The Early Poetry of Emily Dickinson: Fascicles 9 & 10 by Nicolás Estévez Fuertes, Francisca González Arias and Paul S. Derrick (review)

This is the fifth volume in a project that began in 2006 with the publication of La poesía temprana de Emily Dickinson: el primer cuadernillo, a translation and critical study of Dickinson's first fascicle. Two very positive reviews of that volume in Spanish academic journals encouraged us to continue working on the fascicles. Although there have been numerous Spanish translations of Dickinson's work, as far as we know, this is the only attempt to make the early fascicles available to Spanish and Spanish-speaking readers.

In recent years, many Dickinson scholars (Sharon Cameron, Eleanor Elson Heginbotham, Dorothy Huff Oberhaus, Martha O'Keefe, and Alexandra Socarides, among others) have focused on these forty short poem sequences that pose a number of fascinating questions concerning the intentions as well as the poetic accomplishment of this enigmatic American poet. Our translation of the fascicles in bilingual format is accompanied by a critical commentary which provides a reading of each poem and establishes its thematic role within both the fascicle structure and the overall work of the poet.

Fascicles nine and ten include a total of fifty-one poems written between 1860 and 1862. In them, we can observe how Dickinson continues to develop her most important themes: the paradoxical logic of renunciation, the tension between faith and doubt, death as an unbridgeable epistemological borderline, and the metaphor of resurrection. At the same time, in these fascicles Dickinson perfects her poetic technique and refines her handling of these motifs. In this volume, then, we witness Dickinson's definitive steps toward her full intellectual and artistic maturity.

The work in this book was carried out as follows: the two chapters entitled "Cuadernillo 9: en el umbral de la madurez" ("Fascicle 9: On the Threshold of Maturity") and "Cuadernillo 10: acomodar la ambigüedad" ("Fascicle 10: Accommodating Ambiguity"), which offer critical readings, were originally written in English by Paul Sco Derrick and then translated into Spanish by Nicolás Estévez. The fascicles themselves were translated by Francisca González Arias in collaboration with Derrick.

Over the course of thirty-four years, Derrick has published many essays on Dickinson's poetry, including a critical introduction to a translation of a selection of Dickinson's letters to Thomas Wentworth Higginson. He is also co-translator of a selection of Dickinson's poems into Catalan. This work, along with the extensive bibliography of critical books and essays that inform it, provide the main foundation for the readings offered here. And those readings provide the background against which most of our translation choices were taken.

Translation of the critical commentary was challenging. Dickinson's poetry is extremely complex, and her use of words and terms highly ambiguous. Any valid discussion of these complexities requires a corresponding delicacy and precision of expression. Finding comparable phrasing in Spanish was at least as demanding as translating the poems themselves.

As can be expected, our final conclusions are far from definitive. But in brief, we propose that any thematic unity in the first ten fascicles arises from the natural occurrence of the various themes that repeatedly occupied her poems because they constantly occupied her mind. Dickinson cleverly wove complex parallels and metaphorical associations among her central themes in order to cultivate her need for the "cloaking device" of ambiguity.