Emily Dickinson versions and reversals

Mirta Rosenberg disagreed with Robert Frost’s definition that “poetry is what is lost in translation.” But at the same time, he believed that “translation is almost always a partially lost battle,” as he wrote in a note for the Literary Translators Club blog, and he did not contradict himself. Her versions of Emily Dickinson, reissued by the Seré Breve label, condense this uncertain state between losses and gains.

“Towards the heart of the enigma” takes up Rosenberg’s translations, published in 1998 by the Latin American Editorial Center. These are 98 poems by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886). In the prologue that accompanies the edition, Alejandro Crotto quotes “Translating Poetry,” a poem in which Rosenberg formulates a mission: “to translate in the middle, neither literally nor very freely” and at the same time “not to lose the thread / of the meaning.”

Dickinson lived without leaving her home in Amherst, Massachusetts, and died unpublished. “For her, publishing was not an essential part of a writer’s destiny,” says Borges. But after his death, the editions multiplied and in 1924 the first compilation of the 1,775 poems he had written appeared. Since then, points out Mexican poet and translator Hernán Bravo Varela, “she has been elevated to a central figure in various essays, novels, films, television shows, plays and poetry collections.” The impulse reaches contemporary Argentine literature with The Sister (2003), a novel by Paola Kaufmann about the Dickinson family, whose narrator is the poet’s sister; Dickinson Archive (2018), poems by María Negroni, and Nuestra parte de noche (2019) by Mariana Enriquez, whose title takes up a verse from Silvina Ocampo’s translation.

Bravo Varela did translations for another recent issue: I am nobody. Twenty-five poems by Emily Dickinson. Edited by Espacio Hudson, the book takes its title from poem 260 as written: “I am Nobody! Who are you?/ Are you – Nobody – too?/ Then there are already two of us!/ Don’t say it! They might betray us – you know!”

Rosenberg added translations as a highlight of his poetry collections, and in 2018 proposed a second version of Dickinson’s poem 449, often cited for the connection between beauty and truth. This double proposal, says Alejandro Crotto, “makes visible the plurality of possible versions and the relative contingency of each one.”

In this case, the title comes from Dickinson’s poem 50: “into the heart of the enigma / someone will go today,” Rosenberg translates. The version sounds expressively more convincing than Silvina Ocampo’s (“within a riddle / someone is guided today”), due to the options it adopts from the original regarding the noun riddle and the verb walk, and the nuances that the Spanish words contain.

Borges praised the literalness of Ocampo’s versions, saying that they “almost always” offer “the original words in the same order”; These versions would preserve “the cadence, the intonation, the modest complexity” of Emily Dickinson “in a kind of happy transmigration,” according to the prologue to the first edition (Tusquets, 1985).

In her book Silvina Ocampo marginal, María Julia Rossi noted that Borges’ Prologue was “counterproductive” for translations and discussed moments of critical reception. Swedish translator Martha Dahlgren pointed out errors of comprehension and “some misunderstandings at the lexical level” on the part of Ocampo, but at the same time recognized that Dickinson’s versions into Spanish are “the one that comes closest to the original.” Dahlgren also questioned the use of River Plate terms, showing “his own openly Eurocentric perspective” (Rossi).

Ocampo translated Dickinson between 1970 and 1978. Rossi notes that “in his poetics, translation had less to do with a faithful rendering of meaning than with a literary exercise of creative freedom,” contrary to Borges’ assessment. Mirta Rosenberg also represented this perspective for her own versions: “For me, there is no big difference between writing and translating. I see the good poetry translator as an author. What I have translated is part of my work.”

Although comparisons are inevitable (and distasteful), these Dickinson translations complement each other as they address different poems within the work and, in their variations, reveal notions of craft. Bravo Varela seems to pay most attention to the peculiar syntax of the original, where most of the semicolons are replaced by long hyphens that inscribe pauses and signifiers; He also distinguishes “totem nouns” (those that Dickinson writes with capital letters and that would contain his intimate universe) and “taboos” (common references from the outside world) and suggests following “his synthetic and anti-prosaic desire.”

Rosenberg’s versions and those of Ocampo differ neither in meaning nor in the construction of the verse, if both aspects can be isolated. At the beginning of the poem 1071, Rosenberg translates: “The perception of an object costs / the very loss of that object”; Ocampo seems more adjusted when he transcribes the same verses: “The perception of an object costs / the exact loss of the object.” Rosenberg continues: “Perception is in itself an advantage / Which, by virtue of its price, provides an answer.” And Ocampo, on the other hand: “Perceiving it in itself is a gain / that responds to its price.”

Rosenberg modifies the word order using rhymes that give the poem a certain Limerick resonance: “Is beauty then a suffering?/Tradition should know.” In his program, translating means “writing a poem in the target language”; It does not require greater liberties nor is it more discursive, but it dispenses with the scripts that Dickinson uses, becomes more fluid and gains in meaning and sound. “When we leave, we never know that we are leaving; / we close the door and we joke,” is the prevailing example of Ocampo’s solution: “We never know that we are leaving, when we leave – / we gesture and close the door -” (Poem 1.523).

According to Rosenberg in his note on the subject, translation is “happy when one can choose what to lose” and “absolutely when what is lost is imposed from the text.” Dickinson’s poem 684 solves the problem in her version: “The best gains must pass the test of losses / to become gains.”