By Lisa Russ Spaar
When my eldest daughter was college-hunting, I took advantage of an autumn trip with her to Amherst, Massachusetts, to fulfill what had been for me a nearly life-long dream of visiting the Emily Dickinson Homestead. Later that afternoon—still high myself from the power of taking in Dickinson’s tiny writing table and looking out the bedroom windows from which Dickinson often wrote the world—my daughter and I drove out to Hampshire College and met a pleasant young student tour guide who noticed the Emily Dickinson Homestead sticker that had served as my entrance ticket to the Homestead still pressed to my jacket lapel. “Booyah!” she exclaimed in sisterly solidarity. “I take classes in Emily Dickinson Hall. I own Emily Dickinson!”
As Millicent Todd Bingham, daughter of one of Dickinson’s first editors, once remarked, “They all think they own her.” And it’s true that for all of her oblique, damasked “veil”—both in her poems and in her life—Emily Dickinson (who was born on December 10, 1830, nearly 181 years ago this month) often inspires a remarkably intense intimacy with her readers that can lead to a thrall of recognition and insight but also to possessiveness, a cult of sentimentality, mythic idealization, academic and poetic turf warring, and a wide range of projection and appropriation. To paraphrase Dickinson, portions of her have been assigned to (or taken up by) by feminists, Marxists, foodies, Queer theorists, agoraphobics, psychologists, the tourist trade, culture vultures, L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poets, gardeners, and a host of others. Her work (letters, poems, letter-poems, aphorisms, fascicles, fragments) and biography are at the heart of debates about textuality, scribal practices, intention, Bowdlerization, and the character of the lyric poem itself. Recent critical readers have questioned, in fact, whether or not what Dickinson was writing in her wild scrawl—Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Monthly editor and friend and correspondent of Dickinson, compared her handwriting to the “fossil bird-tracks” preserved in the Amherst College library—with its almost hypertextual use of variant readings, can even be considered lyric poetry, suggesting that the “poems” we now attribute to Dickinson are really redactions and constructions of various editorial decisions and the move from script to print culture.
At present, Dickinson seems to be enjoying a “moment,” one of several the poet has experienced since her death as various versions of her poems have become available over time to a wide range of readers, beginning with the highly edited and regularized Todd and Higginson edition, Poems by Emily Dickinson, in 1890, four years after the poet’s death. Recent interest in Dickinson must owe in significant measure to the excellent and innovative work that continues in the wake of the scrupulous reparative scholarship and re-visioning of Dickinson’s manuscripts by R. W. Franklin in editions made accessible in the 1990s. The past two years alone have seen the publication of important new books about Dickinson by Helen Vendler, Aífe Murray, and Lyndall Gordon, texts which in turn build upon the excellent scholarship of the past decade by the likes of Sharon Cameron, Susan Howe, Jerome McGann, Virginia Jackson, Brenda Wineapple, Alexandra Socarides, and many others. An extremely popular recreation of Dickinson’s flower garden, including an exhibit of her extraordinary schoolgirl herbarium, by the New York Botanical Garden in the spring and summer of 2010 also brought Dickinson’s work and “[lunacy] for bulbs” to a wider audience. Perhaps the Twitterable compression and intensity of Dickinson’s lyrics also account in part for this renaissance.
*
Poets have quite naturally been influenced by Dickinson’s “long shadow” (William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, Agha Shahid Ali, Sylvia Plath, Marianne Moore, Louise Bogan, Mary Jo Bang, Heather McHugh, Marianne Boruch, Lucie Brock-Broido, Charles Wright, Rae Armantrout, Mary Ann Samyn, Karen Volkman, Brenda Hillman, and Lynn Emmanuel, to name but a few) as have a wide range of other artists, including Martha Graham, Judy Chicago, and Leslie Dill.
One young American poet, Paul Legault, already the author of three innovative books of poems (the newest, The Other Poems, is just out from Fence Books), has recently completed a manuscript called The Emily Dickinson Reader, due to be published by McSweeney’s next year. Legault’s project involves what he calls “English-to-English translations” of Dickinson’s work. For the past several years, he has been involved in the endeavor—part homage, part parody, part experiment—with the intention of “translating” all 1,789 poems and fragments offered in Franklin’s reading edition of The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Legault’s translations of poems 1 – 499 have already been gathered in a chapbook, The Emily Dickinson Reader: Translations, Vol. 1, published by Try and Make Press in 2009.
Iconoclastic and impudent in a way Dickinson herself can sometimes be, these poems, as Legault himself says in an interview with Julia Guez on BOMB magazine’s blog site, “are a joke that became serious.” In the same interview, Legault goes on to say, with regard to Dickinson, “People are ready for her—for queers and vampires and the two in combination. (I would include E.D. in both camps.) People are tired of the sacred the same way Dickinson was tired of it—if still obsessed with its possibility. Of course when I say ‘people,’ I mean me.”
For example, this quatrain by Dickinson (Fr. 1105 … the numbers refer to Dickinson’s poems in the Franklin reading edition),
Of the Heart that goes in, and closes the Door
Shall the Playfellow Heart complain
Though the Ring is unwhole, and the Company broke
Can never be fitted again?
becomes, in Legault’s translation:
“Flirtatious Emily Dickinson is mad at austere, heartbroken Emily Dickinson.”
Here are others:
1104. It gradually became night through a process marked by crickets, hats being taken off, and the Sun descending past the visible horizon.
1106. Nature is a hotel without indoor plumbing or room service.
1112. When people realize God doesn’t exist, God will die.
1113. That guy has a really big face.
1114. Sometimes I stop loving people.
1115. I like Heaven. I also like it when people tip their hat to me in the street. I like that very much indeed.
1116. I prefer sunsets to the Sun.
1117. Death is over there again, petting his dead sheep. He’s kind of weird but all in all a nice guy.
1123. I prefer liquor when I’m drinking it.
1124. There are two scientific extremities. The infinitely large and the infinitely small. People usually forget about the infinitely small. Don’t do that.
1125. Paradise is being able to opt out of “Paradise.”
1127. I am glad that days exist.
1132. I wish I were a vampire.
1136. I’d prefer to keep my soul.
1141. Sometimes I eat roses. Because I’m fabulous.
1145. When I’m dead, you’ll be dead to me.
1165. I hope the last thing I say before I die isn’t stupid.
1171. I like to watch people sleeping (a little too much).
1178. When it comes down to it, I prefer small, insignificant things, like humans, to God and Jesus and all those guys. They’re kind of boring.
(c) by Paul Legault. Printed by permission of the author.
Harold Bloom says that parody offers a “carnival sense of the world” and that “everything has its laughing aspect, for everything is reborn and renewed through death and ambivalence.” Legault is often able to go straight to the “laughing aspect” even of Dickinson’s most serious poems, but his translations are not merely parodic. In the spirit of Jack Spicer and Robert Creeley, other innovators unafraid to talk back to iconic poets they love, Legault is engaged in a kind of playful, funhouse “mirroring” dance with Dickinson. What Peter Gizzi has written about Spicer’s Lorca project, for instance—that it “enacts a play—a drama—between materiality and invisibility, the lines and what’s between them” and that “part of the absurd labor of poets is to parry with each other” as a kind of homage—might be said of Legault’s project as well. (Interestingly, Legault, who works at the Academy of American Poets and is the co-founder of the translation press Telephone Books, studied screenwriting before getting his MFA in poetry.) One chief effect of Legault’s talking back to Dickinson in this way is the sleight of hand and foot by which the translations bring us not only dos-à-dos, back to back, with a poet we might think we understand and own or know, but they also return us, send us back, with fresh vision to the incomparable poems of Dickinson herself, in all of their difficulty, complexity, ambiguity, and seemingly inexhaustible, regenerative power.
Lisa Russ Spaar, The Chronicle Review’s poetry columnist, is a professor of English at the University of Virginia.
