilities. In the poem's eleventh draft she
j associates the conflux with "a peaceful dialectic of water." In this peaceful
dialectic, she writes in the next draft,
W hatever interpretation
one chose to put on them: Right and Wrong,
Male and Female, Life and Death - became all
unimportant.
I They w eren't contradictory - here they w ere apposite,
j not merely (?)
| Here the various poles are clearly united in one and the same object,
i
J location, or choice. The poles are not opposite but "apposite." One does not
i exclude the other; the polarities merely co-exist and complement each other.
J
But this is only possible in "a peaceful dialectic of water." Bishop later
returned to the "watery, dazzling dialectic," which had first appeared in one
j of the versions of her first draft. The evolution of the poem through its
I various drafts reveals that "dialectic" was definitely Bishop's key term in
"Santarem." Her objective is a dialectic, in which she is not seeking the
erasure of one or the other but the vital interplay between them. Being an
A m erican, for Bishop, signifies the combination of N orth and South: her
definition of Am erican is therefore multiple and pluralistic rather than
.exclusive.
Bishop seeks to extend the "watery, dazzling dialectic" of "Santarem" into
her life, in which she also sees a number of apparently contradictory
355
t
1 possibilities and affinities, which she would prefer to unite and to make
j "apposite." It seems that this "watery, dazzling dialectic" would be Bishop's
version of the Garden of Eden, which she invokes, but then dismisses
because it is linked to divergence instead of convergence.
Bishop's fascination with water has often been commented on and is
apparent in num erous poems, chiefly among them "The Bight," "At the
j Fishhouses," "Cape Breton," and 'The Riverman." What she usually seems
most attracted to is the transforming quality of water. In "On the Amazon,"
an unpublished poem that was probably inspired by the same trip dow n the
Amazon that led to "Santarem," Bishop recreates the interplay of rainw ater
and riverwater and the subsequent transformation of colors:
Down the wide river
comes the soft rain
dark, dark-silver
ru n n in g moving forward
| on pink water - dow n the wide river, comes the soft rain
j Like "Santarem" this poem expresses its speaker's fascination w ith the
I
, dissolution of dialectical boundaries. In the course of this dissolution colors
change and thereby unite the world:
I
rain over there now
| crossing over the dark blue line - the opposite bank -
and the river
‘ erases it all j
the world, all pink,
j has dissolved at last i
i and is going somewhere '
j under a rainbow, too - i
: the rainbow has taken shape, but the world, all pink, 1
strange to say I
has dissolved at last
356
and is going somewhere, at last -
so that is the color of the world all together -
The repetition of "has dissolved" and the use of "erases" underline Bishop s
fascination w ith that phenomenon. The result is similar to that of the
conflux of Tapajos and Amazon in "Santarem": in analogy to a "watery,
dazzling dialectic" and "everything [being] gilded" the effect here is a world
that is "all pink." While at first only the water had been pink— significantly a
mixed color— , now the whole world is twice described as "all pink." It is
i difficult to speculate why Bishop, as far as we know, wrote only one draft of
this poem and then abandoned it. While she was definitely attracted to the
idea of dissolving boundaries, this dissolution is a more short-lived one in
"On the Amazon," since it will probably disappear with the change of
j weather, while the conflux of "Santarem" is permanent.
j "Santarem'"s equivalent of a world that is "all pink" is the golden light
that permeates the scenery— another mixed color. In the poem ’ s first half the
speaker remembers a "golden evening" on which "everything [is] gilded"
i and a street filled with "dark-gold river sand” or "golden sand" (repeated).
| This golden light, which first appears in the poem's eighth draft and is
m aintained from then on, echoes the conflux's "watery, dazzling dialectic."
Its merging of light and darkness has supplanted the dialectic of day and
[
night. While we still seem able to make out the scenery, Bishop’ s dashes, ;
1
! questions, and qualifications underm ine that certainty and clear-cut vision, i
> J
E
! Gold is therefore also the color of uncertain remembrance as well as of !
the golden memories of a place where the speaker wanted "to stay awhile." '
The unwillingness to continue the journey is present from the poem 's first ;
357
draft onwards. In one version, there is a sense that in the same way as she
doe not w ant to continue her own journey, the speaker does also not want
the day to continue its journey:
I wanted to go no farther, really; I wanted
that golden -afternoon or evening to stay
at that conflux of two great rivers pouring on, flowing
Tapajos and Amazon, pouring by steadily.
She wants to remain where she is on this golden evening and she also
wants the golden evening not to end. "Santarem" is, like "The Moose" a
j poem about an unfinished journey. Although towards the end of
i "Santarem" she resigns herself to having to go back on board ("my ship’ s
whistle blew. I couldn't stay."), this is the only poem in which Bishop
expresses a wish to simply remain where she is.
The "two colors" of which Bishop had still spoken in the poem's first
i
■ draft have become one. As pointed out above, these two colors had also
represented for Bishop the two main choices for her life: staying in South
j America or returning to North America. Unwilling to make a choice,
| Bishop lets these possibilities flow together in her mind and writing. She
takes her audience from the scene of converging rivers via a cathedral, a
; promenade, and a belvedere to "buildings one story high, stucco, blue or
yellow, / and one house faced with azulejos. buttercup yellow.” In
juxtaposing "azulejos" and "buttercup[s]" and in uniting them through
their color Bishop also tries to unite South and N orth America.78
f
l
78 The expression "buttercup yellow" first appears in the poem's third draft,
where it is attributed to "azulejos." In the fourth draft Bishop experimented .
w ith using the expression to refer to tiles, but she abandoned this attribution
again in the poem’ s next version, apparently realizing that a juxtaposition
358
Furtherm ore she mediates between south and north by bringing home
Santarem’ s exotic vegetation to her readers in N orth America by likening
this vegetation to the flora with which her northern audience is familiar.
The use of juxtaposition instead of a comparison suggests that these worlds,
although quite different (as expressed though the comma separating the two
spheres) do have some things in common and that there is a chance of
uniting them instead of having to choose between them. The blue of the
| buildings, which reappears three times later in the poem, is reminiscent of
"North Haven," where the color is also mentioned twice. And the
! buttercups, too, make another appearance in "North Haven." But Bishop is
i
not sure of the buildings' color any more. They are "blue or yellow." This
uncertainty is part of her strategy of questioning her memory, which starts
in the poem ’ s first line. The real color of the buildings is unim portant
! because all— including different colors— is flowing together in this scene.
I This conflux also unites memories of the scene w ith thoughts that come
to the poet's mind at the time of writing and revising. The use of three
questions and of three asides mentioned in parentheses as well as of
; corrections creates an impression of spontaneity. The immediacy of external
j observation that had characterized earlier poems has given way to an
immediacy of recording the workings of the speaker/ poet's m ind in which
memories, reflections on those memories, and asides interact. Their conflux j
; characterizes the whole poem as a "watery, dazzling dialectic." I
1 I
| I
of New England flowers and Brazilian palm trees served her purpose of
aligning south and north far better.
359
I
I Having moved from the rivers to more general reflections on dialectic
and then to the city of Santarem, the poem returns to the rivers and the
activity on them:
Two rivers full of crazy shipping— people
all apparently changing their minds, embarking,
disembarking, rowing clumsy dories.
Although there is some condescension contained in these lines, the image
is more charming than annoying. From one draft to the next Bishop
increasingly attempts to present the scene and its confusion as appealing
!
rather than objectionable. In the poem's first draft, the passage reads, "The
river full of ships and people changing ship / embarking, disembarking."
j But Bishop adds in handwriting "mad old" in front of "ships." In the second
draft, these lines become "The rivers full of mad old ships; an d people / all
changing ships, embarking, disembarking." The lines disappear in the next
| two drafts, which only speak of "crazy boats." When the passage reappears,
!
i the "mad old ships" soon become "crazy shipping" and the activity becomes
restricted to only one river: "A river full of crazy shipping, people / all
changing ships apparently embarking, / disembarking, rowing clumsy
; dories." On its way to the published version this passage extends the
confusion again to both rivers, thereby further aligning South and North
America, as had already been done by the juxtaposition of "azulejos" and ]
i
! ”buttercup[s]." Bishop also separates the "crazy shipping" and the "people"
i I
j through a dash instead of a mere comma to make clear that although the j
i
activities she observes in this Brazilian scenery may be "crazy," the people !
are not.
360
In keeping with the conflux of a variety of memories and reflections in
j this poem, the preceding passage leads to an aside, which first appears in the
poem's second draft. Little has been changed in this aside since its first
appearance. In the published version it reads:
(After the Civil W ar some Southern families
came here; here they could still own slaves.
They left occasional blue eyes, English names,
and oars. No other place, no one
on all the Amazon’ s four thousand miles
does anything but paddle.)
Having just established connections between South and N orth America,
Bishop now adds another one. The exchange described here will be
counterpointed in the poem's last stanza with the wasps' nest that the
N orth American speaker receives from the Brazilian pharmacist. An
i exchange between south and north, the spheres between which she does not
i
| w ant to choose, is also one of Bishop's concerns in writing "Santarem."
} A part from bringing an exotic setting and her love for this setting home to
' an audience in North America Bishop also tries to explain several aspects of
! i
[ this setting. In the poem's fourteenth draft, which she probably used for a
i
I public reading, since she wrote on it, "5-6 minutes." there is a handw ritten
note in which Bishop reminds herself to "explain: azulejos. zebu."79 She
i
further preserves local color and the charm of Brazil by leaving in the j
; original Portuguese the "Gramas a deus" comment on the priest having been ,
79 Bishop also changed "the length of the entire Amazon" (in the second
draft) to "all the Amazon’ s four thousand miles." The change is
informative for the audience and also creates a sense of awe in view of the
river's overw helm ing dimensions.
361
i away while the cathedral and his house were struck by lightning. Although
that incident is already narrated in the poem's first draft, the "Gramas a deus"
only appears as a handw ritten addition in the poem ’ s fifth draft.80 The "It
was a miracle," which had originally read "It w as - a local miracle," is another
attem pt at preserving the charm of local color.
A desire to illustrate the charm of Brazil probably also motivated
Bishop's use of the image of a cow being transported by boat:
! Side-wheelers, countless wobbling dugouts...
A cow stood up in one, quite calm,
chewing her cud while being ferried,
tipping, wobbling, somewhere, to be married.
This is the only instance of rhyme in "Santarem." The rhym e complements
the playfulness of the cow's personification through the use of "married."
The episode first appeared in the poem's sixth draft as "Side-wheelers, too,
j and wobbling dug-outs / - a cow stood up in one of them, quite calm /
probably to be married."8 1 Without the rhyme the passage appears so much
more bland and less charming. Only the combined use of "married" and of
the rhyme can render the liveliness and hum or of the situation.
50 Here the expression reads "Gramas a dios." It was not corrected until the j
poem ’ s fifteenth of sixteen drafts, at the top of which appears Bishop's j
j address at 437 Lewis Wharf in Boston. It appears that Bishop needed the .
geographic and linguistic distance from Brazil in order to recognize the i
! mistake in her original Portuguese.
i
51 The personification disappears in the poem's seventh draft, but j
reappears as a handw ritten addition in the eighth draft, where "married" is 1
now rhym ing w ith "ferried."
i
I
362
Another ingredient in the charm of the place is presented in the poem's
last stanza:
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,
j Dutch, the retiring head of Philips Electric,
really a very nice old man,
t who wanted to see the Amazon before he died,
asked, "What's that ugly thing?"
Here is another instance of an exchange between south and north. While, as
recorded earlier in the poem, Brazilians had received a continuation of
slavery from North Americans, the North American speaker here receives
. an "exquisite" ornament, a natural object that has become a perm anent
| work of art reminiscent of "stucco." The wasps' nest also represents Brazil
for Bishop. She had come to it expecting something unknow n and hence
potentially dangerous, but Brazil had turned out to be for her an "exquisite,"
cultured ("stucco"), unspoiled ("clean matte white") home ("nest"). By the
! time she finishes the poem and lives in the United States again, Brazil is an I
i !
empty home for Bishop. i
The poem records two reactions to the exchange that is going on in its la s t!
stanza. While the speaker admires the wasps' nest and m ust be grateful j
i »
I j
! about the exchange, Mr. Swan does not see an ornament but merely an |
i i
"ugly thing." His evaluation is presented as no less acceptable than the !
speaker/poet's and it is his judgment that reverberates at the end of
"Santarem." But the preceding poem has already undercut the value of this ’
363
judgment, as it has undercut any kind of certainty. Significantly,
.
"Santarem" ends with a question mark. The question w hether Mr. Swan’ s
attitude or the speaker/poet's is the more appropriate one remains
unansw ered and is considered unimportant.82 As she was seeking a
harm ony between the two rivers, south and north, memory and present
situation, Bishop is also presenting the final two attitudes towards the
wasps' nest as poles of an ultimately unim portant distinction. She would
rather move beyond its dialectic. But this last stanza's "I couldn't stay,"
which takes up the "I wanted to stay awhile" of the beginning, suggests that
such a harmonious state beyond dichotomies might only be possible in the
poet’ s m ind or writing.
A shorter version of this incident had already appeared at the end of the
first page of the poem's first draft. The expansion of this report from the
i
I initial five lines to the final eleven lines and its positioning at the very end
I
i
J of the poem underline the importance of this exchange for Bishop.
Originally, the passage read:
In the pharmacy, the pharmacist gave me a wasps' nest -
i white as the ships, hard as stucco, bell-shaped
j perfectly wrought
The man from Philips - asked Mr Swann, from
Philips
, "What's that ugly thing?"
' 82 As Lorrie Goldensohn has convincingly argued, "More and more,
Bishop's last poems toy with endings, abandoning strong closure, forcing us
backward against the linear thrust of reading into the more open circuits of
her texts" (Goldensohn 274).
j Mr. Swan(n)'s judgment already rings out as a final one in this first draft. In
the poem's second version, Bishop complicates black-and white distinctions
w hen Mr. Swan becomes "really quite a nice old man." Although his
judgm ent is still just as harsh, it is seen as more acceptable. Bishop does not
object to the poles of evaluating the wasps' nest themselves but instead to
the division which creates them. For these opposite positions as well as for
South and N orth America she is seeking a "conflux." The two rivers are her
emblem for this harmonious union: they carry w ith them all that the
speaker is projecting into them. As Bishop had written in "The Weed," it is
(As if a river should carry all
the scenes that it had once reflected
shut in its waters, and not floating
on momentary surfaces.)
For Bishop, the scenes that the two rivers of "Santarem" reflect and now
j hold inside themselves are taken from all of Bishop’ s life, from South and
' N orth America.
In several of his poems, Pablo Neruda, too, expresses such a desire for a
conflux of south and north. Bishop met N eruda in Mexico in 1943 and
corresponded with him for several years thereafter. While living in Florida,
1 she received Spanish lessons from a friend of Neruda's. Bishop was very
| familiar w ith N eruda's work and vision. In an interview w ith Ashley
Brown that was first published in 1966 she said,
I
By the way, I lived in Mexico for a time twenty years ago
and I knew Palo N eruda there. I think I was influenced
to some extent by him (as in my "invitation to Miss
Marianne Moore"), but he is still a rather "advanced"
poet, compared with other South American poets.
(Brown 290)
365
Although she seems not to go along w ith N eruda’s strong political
orientation, her time in Brazil made her appreciate N eruda's desire for a
closer union of North and South America. Indeed, Bishop’ s reference to
distinctions as unim portant and her celebration of a "watery, dazzling
dialectic" in which north and south can flow together sounds m uch like
| Pablo N eruda’ s invocation of "My land without name, w ithout America"
j in his poem "Love, America (1400)" or Ernesto Cardenal's characterization
■ of himself in Cantico Cosmico (1989) as "a Latin from Manhattan."
! Two poems in N eruda’ s Cancion de Gesta [Song of Protest, 1976],
"Americas" and "North American Friend,” which were discussed in chapter
1, advocate a similar conflux of South and North America. N eruda's love
for every part of the Americas and especially for its "atavistic and eternal
j rivers," which he expresses in "Americas," is one shared by Bishop. But
I while Bishop uses water to unite different parts, N eruda more strongly uses
I
j the "I" of his speaker. N eruda is also far more direct and less metaphoric in
! nam ing the objects of his love than Bishop is. His "North American
i
| Friend" presents another complement to Bishop's celebration of conflux in
{ and of the Americas. Here Neruda addresses a general, unnam ed "North
American Friend," whom he reminds of the connections between the
Americas and the lack of communication between north and south that
]
makes it hard for these connections to be recognized. N eruda ends the poem
i
w ith an appeal to North Americans to open themselves up to w hat unites
!
the Americas the way that, he claims, Latin Americans are receptive to these {
connections. Bishop’ s analogue to N eruda’ s "geography / that unites us" is i
the similarity in color between azulejos and buttercups and, more
I
]
366
importantly, the wasps' nest which the pharmacist gives her speaker. But
while Bishop admits views contrary to her own and does not condemn her
Mr. Swan, who fails to show the "understanding and hopes" which N eruda
calls for, N eruda appeals less subtly to his audience. Whereas Bishop rejects
division by showing that its poles may coexist harmoniously, N eruda rejects
I
I
it by calling on his audience to go along with his own views.
Where N eruda and Bishop agree is in their identification with outsiders.
| As mentioned in the forgoing chapters, this identification is one of the j
m ain characteristics of Bishop's work and a reason for her hemispheric
outlook. In "Pink Dog" she identifies with a hungry, disem powered street
dog, an emblem for Brazil. "Pink Dog," which has been read as one of
Bishop's few feminist texts, exhibits the social concern and a plea for North
; America to sympathize with poverty in South America that were also
i
characteristic of some of the earlier poems about Brazil. What Candace
Slater has rem arked concerning the poems in Questions of Travel still holds
true for "Pink Dog": Bishop "reveals more diffuse sympathy for the
j oppressed than definite anger at the oppressor. Stressing effect more than
< cause, the poet concentrates on manifestations rather than roots of social !
: evils" (Slater 35). The "pink dog," a "nursing mother" and a "poor bitch” j
who goes around "begging" in the slums of Rio de Janeiro, symbolizes first
! the poor in Rio, but also stands, more widely, for Brazil as a whole and its j
i
underprivileged status in the Western Hemisphere. Accusingly, Bishop
writes that there is no place in a crule world for beggars like her pink dog
and for developing countries:
367
They take them 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.
While Bishop’ s sympathies are clearly with the underprivileged, there is
a heteroglossic mixture of voices in this poem. She adopts, for example, the
cruel voice of the powerful (of the uncaring First World; or, in the context
of the W estern Hemisphere, of the United States) w hen she suggests to the
pink dog,
Now look, the practical, the sensible
solution is to wear a fantasia.
Tonight you simply can't afford to be a-
n eyesore.
The breaking up of this suggestion through strophic enjambement and the
; division of ”a-n" hints at Bishop's own deconstruction of this position. The
United States, she implies, would like a poorer American country like
Brazil "to wear a fantasia" and to indulge in its carnival so that the richer
American countries are not rem inded of the need to assist the poorer ones.
Bishop's comment that eventually "Ash W ednesday'1 1 come," however,
underlines her conviction that problems cannot be covered up forever and
that inter-American responsibility cannot be avoided much longer. The
poem's movement from pure rhymes in the first three stanzas to
increasingly im pure rhymes is another indication of Brazil's worsening
social conditions. But Bishop implies that wearing a carnival costume and
368
forgetting its plight is what this pink dog and Brazil need to do to stay
alive.83
"Sonnet," the last poem which Elizabeth Bishop revised for publication,
like "Pink Dog" and "Santarem," takes on the dichotomy of division and
, harm onious union. The poem was published a few weeks after the poet's
death and, according to Adrienne Rich, it contains Bishop's "own last w ord
on division, decision, and questions of travel" (Rich 130). In its entirety the
poem reads,
Caught— the bubble
in the spirit-level,
a creature divided;
and the compass needle
wobbling and wavering,
undecided.
Freed— the broken
1 therm om eter's mercury
[ running away;
I and the rainbow-bird
! from the narrow bevel
of the empty mirror,
flying wherever
it feels like, gay!
Because of the poem's indeterminacy it is not surprising that critics have
]
i assigned it a w ide range of interpretations. While Jean Valentine calls
"Sonnet" "one of [Bishop’ s] most purely joyful poems" (Valentine 45),
i Jeredith M errin speaks of "a rather nineteenth-century melancholic
83 The importance she puts on escape and disguise may have made Bishop
decide to devote an entire chapter to carnival and to other "popular arts" in
her Tim e/Life book on Brazil. i
369
'Sonnet'" (Merrin 112).84 Like Merrin, Robert Dale Parker m isinterprets the
poem: he makes too much of one meaning of the poem's last w ord when
he calls "Sonnet" "a poem of explicit homosexuality" (Parker 142).85 As
usual, Lorrie Goldensohn is right on the mark when she characterizes
"Sonnet" as an "ambiguous affair" (Goldensohn 280).
Bishop does not use iambic pentameter, the conventional sonnet meter,
and she inverts the traditional structure of the Petrarchan sonnet by starting
w ith a sestet that is followed by a turn and then an octave. Sestet and octave
i
j represent two poles, characterized by "Caught" and "Freed." These poles are
! harm onized in the final "gay." The exclamation mark that follows "gay"
reinforces the poem's jubilance. In "Sonnet"’ s rhetorical dialectic, the sestet
represents the thesis, the octave the antithesis, and the final "gay" the
synthesis. This synthesis of joy about liberation is also expressed in terms of
poetics: by inverting the traditional sonnet structure while still writing a
poem of fourteen lines and calling it a "Sonnet" Bishop also tries to
j harm onize poetic tradition and innovation. Like the division between
j tradition and innovation the one between being "Caught" and being
i
j "Freed" can be overcome. In "Sonnet" there is a possibility of release and
I
84 M errin does not offer any support for this view and would probably be [
1 hard pressed to pinpoint melancholy in "Sonnet." Especially in view of the !
concluding octave and the poem's last word M errin’ s designation seems j
, m isguided.
i
! i
1 85 Parker writes that "The changes in standards helped [Bishop] write and
think in ways she could not write or think in before. Late in life she '
recovers the lyric sexuality that most other writers, as heterosexuals, agonize :
over in their youth" (Parker 142). This claim is unfounded and disregards
Bishop's Brazilian experience, which certainly had more to do w ith her
liberation than did any "changes in standards."
370
i healing from division. As Goldensohn has shown, Bishop holds a different
j opinion in earlier poems. "O Breath," for example, had presented
j separations as unbridgeable.
Since it experiences separations, the creature of "Sonnet," like the speaker
‘ of "Santarem," is divided. Its compass needle or orientation is "wobbling
and wavering, / undecided." This indecision echoes the unwillingness of
i "Santarem’ "s speaker to choose, which is especially prevailing in earlier
i drafts of the poem. Like "Santarem," "Sonnet" complements the reluctance
j to make a choice w ith the desire to escape from limitations: "Santarem'"s
j speaker wants to "stay awhile” instead of following her ship’ s whistle and
the responsibilities for which it stands and in "Sonnet" the mercury is
"running away" and thus it escapes its confining container. The rainbow-
bird, too, is flying off and leaves behind an empty mirror that recalls the
empty wasps' nest of "Santarem." With both objects emptiness is not a
negative.
In a published manuscript draft of "Santarem," the first line appears as
"Oh brain, bubble." In the final version, the bubble has become more than
! just a brain; now it is a "creature." This widening of the poem's concern is
! in tune w ith the three images of inanimate objects, followed by a "rainbow-
: i
bird . . . flying wherever / it feels like." Parallel to its movement from i
im prisonm ent to liberation the poem also moves from division to union j
; i
land from the inanimate to the living. The rainbow bird's action and colors !
I
are the poem's lasting images of freedom and joy and help prepare the final ! •
"gay!."
371
I But why a "rainbow-bird," an animal that does not exist? The choice is
| hardly accidental. In coming up with this image Bishop asserts her linguistic
and semantic freedom: in the "caught" tradition there is a rainbow fish, so
why should there not be a "rainbow-bird" in her "Freed" innovation? This
bird of Bishop's creation is one that, if it did exist, might be found in both
N orth and South America, since both continents have rainbows. Like a
rainbow, Bishop's rainbow bird exists objectively, at a distance, but it cannot
be grasped. To attempt to hold it would mean to lose it. In the rainbow
j described in "On the Amazon” a rainbow-bird would not be out of place;
nor w ould it stick out from a scene like that of "The Bight." After the
sestet's image of a compass needle has announced that geography is one of
the poem's concerns and one of the divisions that Bishop w ould like to
overcome, the use of an imaginary North and South American bird as the
i em bodim ent of the movement from confinement to freedom further
suggests that one of the many divisions Bishop tries to harmonize is that
between N orth and South. As she did in the dialectic of "Santarem," she
favors the interplay of opposites like North and South, real and imaginary,
material and immaterial, beautiful and useful, concrete and abstract, present
and past, life and art.
; Another division which Bishop opposes here and elsewhere is that based
| on gender and sexual preference. Her use of "creature," not of a gender-
i specific word, would indicate her desire to move away from gender j
I distinctions. And the poem's polysemous last word, "gay," refers on the one |
hand to Bishop’s joy of reconciling her North and South American
heritages and on the other to the liberation which her South American
372
experience had given her in confronting her sexual preference. H er "gay" is
closer to Stevens’ use of the word than to Ginsberg's openly sexual use of it.
It is ironic, however, that "gay" should be the last word in the last poem
which Elizabeth Bishop, who was for so many years trying to hide her
sexuality, readied for publication.
Bishop shows in her "Sonnet" that gayness, in the double sense of the
word, is the result of an inversion— or at least a redefinition— of (male)
[ tradition. Ultimately, she would like gender distinctions to be considered
I unim portant. In this respect, too, Bishop is seeking integration rather than
opposition. Two years before the publication of "Sonnet" and one year
before "Santarem" came out Bishop wrote in a letter to Joan Keefe,
Undoubtedly gender does play an important part in the
; making of any art, but art is art and to separate writings,
paintings, musical compositions, etc., into two sexes is
to emphasize values in them that are not art. (quoted in
j Gilbert/Gubar, Anthology 1739)
i
I Because of this conviction Bishop also refused throughout her life to be
; included in anthologies of women's writing. While she acknowledges
I gender distinctions, she refuses to allow them to dominate her views on art
: and life.
Bishop had already expressed her skepticism toward gender divisions in
; "Exchanging Hats," which was published in New World W riting in 1956,
: but was never reprinted it in any of Bishop’ s collections. The poem starts,
’ Unfunny uncles who insist
in trying on a lady's hat,
— oh, even if the joke falls flat,
we share your slight transvestite twist
373
in spite of our embarrassment.
Costume and custom are complex.
The headgear of the other sex
inspires us to experiment.
The "we" in this passage definitely includes the poet herself. She delights in
the m ale/fem ale exchange of hats and the action's "transvestite twist." After
the first two stanzas have introduced "unfunny uncles," the poem moves
on to "anandrous aunts" and then to a "you" before returning to an
"unfunny uncle" and an "aunt exemplary and slim." An embracing rhyme
scheme som ewhat parallels this movement and three strophic
enjambements further create an impression of unity and harmony instead
of division. The "you” at the center of "Exchanging Hats" is embraced by
and in turn embraces uncles as well as aunts, men as well as women. It
enjoys the crossing of gender boundaries in the same way as "Santarem’ "s
speaker gladly sees the "male/female . . . notion" dissolve. Gender attributes
j are not m utually exclusive but, as Bishop has written in her twelfth draft of
i
"Santarem," they are "apposite."
Elizabeth Bishop probably chose not to republish this poem because of its
lim ited subject matter of gender distinctions. While "Exchanging Hats"
I
! contains the idea that divisions are unimportant, Bishop chose "Santarem"
' and "Sonnet" as her culminating and lasting expressions of that idea. These
poems w iden the range of spheres of division and they also voice Bishop's !
i |
j view that the divisions between South and North America, while certainly j
; very real, are finally unimportant— at least to her and in her writing. Instead ,
of divisions that would force her to make a choice, Bishop prefers a |
harm onious "conflux" of opposing geographies, ideas, and possibilities, a
"watery, dazzling dialectic." i
Conclusion: Elizabeth Bishop, Voice of the Americas
I
Hans Vaihinger writes that "the test of the correctness of a logical result lies
in practice, and the purpose of thought must be sought not in the reflection
i of a so-called objective world, but in rendering possible the calculation of
events and of operations upon them" (Vaihinger 5). I hope that the
preceding chapters have helped the practice of understanding Elizabeth
Bishop, but I am aware that, as Vaihinger phrases it, "the object of the world
of ideas as a whole is not the portrayal of reality— this would be an utterly
impossible task— but rather to provide us with an instrum ent for finding
our way about more easily in this world" (Vaihinger 15). I do not claim to
have found a "portrayal" of the real Elizabeth Bishop or of the way in which
she fits into the Western Hemisphere. But I do think that w ith the help of
i my view of Elizabeth Bishop as a poet not merely of the United States but of
i
the Americas it will be easier to "find our way about more easily" in her
work.
The hemispheric approach I have pursued shows aspects of the works of
Elizabeth Bishop that other approaches miss. For example, it reveals
Bishop's empathy with outsider figures as part of a larger egalitarian
concern. This is the concern for representing, and thereby em powering, a
variety of aspects, cultures, and countries in the W estern Hemisphere.
l
i
i Women, children, minorities, lower social classes, geographies w ith their
! animals and plants, and American countries reaching from Canada to Brazil
are all given a voice in Bishop's work. They are all considered to be as
im portant as more mainstream aspects of the Western Hem isphere because
375
for Bishop the Americas are one harmonious entity. In the same way as
Walt W hitman has celebrated the diversity of the United States, Elizabeth
Bishop celebrates the harmonious heterogeneity of the W estern
Hemisphere. H er immediate qualification for this celebration is her life as a
traveler, which has made her seek a variety of homes in the Americas,
especially in Nova Scotia, Massachusetts, New York, Washington,
California, Florida, and Brazil. Through her travels she also had first-hand
j knowledge of num erous other parts of the Western Hemisphere.
This inter-American life is reflected in Bishop's work and in its desire to
bring the various parts of the Western Hemisphere closer together. This
desire is already apparent in Bishop s first collection of poems, which she
publishes in 1946 and it culminates in "Santarem" (1978). While she does
not obliterate distinctions between her various Americas, she stresses their
relatedness. By bringing, for example, exotic poetic pictures of Brazil home
to her N orth American audience, she shows a venue for hemispheric
understanding. Elizabeth Bishop makes her poetic voice a Voice of the
Americas, a voice which empowers a variety of American people and
cultures that are commonly disempowered. Thus she widens our concept of
i
America: for her, America is, as she writes in "Santarem," a "conflux."
S
! America’ s diversity is not lost in this conflux but is enriched through its
contact w ith other Americas and with American Others.
Bishop's translations, which have as yet received hardy any critical
attention, are therefore an important aspect of her opus. In them she also
empowers other aspects (writers and cultures) of the W estern Hemisphere
by furnishing them with a w ider audience. In the process, Bishop shows
! once again that inter-American connectedness and understanding are
j possible and desirable.
The hemispheric approach I have used for the works of Elizabeth Bishop
is not appropriate for just any writer of the Western Hemisphere. But as this
dissertation has shown, a hemispheric outlook can yield new results for
num erous American writers. It may reveal some of them to be voices of the
W estern Hemisphere rather than of their own more narrow national
cultures. Five centuries after the rediscovery of the New World, a
hemispheric approach to American literature may help guide us tow ard an
understanding of the Americas as a heterogeneous entity whose parts may
related more closely to each other than to Europe, Africa, or Asia.
Much work remains to be done in this area. As Bishop writes in "The
Bight," "All the untidy activity continues, / awful but cheerful."
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