Cognitive Circuits: The Circumference of Dickinson's Lexicon

"There Came a Day at Summer's Full" Introduction, Arabic, Italian

There came a Day at Summer's full,Entirely for me—I thought that such were for the Saints,Where Resurrections—be—

The Sun, as common, went abroad,The flowers, accustomed, blew,As if no soul the solstice passedThat maketh all things new—

The time was scarce profaned, by speech—The symbol of a wordWas needless, as at Sacrament,The Wardrobe—of our Lord—

Each was to each The Sealed Church,Permitted to commune this—time—Lest we too awkward showAt Supper of the Lamb.

The Hours slid fast—as Hours will,Clutched tight, by greedy hands—So faces on two Decks, look back,Bound to opposing lands—

And so when all the time had leaked,Without external soundEach bound the Other's Crucifix—We gave no other Bond—

Sufficient troth, that we shall rise—Deposed—at length, the Grave—To that new Marriage,Justified—through Calvaries of Love—

(P322)

Translating a poem by Emily Dickinson can be much like taking a voyage over unknown seas in a search for new worlds. Those who have the courage to make such a trip would certainly want to have fine navigational tools: a circumference compass, a direction compass, a map. The "map" for translation would be the fascicles, the manuscripts, the poems, the letters, the clues that the poet gave. The "direction compass" for translation would be a concordance, an alphabetical listing of the words in the literary corpus, giving the location of all of the occurrences of a lexical item by poem and line number.¹ The "circumference compass" for translation would be a dictionary of headword entries, giving the cognitive networks of the poet's semantic geometry.

Fortunately for Dickinson scholars, such tools are available as translation aids in the search for lexical "Land!" (P48). Using the Johnson edition or the Franklin manuscript books with the Rosenbaum concordance enables translators to establish the meaning(s) of a word in one poem by comparing the usage of that word and related words in other poems. For example, a translator may wish to explore the meanings of the word "solstice" in P322, "There Came a Day at Summer's full." Using the context of the poem, the translator may decide that Dickinson uses SOLSTICE² to describe a mid-summer's day in New England geography:

There came a Day at Summer's full,Entirely for me—I thought that such were for the Saints,Where Resurrections—be—

The Sun, as common, went abroad,The flowers, accustomed, blew,As if no soul the solstice passedThat maketh all things new—

The Rosenbaum concordance will show that Dickinson uses the word SOLSTICE in two other poems, and the translator can compare the usage in P592 and P1056 to see if the meanings and contexts are similar:

What care the Dead for Summer?The Solstice had no SunCould waste the Snow before their Gate—

(P592)

There is a Zone whose even YearsNo Solstice interrupt—Whose Sun constructs perpetual NoonWhose perfect Seasons wait—

(P1056)

Using a computerized concordance as a directional compass, a translator can also see whether SOLSTICE is a part of a set of related words in more than one poem. The words SUN and SUMMER occur with the word SOLSTICE in all three poems, so the translator can use lexical resonances of the related words in choosing an appropriate match in the target language. The words LOVE in P322 and BELOVED in P592 co-occur with SOLSTICE, so the translator can examine the nuances of that lexical tie:

The Sun, as common, went abroad,The flowers, accustomed, blew,As if no soul the solstice passedThat maketh all things new—

Sufficient troth, that we shall rise—Deposed—at length, the Grave—To that new Marriage,Justified—through Calvaries of Love—

(P322)

What care the Dead for Summer?The Solstice had no SunCould waste the Snow before their Gate—And knew One Bird a Tune

Could thrill their Mortised EarOf all the...