Our Visitor from Infinitude—Emily Dickinson's Poetry by Enikő Bollobás (review)

Emily Dickinson has been an immensely popular poet in Hungary ever since two representative collections of her poetry appeared in the 1980s. The translators were some of the best Hungarian poets, of whom especially Amy Károlyi and Gyula Kodolányi managed to give Dickinson a voice that was both unmistakable and natural (in the sense that the poems did not sound like translations). It was also these two poets who, reflecting on their translation work, also published the first essays on Dickinson, allowing the Amherst poet to join the Hungarian poetic pantheon. Dickinson studies started to develop in Hungarian scholarship around the same time. Enikő Bollobás, one of the first Dickinson scholars in Hungary, introduced Hungarian readers to Dickinson's idiosyncrasies of language, poetic form, thematics, and personal attitude. Bollobás also offered university seminars to generations of Hungarian students at universities in Budapest and Szeged universities, always reading Dickinson's whole poetic corpus during the fourteen weeks of the semester, and motivating students to write MA theses and PhD dissertations on related topics. Other researchers include Katalin G. Kállay, Judit Kónyi, and Zsófia Tóth, who have explored gender issues, publication procedures, and the topos of death in Dickinson's poetry.

In her 2015 monograph on Emily Dickinson's poetry, Enikő Bollobás examines the poet's achievements, presenting Dickinson as a subversive thinker and formal innovator. Exploring the poet's revisions of some of the most widely accepted norms of nineteenth-century versification, the author interprets Dickinson's subversions and innovations as modes of catachresis, whether catachresis as trope or catachresis as a gesture typical of the modern(ist) mind.

Framed by an introductory critical biography and concluding summary, the book consists of four major chapters. In the first, "Formal-Linguistic Innovations," the author surveys Dickinson's subversive language and form, addressing syntax and lexicon, orthography and punctuation, and verse form. With respect to form, Bollobás discusses visual presentation, stanzaic and metrical structure, grammetrics (the investigation of the ways grammar and prosody or metrics interact), and rhyme, highlighting in each case the catachretic gesture of a poet who consistently deviated from prevailing norms.

The second section, "Modes of Thematic Treatment," is devoted to Dickinson's cognitive experiments or excursions into forms of knowing that supply the poet's main themes. Bollobás identifies several modes of thematic treatment (aesthetics of process, inspection of inner events, epistemological and cognitive uncertainty, multiple selves/spaces of self), demonstrating their correspondence to certain tropes in the next section, "Modes of Thinking and Troping." Working from the assumption that structures of knowing are reflected in corresponding poetic figures and tropes, the author investigates ways the various modes of thematic treatment find their figural home, while still serving a multiplicity of meanings and a strategy of indirection. The tropes discussed are paradox and oxymoron, metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, mise en abyme, and catachresis, contextualized by in-depth analyses of poems employing these constructions. Paradox and oxymoron are understood as dominant tropes of the poet, who sees the world in its contradictions, and whose prevalent cognitive gestures are negation and ambiguity or indeterminacy. Metaphor, the classic trope for the transfer of meaning, is presented as an always unpredictable mode for capturing fleeting moments, as well as the vehicle whereby inner and outer events turn into each another. Epistemological and ontological uncertainty informs the use of paradox, metaphor, catachresis, and mise en abyme alike, while inner events are conceptualized via synecdoche and metonymy. Synecdoche and what Bollobás describes as its reverse, mise en abyme, allow the poet to voice part-whole relations and give spatial form to psychological adventures, while metonymy captures moments of connection, contingency, and indirection. Finally, catachresis, the emblematic trope of an innovative and subversive mind, serves the articulation of modes of prehension, or the phase preceding cognition, for which neither word nor concept existed until the...