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Abstract
I contend that not to examine the literary translations Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) published during her lifetime is not to understand her work. Although studied principally as a poet, Bishop consistently pursued translation throughout her career. Out of the roughly 125 poems she published, 25—or one fifth—were translations. Her first published translations, four poems by the French Surrealist Max Jacob, appeared in 1950, and her final translations, poems by the Mexican poet and intellectual Octavio Paz, were published in the 1970s. In between she translated seven Brazilian writers and poets, including Clarice Lispector and Carlos Drummond de Andrade.
I compare Bishop's literary translations to her original writing in order to extract key themes that appear in her texts, as well as to show how translation—defined more broadly as transportation or movement from one linguistic, geographic, cultural, temporal, or subjective "position" or "location" to another—is a key figure or trope in her oeuvre. In addition to Bishop's published work, I analyze her manuscripts, unpublished drafts, and correspondence in order to show how translation played a fundamental role in her artistic development.
In this book, I contribute to Bishop scholarship by offering the first comprehensive study of her endeavors as a published literary translator. Within the field of twentieth-century English-language poetry, I provide an important example of the understudied figure of the poet-translator, one who translates poetry from other languages and cultures into English. My work also speaks to the fields of "translation studies" and "the literature of the Americas." Though Bishop believed a translator should be as loyal to the original as possible, I argue that translation—in her case and in general—is ultimately a transformative endeavor, a process that turns the original into something both other and new. By providing an example of a U.S. writer who promoted and was influenced by Latin American writers, my work offers an innovative study of inter-American influence, which must be studied in both directions, lest readers assume that the literature of the North always enriches or "improves" the "lesser" literature of the South.
