MASTHEAD Directors DeWitt Henry Peter O'Malley Coordinating Editor for This Issue Frank Bidart Associate Editors Lloyd Schwartz Robert Pinsky CONTRIBUTORS FRANK BIDART'S first book is Golden State (Braziller, 1973); the second, The Book of the Body, will appear next year. ELIZABETH BISHOP now lives in Boston and teaches at Harvard. She is preparing a book…
You live among the remnants of an ancient civilization that has left behind it an intricate system of canals and waterways. No one understands the books and rituals your ancestors handed down to you, but somehow everybody assumes that it must be necessary to maintain the waterways to irrigate the rice crop. Only at the…
The Bronze Statue (Léon-Paul Fargue) The frog on the tumbler-game in the park Gets bored at night, when it all gets dark. She thinks a statue’s life is absurd, Always about to pronounce a great word, The Word . . . She would rather be—as she’d often hope— Blowing bubbles of music with…
"Sambas" appeared in somewhat different form in an article by Elizabeth Bishop, "On the Railroad Named Delight," The New York Times Magazine, March 7th, 1965. Reprinted by permission. The translation from Satires II, vi, of Horace, was published in Alexander Pope, The Poetry of Allusion by Reuben A. Brower (Oxford University Press, 1959). Reprinted by…
You’re over seven feet tall and weigh close to three hundred pounds, but you’re so well proportioned that nobody ever realizes just how big you are until he sees you standing next to another human being. Your manner with other people is gentle and considerate. One afternoon while you’re sitting in a bar with friends,…
In Rio de Janeiro, dozens of new sambas are composed for each year’s Carnival. Although sambas concerning love outnumber all others, there are always some about world events, such as landing on the moon, and Brazilian politics and life in general. This sampling from 1965, a year after the “rightest” revolution, comments on, or pokes…
* Like most people who sense that their love affair is going to pieces, Anna Karenina and Prince Vronsky try a few desperate measures to check the disintegration. One of these measures – available only to the upper classes – was travel. They go abroad, to Italy, and there they make the acquaintance of an…
Several miles in the distance clouds of dust rose hundreds of feet in the air, marking the passage of the more than two hundred thousand pilgrims who were making their way deep into the phosphate-rich Spanish Sahara. Frankie pulled her white illustrated T-shirt over her head and bared her firm young breasts to the onslaught…
Some of my favorite poems by Elizabeth Bishop are not among her Complete Poems published in 1969. They have appeared singly since and whet the appetite for a new collection. Not counting several translations of Brazilian verse, eight new poems have appeared in. The New Yorker: "In the Waiting Room," "Night-City (From a Plane)," "12…
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