Brief Biography of Elizabeth Bishop
Influences on Elizabeth Bishop’s
Poetry
The major literary movements that
influenced the way Bishop wrote and presented her poetry are the: Modernism,
Baroque, Romanticism, Imagism, Surrealism and Symbolism. Modernism has a strong
impact mostly when it concerns what is said to be modern themes, shown in her
poem “Roosters”, which implies “considerations of the causes and effects of war
[…] and modern meditations on guilt [and] spiritual
poverty” (Travisano, 1988: 73). Some critics assert that Bishop’s
“attachment to nature and her experiments with the powers and limits of
imagination” (Travisano, 1988: 11) is in fact a response to the romantic
tradition. Nevertheless, Bishop managed to incorporate some aspects of the
aesthetic of surrealism in her style, especially her fascination with dreamlike
states (Travisano, 1988: 42). It would be a “surrealism of everyday life”, that
is, “a casual, consciously controlled revision of surrealism based on freshly
seeing the unlikely features of ordinary things” (Travisano, 1988: 45).
Elements from Imagism can be found in Bishop’s dramatization of the act of
seeing, extending the “imagism in time
by melding a succession of related images” (Travisano, 1988: 72). Symbolism is
also present, but mostly because of her different approach to the doctrine of
correspondences of Baudelaire, “she draws her symbols back towards rigorously
observed natural fact” (Travisano, 1988: 107). Lastly, the movement with which
she identified herself, perhaps, the most is the Baroque. Mainly because of
Elizabeth’s interest in the twists and turns of perception, and “the element of
surprise, of unlooked for discovery” (Travisano, 1988: 12), which is characteristic
of Baroque. Besides, Bishop considered that the aim of poetry was “to present
the mind thinking, [which] allowed her to capture transient moments in all
their unlikeliness and bring them back alive” (Travisano, 1988: 57).
To
sum up the influences on her poetry according to Travisano:
But neither term,
classic or romantic, adequately defines her. Her mature work is really
postneoclassical, postromantic, postsymbolist, and even postsurrealist in that
she derives much from each of these movements – a devotion to craft, a concern
for nature, a superiority to rhetoric, an alertness to the promptings of the
unconscious – but she is really of none of them. (…) She sees the limitations
of each approach with cool detachment, and that she has deliberately chosen her
own path. If there is one artistic movement to which she felt closest, it is an
older one – the baroque. (...) The element of surprise, of unlooked for
discovery, was the quality Bishop most prized in baroque art. (Travisano, 1988:
11-12)
Poetic Themes
In the words of Thomas Travisano in Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic Development
concerning both the influences on her poetry and the underlying themes:
The three major
phases of Bishop’s career imply an evolving response to the important poetic
movement of her time. Her early phase shows her as a reluctant master of the
symbolist’s private world, a world that renounces history for the ambiguous
pleasures of enclosure. Her middle phase reflected years of travel and
observation, through which isolation might be at least temporarily bridged. It
“extends the Imagist instant”, combining the precision and conciseness of
imagism with a liberating dimension of temporal development. Her last phase
reverses the earliest, engaging with personal and private history. The yearning
for enclosure is still powerful, but it is controlled by a calm and expansive
vision. (Travisano, 1988: 7)
Many of the themes present in
Bishop’s poetry are “auto-biographical”. The value she cherished the most was
her love of accuracy (Millier, 1993: 80), even in her own life she always
strove for perfection, which is perhaps one of the reasons why she did not
write many poems, but also the reason why her poetry was so widely respected.
Her childhood interest for maps established her themes of history and geography
that feature in some of her most famous poems such as in “Questions of Travel”
and also in the titles of her books. The loss she experienced most vividly when
she was a child, but also during her adult life culminated in her celebrated poem
“One Art”. A sense of dividedness and isolation might have arisen from an
inability to find a real physical home, as well as a necessity to escape
civilization and finding comfort in nature (Travisano, 1988: 21), as in “Crusoe
in England”. Some themes such as the passage of time, the mutability of things
and the manipulation of perspective are hard to separate from one another due
to their convergence in Bishop’s poems, such as is “In the Waiting Room” and “Paris,
7 A.M.”.
Brazil
Elizabeth Bishop struggled with her
feelings towards Brazil, one of the places that was truly her home, and its
people. On the one hand, she felt a strong sense of belonging in Brazil and was
utterly fascinated by its beauty, nature and easiness with which she could be
herself and more in touch with her past experiences (Britto, 1999: 10). On the
other hand, she refused to learn the native language (Britto, 1999: 41) and
repudiated the corruption intrinsic to the politics in the country (Britto,
1999:25). Bishop’s feeling towards the primitivism of Brazil represents this
dilemma (Britto, 1999: 22). Although she admired how much closer to nature the
people and herself felt there, she also loathed the sense that Brazilians
refused to learn new ways and the importance they gave to money (Britto, 1999:
24).
Poets were deeply admired in Brazil,
perhaps excessively so. Bishop believed that Brazil was culturally poor and the
intellectuals were overly provincial (Britto, 1999: 17). Moreover, Elizabeth was highly
critical of the Brazilian literature as is stated by Paulo Henriques Britto in Poemas do Brasil: “De outra feita,
comenta que “de modo geral os livros brasileiros são brochuras muito mal
impressas em papel de péssima qualidade, com reproduções execráveis […] são
pequenos e escritos sem grande cuidado”. Os poetas são “ruins […] em sua
maioria”.” (Britto, 1999: 25).
Nevertheless, Bishop did admire and
acclaim some works of Brazilian writers, such as Machado de Assis, Clarice
Lispector and Helena Morley (Alice Brant), whose book Minha Vida de Menina, Elizabeth translated into English due to a
strong emotional identification with its themes of family, affection and
childhood (Britto, 1999: 18).
As far as Brazilian poets are concern, Britto also affirms that:
As far as Brazilian poets are concern, Britto also affirms that:
Em relação à poesia de Manuel Bandeira, sempre fez
restrições – numa carta comenta que ele é "muito acomodado”. (…) Mais de
uma vez a poeta afirmou sua predileção por Drummond, de quem traduziu vários
poemas: “Gosto de Drummond […] mais que de Bandeira, eu acho” (…) Também
manifesta admiração por Cabral – “Ele é o único de quem eu realmente gosto
muito”. Traduz trechos de Morte e Vida Severina numa revista de poesia
norte-americana, e, como observa Regina Przybycien, um ano depois publica “The
burglar of Babylon”, um poema em forma de balada popular que sem dúvida revela
o impacto da obra de Cabral sobre ela. (Britto, 1999: 17)
Analysis of Elizabeth Bishop’s translation of “Morte e Vida Severina” by
João Cabral de Melo Neto
“Morte e Vida Severina” is a famous
poem by João Cabral de Melo Neto and it deals essentially with the problems of
the Brazilian underclass (Millier, 1993: 338) and the theme of travel to change
and improve one’s life. The first parts of the poem may give the reader a
depressing sense of hopelessness, due to the description of the lives of so
many that are toiled with work, who have nothing that can be said to be their
own, except the place where they will eventually be buried. The statement that
only work related to death is valued and wanted only adds to the already grim
misery and despair, and consequently leads to the poetic subject’s belief that
only death can save him from such a dreadful future. It is then that José, the
man with whom the poetic subject is talking, receives the news that his son has
just come to life. The end of the poem represents the hope of life and the
feeling of unity that people who have close to nothing which is material, can
have so much to give and share emotionally with each other.
Before I begin my analysis on this
translation, I believe it is worth mentioning that translation always implies
loss of some kind. It may not be possible to maintain both meaning and form at
all times from the ST (source text) into the TT (target text). Furthermore,
translation from one language to another, in this case from Brazilian
Portuguese to American English involves adaptation of the system and structure
of the SL (source language) to the TL (target language). Apart from this
obligatory changes, Bishop remained as faithful as she could to the ST
(considering that her knowledge of Portuguese was faulty), and the translation
she made is quite literal.
The analysis will include the first
thirty-six lines of the second part of The
Death and Life of a Severino.
In these first lines we can see a
few small differences, such as the addition of the subject “He” in the first
line, because the subject must be explicit in the sentence in the TL, but can
be omitted in the SL. The change from gritos
(substantive) to “crying” (verb) is an optional transposition, with an addition
of meaning because “crying” implies a kind of despair that is not necessarily
inherent to the word gritos. An
absence of the interjection Ó is
present in the TT. In the fourth line, there is an attempt to translate a way
of speaking which is characteristic of the Brazilian language. There is also a
more obvious alteration of the form of the poem, from three lines in the ST to
four lines in the TT, which may be explained by the occurrence of a
compensation to make the verses of the poem regular.
One of the most striking changes in
these verses is the use of the conjugation of some verbs, such as estais, dizei and sabeis (the latter in the following slide), which denote a formal
tone in the SL, which is not maintained in the TL because it would make it
exceedingly hard to do so and it would be, perhaps, unnecessary. Consequently,
in the fourth line of the first verse, the original sentence implies an order,
in opposition to the TT, which the adding of the adverb “kindly” and the change
of meaning in the translation from dizei
to “inform”, is suggestive of a request.
In the second verse presented here
there is an optional transposition with the change of defunto (de nada) to “defunct (nobody)”, a conversion of a
substantive to an adjective. Furthermore, there is an alteration in the last
verse from morada to “resting place”,
which changes the meaning implied in the verse, because morada implies the owning of a property, which is important because
it is suggested later in the poem that the place where the people of the lower
classes are buried is the only “property” they will ever have.
There is little to be said about
these two verses except for three modifications that are made in the TT. The
first one is the omission of the word E
in the TT, which represents a scheme change from a repetition in the ST to its
absence in the TT, because that word in the beginning will be present in some
of the following verses of the ST. The second change represents and optional transposition
from a verb in the ST chamar to a
substantive in the TT “name”. Lastly, there is a generalization from the
superordinate Lavrador to the hyponym
“Farmer”, which is more specific, but I consider that the change was made in
order to maintain the resonance of the choice of words (Lavrador/ lavra →
Farmer/farming).
I consider that there is an
unnecessary expansion in the last two lines of the first verse of the TT due to
the addition of the words “out”, “on” and “long”, which add nothing to the
meaning of the poem. In the second verse the choice to translate onde to “from”, instead of the more
literal translation to “where”, is requested by the choice to translate the
verb começar to “start” in the
previous verse, which is not a meaningful alteration because it does not change
the meaning of the verses. A more significant change is the translation of the
word Caatinga to “driest of lands”
which presents a generalization, since Caatinga
is a plant which only grows where the land is extremely dry, hence the choice
of translation. Also because it could be quite difficult for an American reader
to understand that Caatinga is a
plant.
These last two verses are the most
problematic ones so far. In the first verse there is an obvious change of
emphasis. Whereas in the ST the emphasis is in the word morte (death) as subject, and in the TT the emphasis is in the word
“he” as subject. This poses an evident alteration to the meaning of the poem.
In a poem where the place that is being described is so filled with death, in
the ST there is an explicit meaning that even death itself dies in such a place.
That powerful, yet ominous, meaning is utterly lost in translation, as well as
the play with the words morte, morrida e
matada. Although the emphasis is
maintained in the word “death” as subject in the second verse, the word play
and the rhyme of the words morrida,
matada e emboscada is not
retrieved.
All in all, I consider that Bishop’s
translation is quite literal and faithful to the original. Apart from some
aspects, such as the necessary alteration of the order of the elements in the
sentence in the translation, changes have not been excessively made. There was
an attempt to maintain both form and meaning, but it was not always successful,
such as in the last two verses, which is the most obvious example. Perhaps the
lack of knowledge of Portuguese had a negative impact on the most difficult
parts of Bishop’s translation. However, it is still a surprisingly successful
effort to translate a language that is known to be complicated to learn.
Bibliography
· Bishop,
E., & Britto, P. (1999). Poemas do Brasil. São Paulo: Companhia das
Letras.
· Bishop, E., & Giroux, R. (1994). One art. New York: Farrar,
Straus, Giroux.
· Millier, B. (1993). Elizabeth Bishop: Life and Memory of It.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
· Travisano, T. (1988). Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic Development
(2nd ed.). Charlottesville: University Press
of Virginia.
