[In the following essay, Martins compares the themes of childhood and family in the work of Drummond and American poet Elizabeth Bishop, a well-respected translator of Drummond's work.]

The quotation in the title is taken from “Travelling in the Family,” one of Elizabeth Bishop's first translations of Carlos Drummond de Andrade. As in “Infancy,” “Family Portrait,” and “The Table,” also translated by Bishop, Drummond invites us on a fascinating trip to the past, filled with memories of childhood and family portraits. Coincidentally, the period in which Bishop translates these poems, during the sixties, is also the time for her to rethink and write about her own origins. Poets of memory, Bishop and Drummond confirm that the poetic memory not only nurtures itself from “the violence” in which things “inhabit us,” but depends on an essential temporal and spatial distancing to be converted into words; this is a time when, as Costa Lima suggests, “we no longer see and from what is no longer seen we create another distinct visibility” (82). Inspired by this concept of poetic memory, this study will examine how both poets recreate memories of childhood and family and will investigate possible resonances of Bishop's reading of Drummond in her own work.

Bishop's interest in Drummond's poems about his lineage can be traced back to a strange resemblance in circumstances common to both poets' origins. Explaining the origin of Drummond's name, a crossbreeding between Scotch ancestry and mineiro blood, Bishop points out that “oddly enough, mineiros, people from the state of Minas or “the mines” are often compared to the Scots.” Besides topographical similarities between the two regions, she observes that in both “life is hard, narrow, religious, and often fanatical.”¹ Topography apart, one can say that “oddly enough” these same features could be found in Bishop's own origins, in the small community of Great Village, Nova Scotia, and in New England.

But of course Bishop's motivation to write about her origins cannot be attributed only to her readings of Drummond. There are previous facts to be considered as, for example, Bishop's translation of Minha Vida de Menina [The Diary of “Helena Morley”], one of the first readings recommended to her soon after her arrival in Brazil. Bishop certainly found similarities between the memories in the diary and the memory of her own past, correspondences between places that seem to resist changes and the action of time itself, and similarities in scenes and events “odd, remote, and long ago, and yet fresh, sad, funny, and eternally true” (Diary x). Bishop's interest in autobiography was also stimulated by Lowell's work, especially Life Studies. Her first childhood memoirs—“Gwendolyn” and “In the Village”—surely owe a good deal to Lowell's influence.

Out of all the circumstances that may have drawn Bishop to revisit the landscape of her childhood, one is also common to Drummond: an essential exile from this landscape. In a coincidental move to Rio—Drummond leaving his hometown, Bishop her country—the two poets join in this fantastic trip to the past, “re-collecting” their myths of family and childhood. In the case of Drummond, Affonso Romano de Sant' Anna explains that it is the poet's “non-adjustment” in the metropolis that leads him to “search for refuge in images of the past, compelling him to return emotionally to the stable world of childhood” (72-73). Adapting Sant' Anna's sentence to Bishop's case, one could say that it must have been her temporary sense of adjustment in Brazil that allowed her the necessary balance to return emotionally to the unstable world of childhood. The sense of adjustment referred to here concerns both Bishop's “golden years” in Lota de Macedo Soares' two homes and her contact with a provincial side of Brazil, resembling the Great Village of her childhood.

In “Infancy,” written when the distancing is only temporal, since Drummond still lives in Minas, the poet recreates the family atmosphere, trying to recover the inner voice of the boy who “alone under the mango trees, … read the story of Robinson Crusoe.” The poem, in Bishop's translation, begins:

My father got on his horse and went to the field.
My mother stayed sitting and sewing.
My little brother slept.
A small boy under the mango trees,
I read the story of Robinson Crusoe,
the long story that never comes to an end.
At noon, white with light, a voice that had learned
lullabies long ago in the slave-quarters—and never forgot—
called us for coffee.
Coffee blacker than the black old woman
delicious coffee
good coffee.

(87)²

Isolated from the other family members immersed in their routine, the boy compensates for his exclusion by insulating himself in the imaginary world of reading, living Crusoe's adventures. In a Lacanian perspective, Silviano Santiago associates the boy's attitude to the way a child recognizes his/her double in the mirror, an “imaginary” recognition of him/herself in the “image” of the other (50). Thus, the vicarious experience of the book would function as a kind of mirror through which the boy discovers his own identity. Santiago also observes that, in reading texts of others, “each one of us makes of the reading one's text and inserts oneself on the margin as context” (49). In this peripheral position the boy experiences, therefore, a double exile as he is at the same time withdrawn from his own story in the family circle and living a foreign adventure that is not his. In the end of the poem, no longer the boy, but the adult exiled from his childhood, the poet ponders “[he] didn't know that [his] story / was prettier than that of Robinson Crusoe,” wisely reinstating the centrality of his own story.

The child in “In the Waiting Room” experiences a similar situation of exclusion as her eyes plunge not into an imaginary world but into the fantastic realism of the February 1918 National Geographic. As in Drummond's poem, it is a familiar voice—“Aunt Consuelo's voice”—that brings the child back from her detachment in the world of reading to the reality of the waiting room. The child's perception of herself in relation to these two worlds is, however, far more complex than that of the boy who, despite his isolation between mango trees, lives the cozy routine of a solid family structure. For the child in the waiting room, the presence of the aunt (as the presence of the grandmother in “Sestina”) is the silent substitute for the absent family structure.

Curiously, in an unpublished poem with a very similar poetic form to Drummond's “Infancy,” Bishop reproduces the same sense of family unity:

Father's in the studio
          Painting hill and dale,
Mother's in the sitting-room
          Typing up a tale,
Hepple's in the pasture
          Looking at the rabbits:
Fairies, keep them in good health
          And faithful in their habits!(3)

Like the boy in “Infancy,” the child here contemplates the family universe but, unlike him, she does not insert herself in this universe.

Perhaps the lack of a solid familial ground on which to stand explains in part the child's intense perception of herself in the waiting room which Lloyd Schwartz identifies as “the frightening awareness of her own individuality and equally frightening awareness of her common humanity” (137). “How ‘unlikely,’” says the child, unable to conciliate the sudden consciousness of her own isolation and identity with a disturbing world of similarities and “horrifying” differences making us “all just one”:

Why should I be my aunt,
or me, or anyone?
What similarities—
boots, hands, the family voice
I felt in my throat, or even
the National Geographic
and those awful hanging breasts—
held us all together
or made us all just one?
How—I didn't know any
word for it—how “unlikely” …

(CP [Complete Poems] 161)

Whereas in Drummond's “Infancy” both the enchantment of the voice “that had learned / lullabies long ago in the slave-quarters” and its generosity in calling for coffee restores human warmth to the boy, Aunt Consuelo's voice in Bishop's poem seems only to echo the child's contained cry of pain, a “feeling of absolute and utter desolation,” as Bishop describes it in her prose memoir, “The Country Mouse.”

In discussing the theme of Crusoe in Drummond's poem, Santiago curiously identifies the old black woman with the figure of Crusoe's companion, Friday. The pleasure of the woman's songs and coffee would provide the boy with a second paradisiacal space that, like the first—the paradise of the “island of reading”—would compensate for the isolation from the family. Santiago calls this space the “space of the non-familial where the company denied by [the boy's family] is offered to him by others who surround him with affection and dedication” (55). One could say that Bishop's Friday, a recognized allegory for Lota, has a similar function:

Friday was nice.
Friday was nice, and we were friends.
If only he had been a woman!
I wanted to propagate my kind, and so did he, I think, poor boy.
He'd pet the baby goats sometimes,
and race with them or carry one around.
—Pretty to watch; he had a pretty body.

(CP 166)

Friday surely is this other solitary fellow, a companion and also a sexual being, although unable to procreate. But Friday would sometimes “pet the baby goats … / and race with them, or carry one around.” If not home in the sense of a real family, Friday could at least offer Crusoe the atmosphere of an improvised home by adoption. “—Pretty to watch; he had a pretty body,” concludes the poet, unable to separate the pleasure of contemplating Friday's imitation of a family from the sensuality of his body in movement. Like the voice of the black old woman in Drummond's poem, it is this gesture of Friday that restores to Crusoe the coziness of a family atmosphere.

In the improvised home of her adult life and having the necessary distancing from the landscape of her childhood, Bishop can finally reopen the old family album. Among the photographs, Bishop also discovers old chromographs and unfinished paintings like little cousin Arthur's:

Jack Frost had started to paint him
the way he always painted
the Maple Leaf (Forever).
He had just begun on his hair,
a few red strokes, and then
Jack Frost had dropped the brush
and left him white, forever.

Then, proceeds the poet, “The gracious royal couples / … / invited Arthur to be the smallest page at court” but

how could Arthur go,
clutching his tiny lily,
with his eyes shut up so tight
and the roads deep in snow?

(CP 126)

In this final image of Arthur, it is as if the poet completed Jack Frost's work, giving the unfinished painting in memory the last stroke.

This last stroke, however, neither for Bishop nor Drummond redeems them from the corrosion of their memories, but perpetuates them yet more. These memories remain like that “immortal sob of life” resisting the corrosion of portraits in Drummond's poem “The Dead with Overcoats,” which Bishop attempted to translate but never published:

In the corner of the parlor there was an album of intolerable photographs,
yards tall and infinite minutes old,
and everyone stopped to the joy
of ridiculing the dead in overcoats.
A worm began to gnaw the indifferent overcoats
it gnawed the pages, the dedications, and even the dust of the portraits.
Only the immortal sob of life bursting,
bursting, from those pages,—that it didn't gnaw.(4)

Also indifferent to the action of time, “the teakettle's small hard tears” continue “to dance like mad on the hot black stove,” under the “clever almanac,” in Bishop's “Sestina.” Originally titled “Early Sorrow,” “Sestina” privileges in its form the essence of what is perpetuated through time—the house, the figure of the old grandmother, the stove, the almanac, the tears. But the form demands repetition; what stands out in the poem is movement, as if memory refused to freeze a final image. Thus, the poem ends with the child drawing “another inscrutable house.”

In this fantastic trip to the past, there is also the impulse to return to unresolved family relations, as Drummond does in “Travelling in the Family,” in the long walk with “the shadow of his father” in the desert of Itabira:

… The shadow
proceeded slowly on
with that pathetic travelling
across the lost kingdom.
But he didn't say anything.
I saw grief, misunderstanding
and more than one old revolt
dividing us in the dark.
The hand I wouldn't kiss,
the crumb that they denied me,
refusal to ask pardon.
Pride. Terror at night.
But he didn't say anything.

(59)

Later, at the end of the long walk, father and son finally join in a “ghostly embrace,” a silent moment of mutual recognition:

Eye-glasses, memories, portraits
flow in the river of blood.
Now the waters won't let me
make out your distant face,
distant by seventy years …
I felt that he pardoned me
but he didn't say anything.
The waters cover his moustache,
the family, Itabira, all.

Victoria Harrison calls attention to curious resemblances between this poem and an unpublished poem by Bishop entitled “For Grandfather.” Harrison observes that whether Bishop wrote her first draft of her poem before or after she translated Drummond's, the “affinities are haunting” (177-178). Coincidences start by the idea of the imaginary trip, Drummond's father leading him through the “desert of Itabira,” Bishop's grandfather taking her through the “snows of the North Pole.” The “distinct silences” in both poems mingle with the anguish of the monologue and the desire to communicate with the old patriarchs. The radical difference is that, in Drummond, there is reconciliation; in Bishop, the grandfather remains out of reach:

You'll catch your death again.
If I should overtake you, kiss your cheek,
its silver stubble would feel like hoar-frost
and your old-fashioned, walrus moustaches
be hung with icicles.
Creak, creak … frozen thongs and creaking snow.
These drifts are endless, I think; as far as the Pole
they hold no shadows but their own, and ours.
Grandfather, please, stop! I haven't been this cold in years.(5)

While in Drummond's poem the “waters” cover the father's “moustache,” in Bishop's, “icicles” hang on the grandfather's. Like the embrace, the “waters” assure the presence of affection and seal the silence of mutual recognition and forgiveness. Inversely in Bishop, the “hoar-frost” or “icicles” indicate that affection is unreconcilable. The search nonetheless continues: “These drifts are endless. … Grandfather, please, stop! I haven't been this cold in years.”

Regarding “affinities,” the case of Bishop and Drummond seems to reach far beyond the domain of family and origins or the occasional play of resemblances in isolated poems. Borrowing W. S. Merwin's expression to define theories of influence, I would say that the case of Bishop and Drummond is “much more complicated than that.” It involves not only the process in which Bishop assimilates Drummond in translating him and incorporating his experience into her work (the complicated play of texts), but also the two poets' coincidental task to translate a common universe—the Brazilian everyday, the landscape, and culture, or the strangely similar universe of childhood (the complicated play of texts and contexts). Still, in the field of “affinities,” I would include what Drummond calls in a letter to Bishop “affinity of spirit.”⁶ But how to talk of things of the “soul” stepping in so secular a terrain as literary criticism? Avoiding this risk or the vain intent to unveil what Drummond had in mind, I would interpret this affinity in very earthly terms: a coincidental predestination to “be gauche in life.” The expression is from Drummond's “Seven-Sided Poem,” translated by Bishop. Originated in the tradition of the poètes maudits, gaucherie means in a broad sense incompatibility with the world. The term that appears again in the poem “The Table” is translated by Bishop as “awkwardness.” Having its origin in the two poets' extremely shy nature, their gaucherie is confirmed in their relation with the world—the family world and the world at large—to ultimately become a significant trait in their art. It is worth pointing out that this gaucherie is a personalistic trait and, as Mikhail Bakhtin reminds us, “personalism is not psychological but semantic” (170).

Common to the two poets is also the “personalistic” perception that “we carry things,” as Drummond writes,

framework of our life,
rigid iron fence,
in our most anonymous cell,
and a ground, a laugh, a voice
incessantly resound
in our deep walls.

(“A Ilusão do Migrante” 21)⁷

But, he adds, it is only

in the creative time / space distance,
at the margin of pictures, documents,
when more than we exist
things exist violently: they inhabit us
and look at us, they stare at us. Contemplated,
submissive, we are their pasture,
we are the landscape's landscape.

(“Landscape: How to Make It” 73)

Notes

1. This passage is from Bishop's notes for her translations of Drummond. Elizabeth Bishop Collection, Vassar College Library, Series Poetry, Box 58, Folder 12.

2. All poems by Drummond translated by Bishop cited here are gathered both in her Complete Poems [hereafter referred to as CP] and in An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Brazilian Poetry which she co-edited with Emanuel Brasil. The latter is the source for this and subsequent quotations. (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan UP, 1972).

3. Elizabeth Bishop Collection, Vassar College Library, Series Poetry, Box 65, Folder 20.

4. Bishop's unpublished translation of this poem is held with her notes for her translations of Drummond. Elizabeth Bishop Collection, Vassar College Library.

5. Elizabeth Bishop, “For Grandfather,” Elizabeth Bishop Collection, Vassar College Library, Unpublished Poetry, Box 65, Folder 65.19.

6. Elizabeth Bishop correspondence with Carlos Drummond de Andrade, 29 April 1969, Elizabeth Bishop Collection, Vassar College Library, Correspondence, Box 1, Folder 1.5.

7. Both this and the subsequent translation are mine.

Works Cited

Andrade, Carlos Drummond de. “A Ilusão do Migrante.” Farewell. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Record, 1996. 20-21.

———. “Landscape: How to Make It.” Metamorphoses. 4.3 (1996): 72-73.

Bahktin, Mikhail. “Toward a Methodology for the Human Sciences.” Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Eds. Carolyn Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1986. 159-172.

Bishop, Elizabeth. Complete Poems, 1927-1979. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1983.

———. Trans. The Diary of “Helena Morley.” New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1957.

———. Elizabeth Bishop Collection. Vassar College Library, Poughkeepsie, New York.

Harrison, Victoria. Elizabeth Bishop's Poetics of Intimacy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.

Lima, Costa. “Carlos Drummond de Andrade: memória e ficção.” Carlos Drummond de Andrade and His Generation. Eds. Frederick G. Williams and Sergio Pachá. Santa Barbara: Jorge de Sena Center for Portuguese Studies, 1986. 66-82.

Sant'Anna, Affonso de Romano. Drummond, o gauche no tempo. Rio de Janeiro: Lia, Editor S. A., 1972.

Santiago, Silviano. Carlos Drummond de Andrade. Petrópolis: Editora Vozes Ltda., 1976.

Schwartz, Lloyd. “One Art: The Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, 1971-1976.” Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art. Eds. Lloyd Schwartz and Sybil Estess. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1983. 133-153.