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 Joao 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.
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 Wislawa Szymborska (from Polish). Neil K. Besner taught at the University of Winnipeg from 1987 until his retirement in 2017. 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 film Reaching for the Moon.
"The great American poet Elizabeth Bishop spent two of the most productive decades of her life in Brazil, where she wrote some of her greatest poems and stories. Regina Przybycien's Feijao-Preto e Diamantes was the first large-scale study of Bishop in Brazil by a Brazilian writer and one of the most incisive and moving books about the depth and complexity of her life and work in any language. This is an important book, and admirers of Bishop should be grateful that it is finally available in English, in this eloquent translation by Neil Besner." - Lloyd Schwartz, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic, poet, and coeditor of Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art "What does Bishop get right (and wrong) about Brazil, and how have Brazilian readers returned her endlessly curious, quizzical gaze? Przybycien provides a compelling account of Bishop's most important elsewhere, in which we learn not just what Bishop thought of Brazil but also what Brazil thought of Bishop." - Jonathan Ellis, coeditor of Elizabeth Bishop in Context "Przybycien's book conveys the knowledge of a Portuguese-speaking Brazilian insider familiar with the global scope of the cultural, linguistic, and poetic vectors that inform Brazil and Bishop's writing there." - Angus Cleghorn, editor of Elizabeth Bishop and the Music of Literature "A pioneering study on Bishop and Brazil, this book offers a captivating contextual reading of the poet's writings about the country. This is an important contribution to Bishop scholarship, in a careful and high-quality translation." - Maria Lucia Milleo Martins, author of Duas Artes: Carlos Drummond de Andrade e Elizabeth Bishop "Przybycien shows how Brazilian culture, with which Bishop always had an ambiguous and conflicted relationship, influenced her writing, including how Bishop's translations of Carlos Drummond de Andrade were crucial for her own late poems." - Paulo Henriques Britto, member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters
