Emily Dickinson, Ralph Franklin, and the Diplomacy of Translation

On June 3rd, 1996, the Jones Library in Amherst, Massachusetts paid $24,150 to Sotheby’s for an “unpublished poetical manuscript” by Emily Dickinson which was discovered afterwards to have been counterfeited by Mark Hofmann, the Utah forger and double murderer. Before this knowledge became public, however, and especially during the period when funds were being raised to make a bid on behalf of the Library, the appearance of a rare autograph poem generated considerable excitement. The discovery was additionally timely given the increasing levels of attention being paid to Dickinson manuscripts generally. Briefly stated, the assumption in many recent critical works is that studying Dickinson in any standard typographic edition is effectively to read her in translation, at one remove from her actual practices. More specifically, it has been claimed that line arrangements, the shape of words and letters, and the particular angle of dashes, are all potentially integral to any given poem’s meaning, making a graphic contribution to its contents. ¹ For people working on characteristics of Dickinson’s poetry in manuscript form, then, the newly found lyric seemed to provide a novel opportunity for assessing the status of such characteristics.

Presupposing that the text was genuine, and that it would shortly receive close critical attention in a variety of scholarly publications, one of the questions facing the reader was how best to present reproductions of the work in other, textual and electronic, environments. This challenge was a miniature counterpart to the major and genuine difficulties Ralph Franklin had been working with for more than three decades. Franklin himself had approached the problem of representing the integrity of Dickinson’s originals in different ways. In 1980, he edited The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson, using facsimile copies of Dickinson autograph poems in the sequence of their collation by the poet herself. In 1986, he edited The Master Letters of Emily Dickinson, which included photographic duplicates of the separate pages of the three letters, print transcripts of their contents retaining the lineation of the original, and reproductions of the documents themselves, in the guise of sheets of paper folded to form four pages of writing and placed in an envelope enclosed within the book. In his 1998 three-volume variorum edition of The Poems of Emily Dickinson, he arranges the poems chronologically, in type, and regularizes the majority of them, in the sense that they are often presented as eight-line poems divided into two stanzas. As a consequence, his procedures run contrary to recent assumptions about the primacy of the manuscripts themselves —assumptions which, ironically, emerge historically as responses to his earlier publication of the Manuscript Books. Ellen Hart, for instance, has written about the importance of diplomacy in adapting Dickinson’s poems for print, and of retaining the line arrangement of the autograph as much as possible (Hart 72). Franklin tries to allow for this, however, by supplementing his edited versions of individual poems with information as to word-, line- and page-breaks in the originals, so that as much of an apparatus exists for the reader to judge the merits of the transcription as print will allow. (When appropriate, he also supplies the placement of the poem in its fascicle grouping, the name of the poem’s recipient, as well as an approximate date of composition and details of the paper on which the poem is recorded).

In the light of this debate, what was initially interesting about reading the Dickinson poem by Hofmann (before its provenance was known) was the kind of information it might be seen to provide as to the significance of its own appearance. Had it been genuine, then we might have seen a “diplomatic” version of the poem such as this:

That God cannot be understood Everyone Agrees - We do not know His motives nor Comprehend his Deeds -

Then why should I Seek solace in What I cannot Know? Better to play In winter’s sun Than to fear the Snow   Emily

In fact, the Boston Globe published the entire text as an untitled, two-stanza poem in fifteen lines, with a...