Chapter 6 - Brazil

Summary

Colonialism, postcolonialism, Bishop’s Brazil, tensions between travel and home, translation

Bishop’s twenty years in Brazil constitute one of her richest and most sustained periods of literary production. She wrote many major poems and stories in Brazil, and also translated Brazilian writers’ poems and stories from Portuguese into English. Her fifteen-year relationship with Brazilian Lota de Macedo Soares was a strong influence on Bishop’s personal life and provided her with an invaluable introduction to the country’s language, the culture of its stratified society, and its geography. Bishop’s Brazilian years were marked by the perennial tensions she accurately perceived – and represented in her work – between North American and Brazilian norms and worldviews. Interwoven in these tensions is Bishop’s own lifelong exploration in her art of the conflicts between conceptions of travel and of home. The ambivalent reception of Bishop’s work by Brazilian readers and critics – complemented at times by North American misconceptions of Bishop’s representations of Brazil – persists to this day.