Elizabeth Bishop and Translation by Machova Mariana;

Author:Machova, Mariana;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Notes

1. The essay appears in Poems, Prose, and Letters 438–48, and in the 2011 edition of Bishop’s Prose, 342–51.

2. See notes for the session in VC 71.4.

Chapter 7

Octavio Paz

The last author Elizabeth Bishop translated in her lifetime was the Mexican poet and essayist Octavio Paz (1914–1998), whom she knew in Boston in the 1970s. At that time Paz was already a distinguished figure both in his native Mexico and internationally, with many of his best-known books published, although the most important literary awards—the Cervantes Award, the Neustadt Prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature—were still ahead of him. In 1971–1972, Paz delivered the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard, and he taught other classes there in the following years. He and his second wife, Marie-José (or Marie Jo), lived in Cambridge and they soon became a part of Elizabeth Bishop’s circle of friends. They met early in 1972 and Bishop, who also taught at Harvard at that time, was immediately charmed by the couple. In a letter to Selden Rodman, on February 11, 1972, she mentions having just met Paz: “I enjoy him & his wife both very much. They’re amusing and unpretentious and nice.” (OA 558). She went to hear Paz’s lectures, and was happy to discover that she could understand the Spanish. In the years to follow, the Pazes formed an important part of Bishop’s social life during their stays in Boston, and were among her correspondents when they were back in Mexico. Bishop praised their friendliness and open “Latin temperament,” calling them “the only people, or almost, with whom one can have ‘fun’ here” (OA 586). She gave parties for them, including an Easter breakfast party where Paz got introduced to the Easter egg hunt tradition (“Octavio madly searching my bedroom and bathroom for eggs” [OA 565]), took them for a trip to see the New England winter in January 1974, and later that year she visited them briefly in Mexico, where she and Paz participated in a TV debate on poetry together with Joseph Brodsky and Vasco Popa (“I felt I really wasn’t up to the three gentlemen poets, who had said they weren’t going to argue or discuss ‘theories’ and then did, vehemently—for 2 hours” [OA 598]).

Shortly after they met, Bishop agreed to translate some of Paz’s poems. Paz had been translated into English before: there were three different translations of his long poem “Sun Stone” (“Piedra del Sol,” 1957) published in the 1960s (one of the translators was Muriel Rukeyser, Bishop’s classmate at Vassar for a brief period); from 1970 on, the main translator and editor of Paz’s poetry was Eliot Weinberger, whose close collaboration with Paz eventually led to the publication of The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz 1957–1987 in 1987 which also contained some of Bishop’s translations.

In a letter sent from Cambridge on March 13, 1972, Paz thanks Bishop enthusiastically (both in English and in Spanish) for having decided to translate his poems, and he sends her the texts he has chosen:

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