assumed, the local women. The Indian women were, however, too clever for the Invaders: they knew how to use the landscape to hide and protect themselves from attack. "Brazil, January 1, 1502" is an appreciation of the lush quality of the Brazilian landscape which has remained largely undiminished by man's hand and an acknowledgement of the women's shrewd behaviour.
The poem's epigraph, from Landscape into Art by Kenneth Clark, is "embroidered nature ... tapestried landscape". Bishop underlines the force of nature by opening her poem with the line: "Januaries, Nature greets our eyes/ exactly as she must have greeted theirs." Geography has triumphed over history. The conquerors read into the landscape what they wanted, and appropriated it for their use. Yet, for all their civilising attempts, nature is still as abundant today as it was four hundred years ago. Travisano points out how the Christian conquerors can only see the Brazilian landscape in terms of what is familiar to them: "The Christian conquerors view the lush Brazilian landscape in terms of the familiar enclosed gardens so often celebrated in tapestries back home. Here is a wildemess to explore and command, to enclose as a r t ... the viewpoint is complex because the landscape is actually seen through 'our' modern eyes, while 'their' experience is imagined"(138).
The Portuguese discover a landscape which corresponds not to any reality they have seen but to "embroidered nature", constructed but never experienced. Bishop once again filters the perception of place through another's eyes: on this occasion, as Travisano says, the landscape as the Portuguese saw it is mediated through the twentieth-century reader's eyes. Karen Lawrence in Penelope Voyages0 9 3 2 ) , compares the Portuguese perception of the New World in Bishop's poetry to that of the British travellers in Virginia Woolf's first novel The Voyage Out O^^O). When they arrived three hundred years ago in Santa Marina, Woolf's fictional South American country, it "was still a virgin land behind a veil", a metaphor which anticipates Bishop's description of Brazil (1 5 8 ), As Lawrence says: "Woolf's narrative telescopes colonial and sexual aggression, reminding us that Europe's 'voyages out' to the New World were male penetrations of virgin spaces"(158).
Nature is decked out for man's pleasure whichever century he belongs to. Bishop creates a myriad of tiny detail in the first stanza to show how the foliage multiplies in all its diversity to create a whole: she compares nature to a tapestry which, when taken off the frame appears almost too perfect. The irony is that nature is the dominant force. The men appear as tiny as nails against the vast tropical jungle, and nature hides the Indian women when they need to be hidden. More significantly, nature continues to absorb new arrivals from whichever century. The only advantage the twentieth-century traveller
has is that he can push into the interior more easily, using the roads built by the descendants of the first Portuguese settlers. However, both centuries' men remain "nail sized" in comparison to nature.
The strong Indian women who evade the male invaders in "Brazil, January 1, 1502" have a counterpart in a short story by the Brazilian writer, Clarice Lispector, "The Smallest Woman in the World".64 While Bishop was working on "Brazil, January 1, 150 2", Lispector was writing the short story. The two women had become friends and, in the winter of 1962, Bishop translated five of Lispector's short stories, including "The Smallest Woman in the World".65 Bishop wrote to Lowell about her friendship with Lispector, marvelling at what she considered Lispector's nonliterariness: "I suppose we are getting to be 'friends' - but she's the most non-literary writer I've ever known.... She's never read anything, that I can discover - 1 think she's a 'self-taught' writer, like a primitive painter."66
"Brazil, January 1, 1502" and "The Smallest Woman in the World" share much in common since Lispector's story is also a meditation on the appropriation of the "other". In Lispector's story, a French explorer discovers the world's smallest woman In Africa; he tries to catalogue her according to his classification system and then offers her as a specimen in a Sunday newspaper article. Just as the women in Bishop's poem manage to elude the invaders, so the "little flower" does not succumb to the explorer's attempts to reduce her to a scientific classification, but rather asserts her autonomy by falling in love with the very man who could destroy her freedom.
The final poem in Bishop's opening trilogy is the eponymous "Questions of Travel". This poem is central to her work on and in Brazil, since it marries the two themes of imagined and actual travel, introduced in "Over 2 ,0 0 0 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance", and her double-edged vision as insider and outsider. The poem is an internal debate about the merits of a particular journey, probably to Brazil. One part of the poet grumbles about the scenery, just as the newly arrived tourist in Santos did. This time there is an over-abundance of nature. The narrator complains:
There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams hurry too rapidly down to the sea,
64 Lispector (1 9 2 5 -1 9 7 7 ) was a Ukrainian immigrant whose work is characterised by