Since its publication in Portuguese in 2015, Regina Przybycien's Black Beans and Diamonds has become a foundational study of the critical and highly productive years from 1951 to 1974 during which the American poet Elizabeth Bishop lived and worked in Brazil. Now available in English for the first time, the book provides Bishop scholars and her steadily growing audience of general readers a uniquely informed Brazilian perspective on the writer. Przybyzien discusses Bishop's many important poems set in Brazil and her translations of Brazilian poetry and prose, as well as her thoughts on the country, including her conflicted and complex relationship with its local culture, the Portuguese language, the rigidly observed social strata, its geography and cities (as explored during her wide travels throughout Brazil), its charged politics, and its architecture. Bishop's most important personal relationship, with the formidable, multitalented architect Lota de Macedo Soares, is addressed at length, along with her translations into English of major Brazilian poets such as Carlos Drummond de Andrade and João Cabral de Melo Neto. Elegantly translated into English by Neil K. Besner—and featuring a foreword by biographer Thomas Travisano, founding president of the Elizabeth Bishop Society—Black Beans and Diamonds presents the most substantial Brazilian treatment yet written of the extent to which Bishop's sojourn in Brazil profoundly shaped her life and work.
