Emily Dickinson in Polish: Recent Translations

The publication of Dickinson's selected letters last summer, Emily Dickinson. List do Świata. (Znak:Kraków, 1994), was a quiet event. The book had few advance notices and little promotion. Still, within about four months the readers bought out the whole edition, while friends and acquaintances approached me commenting on the wonderful qualities of Dickinson's correspondence and on the merits of the translator's work. On the whole then, one could say that the edition followed the pattern of traditional readerly reception of Dickinson's work. Despite discreet advertising, her books almost instantly attracted a following of readers who recognized their originality and responded to their intimate appeal. This was also the pattern of the Polish reading public's response to her. The 1990 edition of the first 100 of poems prepared by Stanisław Barańczak (Emily Dickinson. 100 wierszy, Arka, Kraków: 1990) went into several printings, encouraging the translator to continue his work. Last year's volume of letters has for months been out of stock, and Barańczak's new book of poems, which came out earlier this summer (Emily Dickinson. Drugie 100 wierszy, Znak, Kraków: 1995) is also selling briskly.

In connection with the appearance of selected letters in Polish, an interesting debate developed between the translator and the publisher after the book came out. For my former colleague and friend Dr. Danuta Piestrzynska, the argument consisted centrally in defending the translator's rights to control the text published under her name: her right, that is, to read and approve the version sent to print after the house readers expressed their opinions and made their suggestions. Yet beneath the dispute about the translator's responsibility for and rights to the text translated, there lies a deeper, literary disagreement concerning the nature of Dickinson letter writing and its role in the growth of the artist.

The publisher seems to have approached Dickinson's letters as, first of all, a volume of correspondence whose main function for the writer was practical and communicative and whose interest for today's readers consists in providing "background material" for the poet's "proper" work and historical knowledge of "life and manners" in Victorian New England. The typescript of translations was sent for "language consultation" not to a literary scholar but to a specialist in English linguistics, presumably with a view to confirming the translator's competence in English. Even more telling is the fact that at the last moment the Polish text of the Bible that the translator had used for quotes and allusions was changed for a newer (1990) version. The reason was probably dogmatic (the translator had used the Bible Society version) on the one hand and scholastic, on the other; that is, motivated by the desire to use the most recent—therefore, in terms of scholarship, the most up to-date and possibly the most excellent version.

Amidst such care for high theological and philological standards, the aesthetic integrity, the composed quality of the letters, which the translator strove to preserve was neglected, and, in some instances, destroyed. For example, in Letter 63 written to Austin on November 16, 1851 Dickinson echoes Romans 8.18, "the griefs of the present moment are not to be compared with the joys which are hereafter," and the context clearly shows that she applied St Paul's phrase to the siblings' current situation. Separated because Austin was teaching in Boston, they would reunite "hereafter," i.e., during Austin's spring vacation. The orthodox meaning of "hereafter" is changed by the context to signify the time expected when the two and Susie will be home together again. The Polish version of this Biblical text, originally used by the translator retained as central the notion of waiting for the glory to be revealed "hereafter," while the new translation, substituted by the editor, shifts emphasis of the fragment from expectation of perfect happiness in the future to utter disproportion between "the present sufferings" and "the glory to be revealed," not to us but "in us." However philologically and theologically excellent this most recent rendering of the Biblical text into...