DOI 10.1215/0961754X-8521507 "

	
		
		
	
	
		Elizabeth Bishop’s “Questions of Travel” is the eponymous poem in a 1965 col-
lection for her lover, the renowned Brazilian architect Lota de Macedo Soares,
expressing the inexorable human desire to travel to other hemispheres. The
innate or “childish” drive that Bishop depicts, the thoughtless “rush” toward an
unattainable desire to see the far away, is how I view xenophilia: a desire for the
foreign. I would like, here, to bring Bishop’s affectionate yet skeptical view of
xenophilia to a reading of Brian Friel’s 1980 play Translations, because his play, like


	
		
		
	
	
		
			her poem, shows how it may be impossible to satisfy that childish rush, given that
there always will be new foreign places to visit and that we will never “see the sun
the other way around,” anywhere on earth. Both works understand xenophilia as
quintessentially human yet doomed to fail."

Conquering Love: Failed Xenophilia in Translations PDF

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