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UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Traveling Proprieties: the Disorienting Language & Landscapes of Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4q58d5g1 Author Dodson, Katrina Kim Publication Date 2015 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Traveling Proprieties: the Disorienting Language & Landscapes of Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil By Katrina Kim Dodson A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature and the Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender and Sexuality in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Anne-Lise François, Co-Chair Professor José Luiz Passos, Co-Chair Professor Melinda Y. Chen Professor Lyn Hejinian Professor Barbara Spackman Fall 2015 Traveling Proprieties: the Disorienting Language & Landscapes of Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil © 2015 by Katrina Kim Dodson Abstract Traveling Proprieties: the Disorienting Language & Landscapes of Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil by Katrina Kim Dodson Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature Designated Emphasis in Gender, Women and Sexuality University of California, Berkeley Professor Anne-Lise François, Co-Chair Professor José Luiz Passo, Co-Chair This dissertation locates in the work of twentieth-century North American poet Elizabeth Bishop a collision between questions of propriety and questions of travel that emerge from the poet’s unintended exile in Brazil. Drawing on a much more comparative, intertextual archive of Brazilian and travel literature than existing Bishop scholarship, I explore how the poet’s experience of traveling to Brazil and residing there for nearly two decades, from 1951 to 1971, produces the disorienting effect of the “contact zone,” as Mary Louise Pratt characterizes these spaces of cross- cultural, cross-temporal negotiation. These contact zones arise in Bishop’s work as not only geographical-cultural spaces, but also as lyric and linguistic sites of contestation between norms. I argue that the key tension that inflects Bishop’s writing is one between a poetics of “proper” restraint and formal control versus a poetics of exposure marked as “improperly disproportionate.” This dialectic also marks the ways she judges Brazilian landscapes and expression as improper in their excess and overstatement. I argue that questions of propriety and proportion—What is proper behavior on the part of host and of visitor? How should the Euro-American traveler navigate the pleasures and improprieties of its all being out of scale or “too much”?—resonate throughout Bishop’s representations of Brazil in her poetry, essays, journalism, and letters, and inflect her approach to translations of works by Brazilian writers. I also trace how Bishop’s idea of the “proper lyric,” by which she denigrates the confessional and free-verse poetry prevalent among her American contemporaries in the 1960s and ’70s, begins to transform under this counter-poetics of release and exposure as she matures during her Brazil period and beyond, a debate that continues through the afterlife of her archive. Bishop’s keenly observational and reflective work also forms an important nexus in which to consider how the history of travel to Brazil, especially in the greater context of New World exploration, has produced a disorienting effect on European and North American judgments of proper social relations, expression, and scale amid startlingly new landscapes and cultures. Thus, I examine how Bishop’s particular mapping of propriety and proportion in relation to Brazil intersects with a composite geographical-historical-cultural vision of the country formed through accounts by 1 travelers from the 16th century onward, while also causing the poet to redefine her own relationship to North American poetry. As Bishop goes deeper into Brazilian landscapes, language, and culture than most other twentieth-century Euro-American travelers, perhaps with the exception of Lévi- Strauss, she variously adopts the roles of a Darwin, Robinson Crusoe, and Wordsworth, offering a mix of eyewitness observation, exotic fantasy, and pastoral translations. Chapter One, “The Shock of Encounter,” explores the shock of encounter in Bishop’s early impressions of Brazil as a disorienting site of improper disproportions, both in landscape and expression, as she opens a dialogue with similar accounts by previous European and North American travelers to the country. I show how Bishop is uniquely positioned as a poet-historian of travel to Brazil to articulate a twentieth-century critique of tourism and its imperial undercurrents that nevertheless gives in to the seductive pleasures of this tropical new world. Chapter Two, “Lyric Mutation,” traces the effects of Bishop’s experience in Brazil on her poetics, which I argue undergoes an affective loosening up and takes a more autobiographical turn that challenges Bishop’s self-identification as a “northern” poet of cool restraint, as well as her ideas of what constitutes a proper lyric poem. I read the prose poem series “Rainy Season; Sub-Tropics” as Bishop’s fullest manifestation of her poetic self in Brazil, which becomes the fittingly “southern,” watery site for the release of feelings and desires elsewhere deemed inappropriately excessive. Chapter Three, “Pastoral Translations,” follows a divergent mode of adjudication in Bishop’s relationship to Brazil as she recognizes in the Minas Gerais region, and in the rural and folk-themed Brazilian works she chooses to translate, a pastoral ethos that recalls her Nova Scotia childhood and British Romantic influences on her writing. Here, I identify three kinds of pastoral translation: 1) the pastoral mode itself as a translation of the rural periphery for the metropolis; 2) the translation of British and classical pastoral into the Brazilian context of Minas Gerais, with miners in place of shepherds; and 3) the pastoralizing tendencies of Bishop’s translations of Brazilian works into English. These versions of pastoral act as a counterpoint to the impropriety and excess that Bishop and other travelers more commonly associate with Brazil and the tropics. 2 Contents Acknowledgements ii Abbreviations of Frequently Cited Works iii Introduction 1 Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil: Propriety and Exposure in Life and Art Chapter One 9 The Shock of Encounter I. Introduction II. Tropical Disproportion and Excessive Desire in “Brazil, January 1, 1502” III. Fraught Questions of Travel Chapter Two 25 Lyric Mutation I. Introduction II. Between North and South III. The “Proper” Lyric in a Brazilian Context IV. The Art of “Loosing” Chapter Three 60 Pastoral Translations I. Introduction II. Driving to the Interior: from Rio de Janeiro to Ouro Preto III. Bishop’s Pastoralizing Translations Works Cited 100 i Acknowledgements This dissertation took form over several different phases, and over more years than I had intended, between the San Francisco Bay Area and Brazil, in Rio de Janeiro, Ouro Preto, and São Paulo. It was interrupted by an unexpected two-year detour I took to translate The Complete Stories by Clarice Lispector, who was originally the subject of my final proposed chapter. In returning to this dissertation in late spring of 2015 after an extended hiatus, I realized I had enough material on Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil to focus entirely on this topic. After completing two dissertation-length projects this year, the Lispector and the Bishop, I am left in a state of semi-delirium. That is to say, I have numerous parties to thank for the tremendous amount of support and guidance I have received throughout these years, and I am likely to forget to name them all, given the deadline pressure and the ragged state of my wits at this moment. So please forgive me if I’ve left you out and know that my gratitude extends beyond this document. I am thankful for the mentorship and friendship of my Co-Chair, José Luiz Passos. I had the good fortune to study with him from my first semester of graduate school, and he remains my most illuminating guide into the world of Luso-Brazilian literature, from Machado de Assis to the Luso- Brazilian Enlightenment, and contemporary Brazilian literature. I look forward to our ongoing dialogue about travel literature and translation. My other Co-Chair, Anne-Lise François has that rare talent for seeing right into the heart of my work and expressing its aims in better words than I can. Sometimes elusive, like a spirit of the forest, she always magically appears when I need her most. I owe much of my approach to poetics and thinking about nature to her. I must also credit Anne-Lise, along with Steven Goldsmith and my undergraduate professor Kevis Goodman, for turning me into a secret Romanticist. Lyn Hejinian is a source of endless inspiration. Through my exams and this dissertation, I could always count on Lyn to challenge me with unexpected takes on my research questions that opened up new directions and always to do so with a big, encouraging heart. Mel Chen has expanded my thinking on gender, sexuality, and race, both as my adviser from the Designated Emphasis and as the director of the Center for the Study of Sexual Culture, providing me with a stable position as assistant at the CSSC that enabled me to focus on translating Clarice Lispector. I am also thankful to Mel and the group from the GWS 220 Dissertation Workshop for their valuable feedback and