Elizabeth Bishop - Prose

Translating poetry is like converging on a flame with a series of mirrors, mirrors of technique and understanding, until the flame is reflected in upon itself in a wholly new and foreign element. Such an operation is rarely, if ever, successful: the manipulation of the mirrors depends to such an extent on the sensibility and skill of the translator.

Besides being a pretty image, this is a true one, as anyone who has ever tried translating poetry will know. But surely, besides sensibility and skill, it depends (about 50 per cent, I’d say) on luck: the possibilities of the second language’s vocabulary. Without luck the worst happens, the flame goes out, and we shouldn’t blame Mr. Smith when it does.

Lune, ô dilettante Lune,

A tous les climats commune,

Tu vis hier le Missouri,

Et les remparts de Paris,

Les fiords bleus de la Norwège,

Les pôles, les mers, que sais-je?

“Moon, oh dilettante Moon,

With all the climates in common,

You saw the Missouri yesterday,

And the ramparts of Paris,

The blue fjords of Norway,

The poles, the oceans, and what else?”

But if anyone thinks he could do better he should sit down and try. Some of the poems, those with longer lines and those in free verse, are more successful.

It is a pity the poems have not been printed bi-lingually, or at least with a facsimile or two in the poet’s curious, “artistic,” but legible hand-writing. The four sketches from the notebooks are worth seeing, but Laforgue seems to have been so much of a piece (or is this a delusion we have about certain poets? It seems true of Hopkins, too): letters, poems, life — even to his appearance, that surely there should be a picture of that reserved, composed young face under its top hat? And even if this is not a critical study, shouldn’t Verlaine’s influence at least be mentioned? And — this has nothing to do with Mr. Smith’s work, of course — the 1956 abstract water-color on the jacket doesn’t go at all with Laforgue’s sketches of 1885 inside.

Mr. Smith also says:

Laforgue was one of the few poets who could write convincing poetry around the tremendous discoveries of his age.… Laforgue was in so many respects in advance of his time that it is not surprising to find him writing poems one would not have thought possible until the present day.

I am not sure who that “one” is — but isn’t this putting the cart before the horse? Do our three or four great poets who were born around the time of Laforgue’s death, seventy years ago now, and who derive the most from him in one way or another, give us much more of what we are appalled to recognize as “our” time than he did? The truth may be, I think, that poetically we are now away behind it.

* * *

This book should be most useful to: 1. very young, almost embryonic, poets and critics; 2. the more knowing reader whose languages don’t include French or who is lazy about reading it; 3. anyone at all curious about the difficult work of translation. These should read it and then, if they are also interested to the slightest degree in poetry, they should supply themselves with a French grammar and dictionary and the two volumes of the poems, published by Mercure de France, or even with the small volume in the Poètes d’aujourd’hui series, which skimps the poetry but is a fascinating little book, with pictures, and then, well — perhaps sign up at the nearest Berlitz School.

1956

Minha Vida de Menina: The Book and Its Author

When I first came to Brazil, in 1952, I asked my Brazilian friends which Brazilian books I should begin reading. After naming some of Machado de Assis’s novels or short stories, or Euclides da Cunha’s Os Sertões, they frequently recommended this little book. Two or three even said it was the best thing that had appeared in Brazilian letters since Machado de Assis, and then they were apt to launch into animated exchanges of their favorite stories from it.

In English the title means “My Life as a Little Girl,” or “Young Girl,” and that is exactly what the book is about, but it is not reminiscences; it is a diary, the diary actually kept by a girl between the ages of twelve and fifteen, in the far-off town of Diamantina, in 1893–1895. It was first published in 1942 in an edition of 2,000 copies, chiefly with the idea of amusing the author’s family and friends, and it was never advertised. But its reputation spread in literary circles in Rio de Janeiro and there was a demand for it, so in 1944 a second edition was brought out, then two more, in 1948 and 1952, making 10,000 copies in all. George Bernanos, who was living in the country as an exile when it first appeared, discovered it and gave away a good many copies to friends, a fact to which the author and her husband modestly attribute much of its success. He wrote the author a letter which has been used, in part, on the jackets of later editions. Copies of Minha Vida de Menina are now presented every year as prize-books to students of the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Rio.

The more I read the book the better I liked it. 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; Wordsworth’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 diary; but its forced maturity and closed atmosphere are tragically different from the authentic child-likeness, 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 half-way through the book I decided to try.

I learned that “Helena Morley” was still very much alive; that the name was the pseudonym of Senhora Augusto Mario Caldeira Brant and that she was living in Rio, well known and much loved in Rio society. Her husband was then, although almost eighty years old, acting as president of the Bank of Brazil for the second time. The poet Manuel Bandeira, an old friend of the family, kindly gave me an introduction. Armed with a friend, Lota de Macedo Soares, to serve as interpreter because my spoken Portuguese was very limited, I went to call.

Senhora Brant, or Dona Alice as I shall call her in the Brazilian way (“Helena” and “Morley” are both names from her English father’s family), now lives in a large, stuccoed, tile-roofed house, on the street that borders the “Lagôa,” or lagoon. It is a fashionable place to live. The house is set in a yard with flowerbeds, coconut palms, eight fruit-trees and a servants’ house and vegetable garden at the back. A stuccoed fence and wooden gates protect it from the street. A large Cadillac is sometimes parked in the driveway, and its mulatto chauffeur wears a white yachting cap: Cadillac, chauffeur, and white cap are all contemporary Rio fashion. Nearby rise the extravagant Rio mountains and across the lagoon towers the one called the “Gavea,” or crow’s-nest, because its shape reminded the sixteenth-century Portuguese explorers of the lookout platforms on their little vessels.