Famously and lovingly known as Poetinha (Little Poet), Vinicius de Moraes (1912-1980) is still popularly regarded as a heavy-smoking, whiskey-drinking bohemian, ladies’ man (9 marriages) who along the way left an inimitable mark in modern Brazilian literature, theater, films, and music.
It is not surprising, then, that at some point in Elizabeth Bishop’s (1911-1979) long stay in Brazil, one that began in the early 1950s, Vinicius would meet and befriend the American poet. After all, they were fellow poets, and they hit it off. In fact, three decades and more after Bishop left Ouro Prêto for good (after living in Brazil for the better part of two decades), folks in that fabled city were still telling and retelling stories about Vinicius and Bishop, of two poets who often sang their way home through early-morning streets after a night of bar-drinking. Remembered, too, was the great scandal she engendered when she became the first woman to walk the streets of Ouro Prêto in slacks.
In An Anthology of Twentieth Century Brazilian Poetry (1972), a ground-breaking collection, Bishop and Emanuel Brasil present representative work by 14 poets in translation by various hands. Vinicius is represented by seven poems, one of which, “Sonêto de Intimidade” ("Sonnet of Intimacy"), was translated by Bishop herself. It was an interesting choice. She describes it, in a letter to the poet Robert Lowell, as “almost exactly like the Portuguese and rather funny” (Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, ed. Thomas Travisano with Saskia Hamilton [Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008], 666). Included in the letter was her translation:
Country afternoons, there’s much too much blue air.
I go out sometimes, follow the pasture track,
Chewing a blade of sticky grass, chest bare,
In threadbare pajamas of three summers back,
To the little rivulets in the river-bed
For a drink of water, cold and musical,
And if I spot in the brush a glow of red,
A raspberry, spit its blood at the corral.
The smell of cow manure is delicious.
The cattle look at me unenviously
And when there comes a sudden stream and hiss
Accompanied by a look not unmalicious,
All of us, animals, unemotionally
Partake together of a pleasant piss.
(An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Brazilian Poetry, ed. Elizabeth Bishop and Emanuel Brasil [Middletown: Wesleyan Univ. P, 1972], 103).
It is doubtful that the always correct Miss Bishop would ever have considered using the word “piss” in a poem or story of her own, but that she relished using it in a translation is clear since she chose to use it emphatically by making it the last word of the last line in Vinicius’s poem (in the original it is the first word in the line). For Vinicius’s poem (despite its quite different tone) may have taken her back to some doggerel of her own in her college days, when she wrote and read this specimen, as her classmate the novelist Mary McCarthy recalled, of what one might call her genteel toilet-verse (Elizabeth Bishop: An Oral Biography [Amherst: Univ. of Mass. P, 1994], 43).
Ladies and gents, ladies and gents,
Flushing away your excrements,
I sit and hear behind the wall
The sad continuing waterfall
That sanitary pipes can give
To still our actions primitive.
(It’s tempting to think that this audacious use of the “waterfall” was Bishop’s first poetic use of an image that would take on more respectable denotations in her writings about Brazil, most notably in “Questions of Travel,” one of her most influential and widely admired poems.
Vinicius’s main work falls within the times designated by the Brazilians as the years of “Second Generation Modernism.” First recognized for his traditional poetry (e.g. the sonnet), he is now far more famous outside of Brazil for his song lyrics (he collaborated with Tom Jobim, Toquinho, Baden Powell, and Carlos Lyra, among others), notably the words to the world-wide hit “The Girl from Ipanema.” Less well-known outside of Brazil is that in 1957-1958 he worked with the French director Marcel Camus on the film Orfeu Negro (Black Orpheus), based on Vinicius’s own Orfeu da Conceição, a play that won the theater prize conferred at the IV Centenário do Estado de São Paulo.
“Have you seen the Italian-French film, Black Orpheus, about your carnival? It’s just a little too full-color, gorgeous, operatic, American; but the story’s developed with amazing tenderness, one is really at the carnival and hears the music of your records,” wrote Robert Lowell in 1960 (Words in Air, 312). Bishop replied: “Yes, I saw the Orpheus movie; it opened here a year ago. It was an opera to begin with, written by a poet Lota [de Macedo Soares] knows, but we didn’t attend that, and L refused to see the movie, too. I liked bits of it, but the effect, I though, was more French than Brazilian (you say ‘American’!—but that footsie game, etc., are pure French, surely). I liked the views of Rio at dawn, and they picked the best slum, of course, but had to build their own hovels, and Carnival isn’t like that. It’s much, much better. For one thing the Samba Schools are very proud and independent and they practice all year with professional teachers, and they perform; they’d never mix with the crowd like that. Carnival’s one big glorious mess, but a more orderly and artistic mess, really. … The ‘Orpheus’ music is pretty fakey, too—only one true samba—and the words, being written by a real poet, are bad. They lack that surprise, the mis-used words, the big words, etc., that sambas always have. One of my favorites has a refrain: ‘Respect the ambient!’ And one is about how Woman drags down Man—with all his ‘beauty and nobility’…” (Words in Air, 314) Singing late-night duets in the streets of Ouro Prêto came along a bit later.
George Monteiro is professor emeritus at Brown University, and a distinguished scholar of American and Portuguese Literatures.