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Reviewed by:
  • Emily Dickinson: Sämtliche Gedichte trans. by Gunhild Kübler
  • Heinz Ickstadt (bio)
Kübler, Gunhild, trans. Emily Dickinson: Sämtliche Gedichte. München, Ger.: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2015. € 49,90.

Nine years ago, Hanser Verlag brought out an edition of some 600 poems of Emily Dickinson, competently selected, edited, and translated into German by Gunhild Kübler. Reviewing it for this journal, I predicted that Kübler’s selection would, for a long time, be closest to a complete edition of Dickinson’s work in German. Publisher and translator have proven me wrong. Since early this year, German readers are able to acquire a handsome, moderately priced bilingual edition of all of Dickinson’s poems, based on R.W. Franklin’s reading edition of 1998, and again translated and edited by Gunhild Kübler, together with an extensive postscript on Dickinson’s life and work (and on the complex history of its publication), a short but helpful commentary and a brief bibliography – a monumental achievement. It will no doubt fundamentally reshape the knowledge of Dickinson’s poetry in Germany and deepen its appreciation by a steadily growing German audience beyond the relatively small circle of academic experts. After the Japanese, Italian, and French publications of her collected poetry, this is the fourth bilingual edition of Dickinson’s complete poems in a foreign language.

If the critical reception of Kübler’s earlier volume had been encouraging, even enthusiastic (she received several prizes for her work), the present publication of Dickinson’s poems (all 1789 of them) promises to be an even greater success — the first edition of some 5000 copies has already been sold, a second is in preparation. What Gunhild Kübler had hoped to accomplish with her first selection, she has now achieved once and for all: to document Dickinson’s boundless creativity and inventiveness beyond the corpus of often-anthologized poems on death and immortality, or her linguistic explorations of the borderlines of consciousness. Although the greatness of these well-known poems is surely beyond any doubt, the present publication clearly shows that they form only a fraction of her breathtaking productivity, that the bulk of her poetry is concerned with everyday life, her love for, and close observation of, nature; as much as it is marked by the interest she takes in the life surrounding her – in people, local news, and events. The voice we hear most often through these poems is not that of the famous recluse in white, nor that of a joyless spinster – clichés that Kübler vehemently objects to – but that of a woman intensely engaged in the life she lived [End Page 96] in fact as well as in imagination. Accordingly, her poems deal with the agonies and joys of love, of physical and/or spiritual fulfillment and give evidence of the sensuous pleasure she takes in the noises and colors of nature. They also show her constant awareness of the presence of death, many of them mourning the loss of friends and relatives she had deeply admired and loved. Through the linguistic veil of these poems we come to see a woman tortured by introspection, haunted by what she knew was living in the “cellar” of the soul; a woman taught by religious convention to sacrifice earthly desire for a world “beyond,” but who, from early on, understood that the only paradise she could be sure of was here on earth, and the only immortality graspable that of consciousness and of the poems she created.

Small wonder, then, that her poetry displays a great variety of tones and voices, of moods and modes of expression. It can be witty and ironic, exuberant and ecstatic; but also laconic and down to earth, aware of “The Stock’s advance and Retrograde” (Fr1049). It can be learned and scientific, intellectual and abstract as well as passionate in declaring love or recoiling in painful rejection or consciousness of loss. It is religious in its dense meditations on Death and the Beyond, but also irreverent, even blasphemous, questioning hallowed social institutions (like marriage, whose economic basis she exposes mercilessly), or undermining the tenets of formal religion to which she opposes her...

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