Elizabeth Bishop rediscovered ...at Berkeley Book Festival in the context of Brazil!

Katrina Dodsen, who just won the PEN Translation Prize for the short stories of Clarice Lispecter, has also completed her dissertation on Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil.  Simultaneously, a book has been published by UVA by Bethany Hicok, drawing on archival sources of unpublished travel writings and exploring the impact of Brazil on Bishop's life and art.in  Elizabeth Bishop's Brazil.


 Bishop arrived in Brazil at age 40 and remained for nearly two decades.   It details her life with Brazilian aristocrat and architect Lota de Macedo Soares and with Brazil and discusses little known translationsof famous poets such as Carlos Drummond de Andrade(1902-1987)  which film we saw in this series for the Auteur, Author part of the Berkeley Book Festival. "D"Amor Natural" by Heddy Honigmann(Netherlands/Brazil) (1996) was discussed by Katrina Dodson, Idra NoveyDebut novel, Ways to Disappear is about a translator's search for a missing Brazilian author) and Berkeley Professor Ramond Naddaff, co founder and editor of Zone Books.  Honigmann's strategy was to  interviewed people of the poet's s generation who had known him; they responded to his last book of erotic poems which were found and published after his death. A subtext is how elderly people explore their own memories and fantasies of sexual life, which has some very humorous as well as touching moments.

This project especially interests me, because on my Fulbright, I researched the life of Anna Akhmatova when she was in exile in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, a little known part of her life, which had great impact on her.  I interviewed people who had known her on video footage and traced her apartments where she had lived, and the buildings where she gave readings even interviewing her neighbor at that time, who was my guide as well as the son of the Cultural Minister who protected Anna Akhmatova by seeing that she got rations.  I reviewed all of AA's poems from this period in translation, and worked with one of her most famous translators, in London, who had been on a project with the Russian department in Princeton.   The chairs at Princeton and at UPENN read the article and so did AA"s biographer, at Yale; all thought it a good piece, but the Russian Review would not publish it because I did not know the Russian language?? !!  The article was published in St. Petersburg, by a visiting Editorial director who took the piece back, and published it in Russian, though I never saw it.  A pity...that it was not published here.  It is a piece the New Yorker would have liked but they only take commissioned work...alas!  At least it was a very satisfying piece of research and writing, probably one of the better ones I have ever done. .

Mark Strand was a great admirer of Bishop's. ..perhaps because they shared a Nova Scotia childhood. I don't think I ever heard him read and not pay tribute to Elizabeth Bishop at some point.  I heard her read at the Academy of Poets reading at the Guggenheim museum, in the 70's when she would have taken over Robert Lowell's chair at Harvard.  The film, "Welcome to this House, A film on Elizabeth Bishop: by Barbara Hammer (2015)  was shown.  Hammer has also done a film of the author Sebald. Katrina Dodson introduced the film.  The focus is on Bishop's "Conflicted need both to stay still and to move."  Hammer approaches the subject through visits to her home in Nova Scotia where she grew up, with her grandparents, and then to boarding school, and onward...along with her adult homes in Key West and in Brazil, and in selected poems to reveal Bishop's personality as well as art.  The interviews with the housekeepers and maids who waited on her, did not find her a "nice" person, because she was so guarded about her privacy when writing; they found her difficult as she rejected their reaching out to her.  Troubled by alcoholism, which would eventually break down her relationship with Lota, and cause her to create her own home in a village nearby, and take a new lover in an inn keeper there.  Lota's nurturing of Elizabeth Bishop has been given homage here. Robert Lowell plays a role as he visits her in Brazil, and as treated in the play about the letters they wrote to one another in a Berkeley Rep production last year, and in the published correspondence between them, it is clear that their friendship was an enduring one and Bishop ends well, by inheriting his chair at Harvard University. 

Seeing both films and hearing Colm Toibin(though he did not speak about Elizabeth Bishop, but focussed on Ireland)  has also returned me to Colm Toibin's 150 page book which is a hommage to her influence on him:  "On Elizabeth Bishop" (2015) which I am rereading, more meditatively, since seeing these films on Drummond and on Bishop , and hearing the discussion. Of course, the poem for which Elizabeth Bishop is most canonized is: One Art which I have always loved.  Especially in my adult years...over the age of 50.  I can substitute my own losses in her lines...?


One Art

Related Poem Content Details

BY ELIZABETH BISHOP

The art of losing isn’t hard to master; 

so many things seem filled with the intent 

to be lost that their loss is no disaster. 

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster 

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. 

The art of losing isn’t hard to master. 

Then practice losing farther, losing faster: 

places, and names, and where it was you meant 

to travel. None of these will bring disaster. 

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. 

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, 

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. 

I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster. 

—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.

Elizabeth Bishop, “One Art” from The Complete Poems 1926-1979. Copyright © 1979, 1983 by Alice Helen Methfessel.  LLC.Elizabeth Bishop painted while on Key West, and in Brazil: watercolors, which are assembled here, absent the pieces from Brazil...I have a copy and reread and enjoyed her watercolors, a medium, I also enjoyed for a period of time, commemorating scenes in Litchfield, Connecticut at the house on the lake, where we went for 20 years, each summer. I loved Key West. I attended a conference when I was teaching on naturalists and writing, including Annie Dillard, Terry Tempest Williams, Peter Matthiesen, and so on....very memorable looking at sunsets and biking past the houses on Key West, which is very "picturesque".  The Hemingway villa with its many cats(still in residence ) was outstanding.   EB mentions visiting Hemingway and loving his Miro painting... in the prose accompanying these watercolors, which seem inspired by her friendship with a woman painter in particular !  

I own and have read, of course these books. Geography III is what she read from in 1977 at the Guggenheim, and she signed my edition.  On line it is worth $3500 but who will pay it! 

 

 

So my first summe reads are returning me to Key West and transporting me to Brazil of another time.