"If a lion could talk . . .": Dickinson Translated

translate: 1. To express in another language, systematically retaining the original sense. 2. To put in simpler terms; explain. 3. To convey from one form or style to another; convert. 4. To transfer (a bishop) to another see. 5. To forward or retransmit (a telegraphic message). 6. Theology. To convey to heaven without natural death. 7. Physics. To subject (a body) to translation. 8. Archaic. To transport; enrapture.—intr. 1. a. To make a translation, b. To work as a translator. 2. To admit of translation. 3. Aerospace. To move from one place to another in space by means of reaction power. [Middle English translaten, to transport, to translate, from Latin translatus (past participle of transferre, to carry across, transfer, translate): trans—,across +—latus, "carried".

—The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (1969).

1. To express in another language, systematically retaining the original sense

Of course, as we all know, Dickinson is herself a translator: although she claims that she sees "New Englandly," "our" language rarely seems to be her first language, she is always translating from some other ur tongue. Hence the agony of her syntax, the fluidity of her definitions, the multiplicity of her pronouns, her participles that become nouns. ". . . the Sea / Develop Pearl and Weed." "Volcanoes be in Sicily." "'My Husband'—women say—/ Stroking the Melody—Is this—the way?" "I could not see to see." "Why make it doubt—it hurts it so—." "Ourself." "Themself." "Hovering seen through fog."

Perhaps we should conclude that Dickinson spoke English as a second language and was our country's first great ESL poet. Remember how she complained that "They shut me up in Prose—/ As when a little Girl / They put me in the Closet—/ Because they liked me 'still'—"? What she really meant may have been that they shut her up in language, in the English language, the essential medium of our poetry, and she had to wrestle to bend it to her own purposes, to her will, not just for freedom but for accuracy, for absolute precision. Certainly the braggadoccio with which she outlines her solution to the problem of being shut up—silenced, confined, constrained—simultaneously analyzes and enacts the struggle of the translator/poet.

Still! Could themself have peeped—And seen my Brain—go round—They might as wise have lodged a BirdFor Treason—in the Pound—

Himself has but to willAnd easy as a StarAbolish his Captivity—And laugh—No more have I—

(613. first variant)

"No more have I": words fail the poet here—"I have no more to do than the bird does?" "I have no more, no more what?"—even as she triumphs over the walls of syntax, the closet of prosaic meaning.

Less ambiguously, though, when Dickinson confesses and acquiesces in herlinguistic limits, sheexplains just whyshe is a translator/poet, a poet writing in a second language.

I found the words to every thoughtI ever had—but One—And that—defies me—As a Hand did try to chalk the Sun To Races—nurtured in the Dark—How would your own—begin?Can Blaze be shown in Cochineal—Or Noon—in Mazarin?

(581)

The Ur speech of her soul, Dickinson says, is untranslatable. What T. S. Eliot called "the overwhelming question" can't be voiced in any hard-learned vernacular. No wonder she "could not bear to live—aloud—" sometimes. No wonder the agonies of syntax often overcame the "it" at work in her, "So brave—upon its little Bed / To tell the very last They said / Unto Itself—and smile—And shake—/ For that dear—distant—dangerous—Sake—."

2. To put in simpler terms; explain

That is what we are always trying to do with Dickinson, who even now often appears to be what she once called herself—"the only kangaroo among the beauty" of literary tradition. Her "splendours are menagerie," she tells us: they are alien to our splendours, they are constituted out of meanings and desires that don't fit our received ideas of beauty. The "bells whose jingle cooled [her] tramp" sounded—not to...