La prison magique. Quatre essais sur Emily Dickinson, and: Emily Dickinson. Car l'adieu, c'est la nuit (review)

In the French literary domain, both Charlotte Melançon and Claire Malroux are known as specialists in the poetic works of Emily Dickinson. One can also mention the recent translations by the French poet Patrick Reumaux (Lieu-dit l'éternité. Seuil, 2007) and previous translations by Alain Bosquet, also a well respected poet, although generally his translations of Dickinson are not ranked among his best poetic achievements. Claire Malroux's work Chambre avec vue sur l'éternité: Emily Dickinson (Gallimard, 2005) is considered the main recent reference work for the study of Dickinson in France and has been generally praised in the Parisian poetic establishment. In previous years, Malroux had published on Dickinson and translated her poetry for the lesser-known and more scholarly publisher José Corti. Charlotte Melançon works and lives in Québec and thus her work is less well-known in metropolitan France, but scholars interested in Dickinson appreciate Melançon's simple and direct translations. Her announced translation of Dickinson's collected works by her usual Quebec publisher, Editions du Noroît, has been long awaited as an important event for the development of Dickinson studies in the Francophone world even if Malroux's translation in the prestigious Poésie series at Gallimard might appear to some to be the definitive reference text.

Francophone specialists of Dickinson familiar with the previously published translations of poems by both Melançon and Malroux know that there is a clear difference of sensitivity between the two translators. Generally Melançon offers a more subdued and less rhetorical version of Dickinson than Malroux while the latter offers a well-crafted sense of Dickinson's mastery of style and agility with word play and fleshes out Dickinson's deepest feelings. While Melançon is known as a professional translator, Malroux is very much part of the Parisian writing scene and is known as a poet in her own right, often associated with the 1980 Gallimard movement of the so-called "new lyricism." She has published ten books of poetry, first at Rougerie (until 2000) and then at Le Castor Astral. Through her friendship with the American poet Marilyn Hacker, two of her books of poetry have been translated into English, Edge and A Long Gone Sun, and her own poetic work has been recognized in France through several literary prizes including the Prix Maurice Edgar Coindreau and the Prix Laure Bataillon. For her translation of Dickinson's poems and the poetry of Nobel prize winner Derek Walcott, she received the Grand Prix National de la Traduction in 1995. Charlotte Melançon is secretary of l'Association des traducteurs et traductrices littéraires du Canada (ATTLC) and has translated several English texts into French. In 1990 she received the Prix Littéraire du Gouverneur Général du Canada for her French translation of The Second Scroll by A. M. (Abraham Moses) Klein. In an article from 2000, "Les mésaventures du merle: les américanismes chez Emily Dickinson," (Méta, 45.1), Melançon denounced the errors of the French translators of Dickinson (Bosquet, Reumaux, and Malroux) when it came to the actual names of North American flora and fauna. For her, for example, to translate the English name "Indian pipe" in "White as an Indian Pipe" (Fr1193) by the French metaphor designating an actual "Indian pipe," calumet ou pipe d'Indien, is to take the French text into the direction of an "ethnic cliché" (poncif folklorique) that is absent from the original text; the correct translation would have been the straight translation of the name of the plant in French, monotrope, a decision that does not add any superfluous connotations.

While the two books that are the subject of this review are very different in the sense that Malroux's is a...