A well-handled contemporary poetic associationcopy of the first US edition of Elizabeth Bishop’s translation of the diary of a Brazilian girl in the “far-off” provincial diamond-mining town, Diamantina: the American poet, William Jay Smith’s copy.
A near contemporary and a fellow prize-winning American poet, William Jay Smith (1918–2015) followed Bishop in being appointed Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, 1968-1970 (the nineteenth appointee; Bishop was eighth, serving 1949-50). He later described her as a “tutelary spirit,” alongside Edwin Arlington Robinson, Marianne Moore, Theodore Roethke and Louise Bogan; Smith had first come across Bishop’s poetry as a freshman in 1935, and, like Bishop (and Moore), he “adore[d] particulars and exact observation” and “emphasize[d] wit and the skilful use of traditional forms” (Frank, 1998). He was not, however, a fan of her prose, observing much later in a CPR interview: “Elizabeth Bishop wrote a few essays but they were much inferior stylistically to her poems. It was clear that she had devoted less time and attention to them than she had to her poems”; no
notes or marginalia feature here to hint at his thoughts on her work as a translator. We do, however, have Bishop’s thoughts on Smith’s translation of Jules Laforgue (and the impossibility of translating poetry); her mostly favourable review, ‘The Manipulation of Mirrors,’ had been published the year before in New Republic.
A Brazilian literary favourite, which had been repeatedly recommended to Bishop, in her introduction the poet likens sections to Chaucer and “Wordsworth’s poetical children and country people, or Dorothy Wordsworth’s wandering beggars,” whilst “occasionally entries referring to slavery seemed like notes for an unwritten, Brazilian, feminine version of Tom Sawyer”. It did not sell well, nor bring in the income Bishop had hoped.