Elizabeth Bishop's Brazil

Bethany Hicok

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780813938547
• eBook ISBN: 9780813938554
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

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

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 Drawing on archival sources that include Bishop's unpublished travel writings and providing provocative new readings of the poetry, Elizabeth Bishop's Brazil is a long-overdue exploration of a pivotal phase in this great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

Index

Italicized page numbers refer to illustrations.

aesthetic choices, 140–41

Aleijadinho, 57

Alliance for Progress, 48

Alves, Manuelzinho, 26–30, 32–33

Amazon, 7, 25–26, 44, 121–46; anthropological studies of, 122, 123, 124, 130; author’s travel on, 144–46, 160n2; Bishop’s travel account of trip, 131, 161nn31–32; and Brazilian medicine, 141; as cross-cultural contact zone, 122, 133, 135, 146; historic background of, 122; “On the Amazon,” 121, 142, 145, 161n41; riverboat travel, 5, 131, 144–46; and “The Riverman,” 122, 123, 124, 125–30, 139, 141, 160n15; and “Santarém,” 7, 121, 122, 123–24, 130–41, 142–44, 161n41; and “A Trip to Vigia,” 43–45, 142–43

American foreign policy, 140

anthropology, 6, 101, 122, 123, 124–25, 130

anti-America critique, 49

anti-Semitism, 154n34

Architecture Biennial (1951), 11

armadillos, 25–26

Ashbery, John, 113

astrological imagery, 18–19, 24, 32

Athill, Diana, 153n17

automobiles, 37, 39–40, 43, 46

ballad form, 66, 110–13. See also folk balladry

Bandeira, Manuel, 4, 64, 66, 73–74

Barata, Ruy, 151n18

Barker, Ilse and Kit, 24, 33

Baumann, Anny, 33, 124, 153n51

Belém, 43, 45, 131–33, 143

Bellos, Alex, 120

Berger, Charles, 137

Bernardes, Sérgio, 9, 11, 17

Berryman, John, 65

Besner, Neil, 3, 95, 154n23, 157nn113–114; “Where Rivers Meet,” 160n2

Bhabha, Homi, 6, 20–21, 22

Biele, Joelle, ed., Elizabeth Bishop and the “New Yorker,” 147n1

Bishop, Elizabeth: in Brazil from 1951 to 1966, 1, 33; childhood and family of, 75–76; connecting prose to poetics of, 99, 157n8; as cultural ambassador, 13; decision to stay in Brazil, 14–17; duration of stay in Brazil, 8; as et...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Prologue
• One: Samambaia and the Architecture of Class
• Two: Letters from the Road
• Three: Bishop’s Brazilian Translations
• Four: Bishop’s Brazilian Politics
• Five: Amazon Worlds
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index