Black Beans and Diamonds: Brazil in the Work of Elizabeth Bishop by Regina Przybycien

A Michael Greenstein Review

Diamantina Dichotomies

If Elizabeth Bishop’s first volume of poetry, North & South (1946), points to geographic dislocations in her life between Nova Scotia, New England, and Brazil, then the title of Regina Przybycien’s study, Black Beans and Diamonds, further suggests the social discrepancy between poor and rich classes in Brazil. Thomas Travisano’s “Foreword” mentions Bishop’s Brazilian dislocation, and Neil Besner’s “Translator’s Preface” introduces the Brazilian title “Feijão preto e diamantes.”

Przybycien introduces the dichotomy “Brasil Versus Brazil” with songs of exile but also with certain biographical details such as Bishop’s allergy to cashew fruit where the tropical fruit serves as a metaphor for the forbidden fruit. Even more toxic than her cashew allergy was her alcoholism which exacerbated her outsider status as emigrant, woman, and lesbian in a macho society. Bishop carried on lengthy correspondence with Robert Lowell and May Swenson in the United States, confiding her literary, personal, and political misgivings.

Przybycien traces the paths of poetic influence on Bishop from Marianne Moore to William Carlos Williams’s concise language. From the British tradition Bishop chose George Herbert and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Her house at Samambaia provided refuge for her for several years and brought back memories of her Nova Scotia childhood with her grandparents: “when I came first to live in Samambaia and had oil lamps for two or three years, etc. a lot came back to me. I helped design our sitting-room stove, for example and without ever having done such things before I found myself baking bread, making marmalade, etc. – when the need arises apparently the old Nova Scotia domestic arts come back to me!”

Orphaned from her father at eighteen months Bishop grew up witnessing her mother’s madness and living with her maternal grandparents in Nova Scotia before being transferred at the age of seven to her paternal grandparents in Worcester, Massachusetts. One of her Rio de Janeiro poems, “Going to the Bakery,” describes Copacabana Avenue at night with its prostitutes and drunken beggars, part of Brazil’s moral decadence. Carnival, masks, and samba rhythms infuse her poetry. Translating Helena Morley’s diary, My Life as a Girl, enabled her to recreate her own past in Nova Scotia. “To record, to translate: a doubled journey whose tracks are only traced in part; the other part has to be built along the way.” She doubles back toward Diamantina and colonial Ouro Preto with its rock solidity.

“Santarém” develops images of two streams, “surrealistic images that suggest a profound psychic division.” Her two rivers carry her back to the Garden of Eden and a conclusion of dichotomies: “life/death, right/wrong, male/female … in that watery, dazzling dialectic.” Her dazzling dialectic enters the diary written between 1893 and 1895 in Diamantina. Translation is “a double appropriation” that juxtaposes two periods – the time of Helena’s diary and the time of Bishop’s preface.

In 1962 (ten years after her arrival in Brazil) she discovered the work of Clarice Lispector whose short stories she preferred over her novels. With her exotic origins and features Lispector is “doubly strange” in her combination of Brazilian and Russian cultures. She differentiates between Brazilian poetry’s irony and American poetry’s understatement.

Near the very end of the book Przybycien erroneously identifies trimeter as verses in three lines in Bishop’s translations. Neil Besner’s translation is admirable with one minor exception – “all these descriptions declaimed exclamatively.” Black Beans and Diamonds makes a valuable contribution towards our understanding of Bishop’s Brazilian background.

About the Author

Regina Przybycien, a retired Brazilian professor of American and comparative literature, recently translated into Portuguese a book of poetry by Lloyd Schwartz (from English) and three books by Wisława Szymborska (from Polish).

Canadian writer Neil K. Besner grew up in Rio de Janeiro. His prizewinning translation of Carmen L. Oliviera’s Rare and Commonplace Flowers: The Story of Elizabeth Bishop and Lota de Macedo Soares provided a major source for the 2013 feature film Reaching for the Moon (in Brazil, Flores Raras). He is professor emeritus of English at The University of Winnipeg and the author of books on Canadian writers Mavis Gallant and Alice Munro, among others.

About the Reviewer

Michael Greenstein is a retired professor of English (Université de Sherbrooke). He is the author of Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature and has published extensively on Victorian, Canadian, and American Jewish literature. He has published over 300 essays and reviews in books and journals across Canada, the United States, and Europe.

Book Details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ LSU Press

• Publication date ‏ : ‎ June 9 2026

• Language ‏ : ‎ English

• Print length ‏ : ‎ 202 pages

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0807186104

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0807186107