Dickinson for the French

Claire Malroux. Chambre avec vue sur l'éternité: Emily Dickinson, NRF Gallimard, 2005. 291 pp. € 17.90.

Scholars who don't read French might nevertheless take note of this mixed-genre treatment of the life and work of Emily Dickinson. Claire Malroux, poet and translator of English-language poetry, here debuts as a critic (that is, if we put aside the critical introductions she provided for her translations of the poems and letters of Dickinson published in France a few years ago). Of course, American poets have interested the French for more than a hundred years, first Poe and Whitman, then Eliot and Pound. But translations of Dickinson only began to be published in the 1950s, unfortunately without leading to much discussion of her oeuvre there. Now, with the renaissance of women's writing that has followed second-wave feminism, it's likely that Dickinson will take her place beside other American poets that have been embraced by French tradition. Claire Malroux's translations, brilliant and accurate as they are, are likely to play an important part in the process.

Chambre avec vue sur l'éternité (Room with a View of Eternity) isn't a conventional scholarly study; instead, it imaginatively recounts Dickinson's life and the relationship between that life and the poems. Malroux juxtaposes pivotal events with excerpts from poems that might participate in a reciprocal process of clarification. The critical approach here, biographical and impressionistic, stands apart from the poststructuralist methods developed in France beginning in the 1970s, which makes Malroux's study more accessible to the non-professional. But Malroux also overleaps traditional scholarly methods by inventing passages to be understood as spoken or written by Dickinson herself—a posthumous voice aware of events occurring after her death, even up to the present. It is startling to hear this invented Dickinson comment, for example, on Malroux's earlier essay on her poetry, and to quote from it. Equally startling is to find new "Dickinson" poems written by Claire Malroux—an audacity that to some readers will seem exhilarating and to others misplaced. The latter group may also wonder why Malroux refers throughout to her subject as "Emily" rather than "Dickinson"; and object to her use of the term "poétesse," rather than "poète femme." You could argue, though, that this ensemble of non-standard critical practices is meant to subvert traditional academic criticism and substitute for it something less chilly, something more personal. In any case, insights into the poetry abound, the kind of insight available to a critic who is a poet, a woman, and a translator of Dickinson. Translation is itself a form of hermeneutics, and the reader who knows French can find in Malroux's versions many useful implicit interpretations of Dickinson's work. Microscopic familiarity with the texts has led her to single out a number of themes not generally foregrounded; for example, Dickinson's deployment of the theme of "royalty," unusual in a citizen in a young republic. Equally stimulating is her discussion of keys, visitors, wounds, and Dickinson's "interior Atlas," the repertoire of place names used to express special complexes of feeling. This includes "Paris," never visited in her lifetime, but, through Malroux's mediation, suddenly accessible and welcoming.