Translation and the Emily Dickinson Lexicon

Any time a work is rendered into another language, the translator will have difficulty finding exact equivalents for specific words in the text. Ideally, the translator will choose an appropriate replacement based on context, balancing what is lost in the original with what is gained in the target language (Steiner 300). Translators of Emily Dickinson, however, find their problem compounded, because Dickinson uses multiple lexical connections to tie the words of a poem together into an unusually dense network Not only that, sometimes words relate cross-textually from one poem to another. Without the use of a dictionary, a translator might miss the transaction of senses within the poems.

Dickinson herself used a dictionary for poetic composition. In 1862, she told Thomas W. Higginson that for years her "Lexicon" was her only companion (Letters 404), and she mentions a lexicon in three of her poems (P 246, P 728, P 1342). Dickinson's use of the dictionary has been noted in scholarship since the 1930's, and many scholars have equated Dickinson's "Lexicon" with an early edition of Noah Webster's dictionary.¹ Although scholars have cited various editions, Jean Mudge, Willis J. Buckingham, Richard Benvenuto, and others have shown that Dickinson's "Lexicon" was an 1844 reprint of Noah Webster's unabridged 1841 American Dictionary of the English Language.

Webster's American Dictionary is "one of the most important sources of information for understanding what Dickinson meant her words to convey" (Benvenuto 46). She did not just use her copy of the 1844 dictionary as a reference tool but read it as though every word were "once a poem" (Emerson 229). Consequently, every content word in a Dickinson text can be read as a poem. Definitions, synonyms, citations, and etymologies resonate in Dickinson's words; indeed, Webster's entries are a direct source of allusion in some poems. Even when the words of a poem are not directly influenced by Webster's entries, many Dickinson poems mirror semantic connections in the dictionary, because Webster and Dickinson have similar historical and cultural backgrounds.

Historical and Cultural Connections

Emily Dickinson was born in the year 1830, in the noon of the lexicographical renaissance that led to Noah Webster's American Dictionary in the United States and later to the Oxford English Dictionary in Great Britain. It is not surprising that Dickinson would see Webster's dictionary as a companion. Webster lived in Amherst, Massachusetts and worked there on his 1828 dictionary from 1812 to 1822 (Leavitt 28). During that time, he helped establish Amherst Academy, where Dickinson went to school. Noah Webster and Samuel Fowler Dickinson, Emily's grandfather, were co-founders of Amherst College, where Emily's father Edward and brother Austin served as treasurers (King 82). Webster's granddaughter and biographer, Emily Ellsworth Fowler Ford, was one of Dickinson's school chums in Amherst (Sewall 369).

After leaving Amherst in 1822, Webster returned to New Haven, Connecticut, where he finished the first major edition of his dictionary in 1828 (Leavitt 23). At the age of eighty, he worked on a revised edition of the dictionary, which was published in 1841. After Webster's death in 1843, the J. S. and C. Adams company in Amherst purchased the unbound copies of the 1841 dictionary (Leavitt 45) and published them in 1844 and 1845. Sales of the fifteen dollar, two-volume edition were slow, so the Adams firm sold the remaining unbound copies of the 1841 dictionary to the G. and C. Merriam Company. The Merriam firm hired Webster's son-in-law, Chauncey A. Goodrich, to produce the New Revised Edition in 1847 (Leavitt 49). Although more copies of the 1847 edition are available for contemporary scholarship, it is not as helpful for studying Dickinson's works, because Goodrich made extensive revisions (Buckingham 491).

Dickinson's father was one of the few people who bought a copy of the 1844 reprint of Webster's 1841 edition. A year after Webster's 1843 death, Edward Dickinson purchased a copy of the 1844 Amherst printing for his family's library...