“I Tried to Answer from the Birds, in Ancient Augury Fashion”: Aristophanes’s Birds and the Work of Elizabeth Bishop

Abstract

Elizabeth Bishop is not a writer often read in conjunction with classical texts. This article argues, however, that her unpublished college translation of Aristophanes’s Birds constitutes an important step in her poetic development. Through an analysis of her translation, this article demonstrates that Bishop was an attentive and astute reader of Greek whose eye was particularly drawn to how the parabasis of Birds contrasts the steadfastness of birds with human ephemerality. Written at a formative moment, the translation interweaves the image of a bird as a point of constancy into Bishop’s own poetic fabric, and poems from the thirties display clear Aristophanic echoes. Furthermore, Bishop engages with the more political elements of Birds—namely, Aristophanes’s connection of bird metamorphosis with domination, dramatized by the play’s tropes of gendered violence, imperialistic ambition, and presumptive human supremacy over the animal. By giving birds language, Aristophanes poses the potential of avian sociality and resists reducing birds to one-dimensional allegory. This article argues that these aspects of Birds resonate too, albeit latently, in Bishop’s own poetry, both early and late. Through drawing out linguistic associations and thematic connections to Aristophanes’s play from across Bishop’s work, connections often catalyzed by the presence of a bird, a sustained relationship with the classics becomes visible.