Emily Dickinson's Poetry: On Translating Silence

It seems, in principle, that silence considered in a linguistic perspective implies the absence of semantic content and, therefore, silence might appear as the opposite phenomenon to any organized discoursse or rhetorical order. If this were true, the title of my paper would not have any sense in this particular panel. But I hope I will be able to make clear that this is not the case.

It happens that one of the intrinsic characteristics of Dickinson's poetry is that silence—apparently the absence of diction—is perfectly well articulated in her poems. What she does not say is as relevant as what is explicit in the text. So much so that I think we could speak about something like the meaning of silence.

Related to this peculiar way of understanding writing is also the importance of the construction of that precious building—sometimes almost invisible—called the poem. The dashes—as we will see later on—the peculiarities of typography in the manuscripts, the use of capital letters, separation of words, evolution of handwriting, etc., all these demonstrate a genuine obsession for geographical contours and relief over the surface of the paper.

Silence is very frequently the best translation of the limits of the poem. That is the reason why one of the pertinent questions we could probably ask is the following: What is there between the blank page and the final poem? or, in other words, What is the field (if any) that separates the void from the music?

Emily Dickinson feels very comfortable on the edge of meaning itself. And that is why ellipsis seems to be her favourite rhetorical realm. As in Hopkins or in St. John of the Cross, the most loquacious way of diction is the no dictum.

Her poetry is experimental in the original sense: it experiments with the limits of genre. In my opinion, she is a constituent, a germinal poet because she establishes a new poetical lexicon as well as a new sense of detachment and an unusual sense of humour.

I have taken into account all these aspects in my double translations of her poems: translation in the sense that every reading or comprehension implies a translation and the translations I have made of her poems and letters into Spanish.

If her physical and voluntary confinement provided her with a new sense of time and space relationships, the meaningful rhetoric of silence conveys an alternative way of approaching the poems external referents or the objective correlative. No doubt, Shakespeare, the Metaphysical tradition, and the Bible are behind her; before is Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, and Elizabeth Bishop.

The fascinating thing about her elliptical system of construction is a severe lexical economy coexisting with the widest echoes of the common words. The domestic world and the minor-key tone of her vocabulary render a universal voice. Like Cervantes, Emily Dickinson knew well that only in everyday business abides the universal quality of eternal literary values.

She prefers silence not for any reason deerived from her female condition or from any pathological shyness, but simply because she is extremely respectful with words. Communication has for her an almost sacred value; the conversation and language always mean for her a deep compromise with the inner privacy of the interlocutor. This may be the reason why she always prefers written expression. As she states in several of her letters, trivial babbling terrified her, and she couldn't stand banal social talking. For her it was a way of avoiding the commitment of meaning. And, of course, this doesn't imply she wouldn't like to play with words, as we all know very well.

Emily Dickinson arranges the poetical discourse in an analogical way, and this is the reason why her poems are very rarely narrative, following a logical plot. Frequently a common reader will aks, but What is she talking about? The stylistic consequences of this compositional method is the systematic absence of nexus. She suppresses most of the logical linking elements in such a way that it is for the reader to decide and / or add those connections...