From the Archive: “The Work!” A Conversation with Elizabeth Bishop

Abstract

From the Archive: “The Work!” A Conversation with Elizabeth Bishop George Starbuck Reprinted with newly restored content from Issue 11 of Ploughshares, Spring 1977 (guest-edited by Jane Shore and DeWitt Henry) A gray late afternoon in winter. Elizabeth Bishop, dressed casually in a Harvard jersey, welcomes the interviewer and answers his polite questions about a gorgeous gilt mirror on her living room wall. Yes, it is Venetian, those little blackamoors are Venetian, but it was picked up at an auction in Rio de Janeiro. The interviewer, sure in advance this is nothing to have asked one of his favorite poets to do, squares away with his cassette recorder on the coffee table and pops a prepared question. A wonderful expanse of books fills the wall behind the sofa. Before long there is laughter. A good memory, the thought of a quirk or extravagance in someone she knows and likes, sets Miss Bishop off. The laughter is quick, sharp, deep. No way to transcribe it. [Editor’s Note: The original interview was cut and occasionally corrected by Elizabeth Bishop. For this reprint, we have used the original typescript, restoring all of the cuts and keeping the text closer to the recorded conversation. We have, however, left in any content that Bishop added to the typescript to elaborate a story or clarify her meaning, so the version that follows is a hybrid of the two versions. Many thanks to Lloyd Schwartz for telling us about the typescript and sending us a copy, as well as to Frank Bidart, Bishop’s executor. The original version of the interview, with all of Bishop’s changes, can be found on our Web site, http://pshares.org. Select Read by Issue and then navigate to Spring 1977.] George Starbuck: I did some research. I got out the travel book you wrote on commission for Time-Life Books. There’s geography too. [End Page 161] You tell such wonderful bright clear stories from the history of Brazil. Elizabeth Bishop: I can’t remember too much of that book. At least I choose not to. A lot of it was a catalog. It was edited by Time-Life Books and they changed a lot of it. And I have a lot more pictures. There’s one—I think the one of Dom Pedro [the last Emperor –ed.] and his official party taken in front of Niagara Falls? Well, there was another pair of those. But that one, I think, is really ironic. He traveled all around this country. And yet he had never been to Iguassu, which is—how much—ten times bigger than Niagara Falls. This was in 1876 and he went to the Philadelphia Centennial. Alexander Bell was there with his telephone—a very young man, whose invention hadn’t been used at all. And Dom Pedro ordered telephones for his summer palace, in Petropolis. He also thought that the ladies of his court didn’t have much to do, so he took them all back Singer sewing machines—which they didn’t like very much. Did you read in that Brazil book how Longfellow gave a dinner party for him in Cambridge? GS: Yes, and that Dom Pedro was fond of Whittier and translated some of his poems into Portuguese. EB: So I looked up some of these translations and I thought it would be poems about slavery because Dom Pedro was so very much against slavery. [Slavery existed in Brazil until 1888. –ed.] But they weren’t about slavery at all. They were poems about birds, nature poems. Poor Whittier was so shy and at the Longfellow dinner party, Dom Pedro, who was over six feet tall, strong and handsome, tried to give the Brazilian abraço, twice—and poor Whittier was frightened to death. GS: You take a set task, like that Time-Life book, and you make it wholly your own. [EB: Not wholly; say two-thirds.] It always seemed that you were just bursting to tell those stories. You’re that way with translations. I discovered something. I went into Geography III without stopping off at the Table of Contents, and so I went into the Joseph Cornell poem without...