Elizabeth Bishop - Prose

These things haven’t much to do with poetry, of course. You also spoke of translations in your letter. Perhaps you saw the small group of translations in the November POETRY? — from a long poem by João Cabral de Melo Neto. I am also publishing soon two groups by Carlos Drummond de Andrade, one in POETRY and the other in THE NEW YORK REVIEW. I don’t think much of poetry translations and rarely attempt them, — just when I see a poem by someone I like that I think will go into English with less loss than usual. That means it isn’t necessarily one of the poet’s best poems. My translations are almost as literal as I can make them, — these from Brazilian poets are in the original meters, as far as English meters can correspond to Portuguese — which uses a different system. I wouldn’t attempt the kind of “imitation” Robert Lowell does, although he makes brilliant Lowell-poems that way, frequently. Ben Bellitt’s translations (you mention them) are AWFUL — have you see his Rimbaud? — very sad, since he obviously works so hard at them.

Kenyon Review is publishing, Spring or Summer issue, three very short stories I translated from a Brazilian writer, Clarice Lispector. I hope that’s all the translating I do for some time now.

The most satisfactory translations of poetry, I think, are those Penguin Poets, with a straight prose text at the bottom of the page — at least those in languages I know something of seem quite good. You once mentioned Evtushenko. He seems awfully brash to me. — (I can read just enough Russian to tell how they rhyme, usually.) Pasternak one feels sure is good — and I am surprised by how good Esenin seems — but it is all gamble and guess-work. I never have enjoyed Rimbaud as much as the summer I read him in Brittany, living all alone, and really knowing very little French then. (Although I still think he’s superb, of course.)

You also mention Neruda again. As I probably said, my poem to Marianne Moore was based on a serious poem by him, one of his best. (Mine is not serious.) Since I was interested in surrealism long before I met him, I don’t believe his poetry had much influence on mine. But I like some of it — up to and including the Macchu Pichu poem, more or less. His later poetry is mostly propaganda, and bad. He was my first experience of a full-scale communist poet, in fact my only experience of a good communist poet (there are plenty of bad ones, here and elsewhere — or Brecht, I suppose, is another good one) — sad man, aware, I felt sure, of having betrayed his talent. He said many things that made me feel this, and he would tell me NOT to read certain of his poems, political ones (I knew him during the war), because they weren’t any good. I met Neruda quite by chance; I did NOT like his politics. I had introductions to manyof the other party in Mexico and knew and liked Victor Serge, etc.—

I’ve never studied “Imagism” or “Transcendentalism” or any isms consciously. I just read all the poetry that came my way, old or new. At 15 I loved Whitman; at 16 someone gave me the book of Hopkins that had just been re-issued (I’d already learned the few bits of Hopkins that were in my Harriet Monroe Anthology by heart). I never really liked Emily Dickinson much, except a few nature poems, until that complete edition came out a few years ago and I read it all more carefully. I still hate the oh-the-pain-of-it-all poems, but I admire many others, and, mostly, phrases more than whole poems. I particularly admire her having dared to do it, all alone — a bit like Hopkins in that. (I have a poem abut them comparing them to two self-caged birds, but it’s unfinished.) This is snobbery — but I don’t like the humorless, Martha-Graham kind of person who does like Emily Dickinson …

In fact I think snobbery governs a great deal of my taste. I have been very lucky in having had, most of my life, some witty friends, — and I mean real wit, quickness, wild fancies, remarks that make one cry with laughing. (I seem to notice a tendency in literary people at present to think that any unkind or heavily ironical criticism is “wit,” and any old “ambiguity” is now considered “wit,” too, but that’s not what I mean.) The aunt I liked best was a very funny woman: most of my close friends have been funny people; Lota de Macedo Soares is funny. Pauline Hemingway (the 2nd Mrs. H) a good friend until her death in 1951 was the wittiest person, man or woman, I’ve ever known. Marianne was very funny — Cummings, too, of course. Perhaps I need such people to cheer me up. They are usually stoical, unsentimental, and physically courageous. The poor Brazilians, the people’s, sense of humor is really all that keeps this country bearable a lot of the time. They’re not “courageous,” however — far from it — but the constant political jokes, the words to the sambas, the nicknames etc. are brilliant and a consolation — unfortunately mostly untranslatable. Only their humor sometimes manages to sweeten this repugnant mess of greed & corruption.

I have a vague theory that one learns most — I have learned most from having someone suddenly make fun of something one has taken seriously up until then. I mean about life, the world, and so on. This is again a form of snobbery. I dislike extremely bookish people (I do happen to love some, but I think they’d be better off if they weren ’ t so bookish), and I don’t enjoy writers who talk literary anecdotes all the time or are preoccupied in putting other writers in the proper pecking order. Criticism is important, “weeding out has to be done,” (R. Lowell), but I don’t want to do it. I feel that art would probably struggle along without it in very much the same way, probably. I trust my own taste and usually don’t want to explain it — at the same time I occasionally wish I could it explain it better.

You mention Ernst again. Oh dear — I wish I had never mentioned him at all, because I think he’s usually a dreadful painter. I liked that Histoire Naturelle I mentioned, and his photo-collages still seem brilliant. Klee I like, of course, and Schwitters — but then — I like so much painting. Some Seurats, for example — one smallish quiet, gray & blue one of Honfluer, with posts sticking up out of the beach — at the Museum of Modern Art in N.Y. — I’d give anything to have painted that! I often think I have missed my vocation, and I do paint myself occasionally — not at all well. But I like music just as much, and that is what one misses most here. I believe I must have the “artistic temperament…”

Now I’ll be confidential. The Pauline Hemingway mentioned above sent my first book to Ernest in Cuba. He wrote her he liked it, and, referring to “the Fish,” I think, “I wish I knew as much about it as she does.” Allowing for exaggeration to please his ex-wife — that remark has really meant more to me than any praise in the quarterlies. I knew that underneath Mr. H and I really are a lot alike. I like only his short stories and first two novels — something went tragically wrong with him after that — but he had the right idea about lots of things. (NOT about shooting animals. I used to like deep-sea fishing too, and still go out once in a while, but without much pleasure, & in my younger tougher days I liked bull-fights, but I don’t think I could sit through one now.) H said, horribly, that critics in N. Y. were like “angleworms in a bottle.” Perhaps Gibbon put it better: “A cloud of critics, of compilers, of commentators, darkened the face of learning, and the decline of genius was soon followed by the corruption of taste.”

I don’t like arguments (too bad, since I now live where argument, mostly about politics, is the favorite occupation …) and I approve of D.H. Lawrence’s saying he hated people discussing politics and the news they’d all read in the same newspapers. I admire both Hemingway & Lawrence — along with others — for living in the real world and knowing how to do things. I am a little vain of my own ability to do things, perhaps, — or perhaps I have just been lucky in my interests, experiences, and friends. (And perhaps on the other hand I have just dissipated my energies.) But I’m often thunderstruck by the helplessness, ignorance, ghastly taste, lack of worldly knowledge, and lack of observation of writers who are much more talented than I am. Lack of observation seems to me one of the cardinal sins, responsible for so much cruelty, ugliness, dullness, bad manners — and general unhappiness, too.