Elizabeth Bishop's dense and precise losses

The definition of painting offered by Maurice Dennis, artist and art critic, a practitioner and theorist of the Nabis's colorful symbolism in the effervescent France of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, is quite famous: "Painting, before being a horse, a female nude, or any other motif, is essentially a flat surface with colors." The poems of the American poet Elizabeth Bishop (Worcester, 1911–Boston, 1979) have made me think of Dennis's definition. They are words upon words, verses upon verses, unfolding across the page with such a scrupulous blend of meticulousness and density that it is often difficult even to see or understand the poems' themes. We see the colors, not the horse or the female nude.

As Anna Gual explains in the prologue to this volume of Complete PoetryBishop was a lifelong, slow, and severely self-demanding writer: not only could she spend years working on a poem, but she also experienced the long periods of writer's block with great intensity. In this sense, it's difficult not to read poems like The map either More than 2,000 illustrations and complete consistency like a struggle Bishop has with herself, with her desire to reveal herself and simultaneously her need to hide. It's not a play on words. Bishop's poetic procedure, especially when it materializes in long poems that function as lyrical descriptions of the element mentioned in the title (the state of Florida in the poem). Floridaa cold spring in the poem A cold spring), It suggests an extreme version of the Eliotian objective correlative, the technique that allows the poet to express himself impersonally.

The need to erase bad memories

Concealment, unspoken secrets, and traumas locked away were constants in Bishop's life. Her father died when she was only eight months old, her mother was permanently committed to a psychiatric hospital when she was five (she never saw her again), and an uncle with whom she lived for years sexually abused her when she was still a child. The need to erase the bad memories—to bury the accumulation of wounds that shaped her—led her to alcohol, an addiction she could never shake. As if that weren't enough, Bishop was also a lesbian, or bisexual, in a time when being so and having it known could greatly complicate your life. In an excellent article published in 2017 in the magazine New YorkerCultural critic Claudia Roth Pierpont explained that Bishop's posthumous glory, after receiving numerous awards during her lifetime, was partly due to the revelation of her lesbian relationships. Suddenly, she became worthy of recognition within the context of cultural studies in the 1980s. Roth Pierpont cautions, however, that Bishop's poetry does not lend itself to biographical readings. This doesn't mean her life isn't present in the poems. It means it doesn't exist in a literal and mechanically predictable way. And it means that her rich, yet elusive and indirect, diction can be as personal as the most direct clarity.

Author of only four books of poems during her lifetime—this volume includes most of the previously unpublished works released posthumously—Bishop is a very difficult poet to translate because, in the original English, her poetry is simultaneously highly conceptual, highly musical, and highly visual. The rhythm and rhymes, the precise yet ambivalently expressive meanings, the graphic power of some of the images she evokes, form a rhetorical framework of such intricate complexity that it is difficult to translate into Catalan. Nevertheless, Jordi Fité's work is truly commendable.

The volume contains some memorable poems. I would highlight two: An artwhich can be read as a self-ironic celebration of learning the art of loss (losing keys, time, houses, a love), and Crusoe in England, which refers to the poem The Journey of the Three Kings by T.S. Eliot. Both poems function as the recollection and evocation of an inexplicable event that marks a turning point, causing everything to lose meaning and simultaneously gain meaning—in Eliot's case, through the discovery of true faith; in Bishop's, through the discovery of something (an emotion), an authentic emotion. I'm not entirely sure, though. Again, I see the colors more than the motif. But what colors!