부산대학교 도서관

Summary: 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.