Brant, Alice. The Diary of Helena Morley. Trans. Elizabeth Bishop. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy, 1957. Print.

Contents:

Elizabeth Bishop took on the task of translating this diary shortly after she arrived in Brazil. Her friends recommended it to her, and Bishop became enamored with the young girl’s diary. The book itself recounts the life of a mining girl during the nineteenth century, detailing her life and family in Brazil. The project took Bishop three years, translating it from its original  Minha Vida de Menina, which roughly translates to "My Life as a Little Girl." Several readers who have picked it up in their travels have remarked on its easy candor and readability. Unfortunately, the original manuscript in Portuguese has been lost, and only the English translation remains.

Critical Reaction:

“Bishop spent three years translating the diary. She met the real Helena, Alice Brant, and spent a week in Diamantina, which she describes vividly in the introduction. Time seems to have stood still, as the town's inhabitants speak to her in "almost the very words" Helena used in the 1890s. Although it is true, as one of Bishop's friends observed, that "you can feel in the book that the translator had great fun doing it", a more melancholy undercurrent also connects Bishop to Helena.”

Boddy, Kasia. “Forgotten Treasure From Brazil.” The Telegraph. 2008. Online. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/non_fictionreviews/3555785/Forgotten-treasure-from-Brazil.html

“When the American poet Elizabeth Bishop arrived in Brazil in 1951, she expected to spend two weeks there and ended up staying 15 years, a time of emotional turbulence and creative productivity. Bishop wrote poetry and prose and translated Latin American writers, including Octavio Paz, but this project, suggested by friends as a way to improve her Portuguese, is something completely different. It’s a teenager’s diary, written between 1893 and 1895 in the remote mining town of Diamantina, the highest town in Brazil. It’s a delightful, funny and revealing memoir, a little bit of Austen in the Americas.”

France, Miranda. “The Jane Austen of Brazil.” The Spectator. 2014. Online. http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/9280481/the-jane-austen-of-brazil/