The International Reception of Emily Dickinson by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2019-12-19T00:00:00+00:00

Serving Two Masters

My obligation to produce a new version of Dickinson was stirred by the discovery, recounted above, that the passage of time had largely turned Dickinson into a palimpsest. What the Israeli reader ordinarily read when she/he opened ‘Dickinson’ sounded quite unlike the hesitant and, at the same time, vitally alive speech that is registered in the original, to the extent that one sometimes wonders whether a shrugging rejection of the poem might not be preferable to such a poeticized embracing of it. The New England criteria for tune, the syntactical complexity, the brevity and compression, the intensity of line, the shattered metaphysics and the dispaired hymnody and the Gothic paired with the nursery rhyme all lost their immediacy, or were lost completely, in the Hebrew translation. I venture to speculate that perhaps her slow and limited reception can be partially explained by her untranslatability; for many readers, the Hebrew Dickinson (despite their difference, this is true of all three editions: Eig-Zakov, Shapira and Shalev-Toren) lacked what one would hear and seek as her speaking voice – whispering, provoking, ‘braying’ or simply addressing; instead, it often sounds obsolete, high flown, suffused with sweet manners and lacking the sensory concreteness and the intimacy of language and meaning so vital in her English.

I was torn between fidelity to what I perceived to be her ‘voice’ and the musicality, the authority, and at her best, the crystal lucidity of her poem. Multiple forms of compression (ellipses, silences, grammatical deletions, discontinuities, elision of syllables and omission of logical links, multiplicities of meanings, ungrammaticalities) – all distinct marks of her speech – have been almost impossible to render in Hebrew without sacrificing clarity, meaning and the poem itself.

Inherent differences between the source and the target language have been no less of a challenge. English is largely monosyllabic, while Hebrew is dominated by longer (two and three syllables) words, each with its own distinct musicality. Hence, it often becomes impossible to retain in Hebrew the intense brevity of Dickinson’s line. In order to retain its brevity and density, I often had to make even more extreme the poet’s compressions, to take the liberty of omitting articles, connectives, pronouns (in Hebrew they can often be elided into the verb), even where Dickinson herself didn’t. In this sense, the very act of translation necessarily involves a specific kind of editing, one that at times may even infringe upon the original. I am aware that, paradoxically, I myself may have acted like one of Dickinson’s early editors. Moreover, English is accentual and its poetic tradition favours rhyme and iambic meter. The English iambic tradition, as Dickinson inherited it from Shakespeare, from the ballad or even from religious hymns, relies on speech rhythms. In contrast, Hebrew is originally a non-accentual language, relying on semantic and syntactic parallelism.15 In order to imitate Dickinson’s prosodic qualities, her Hebrew translators relied on imported Russian accentual models that are opposed to speech rhythms. Adoption of these models entailed giving up both the grammatical conversions and the sense of the spoken word so vital in a Dickinson poem.

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