Table of content

Introduction………………………………………………………….………...5
Chapter 1. Emily Dickinson's Poetry in the Context of American
Romanticism……………………………………………………………………7

1.1Genaral characterization of American Romatism. ………………………….7

1.2 The Artistic world of E. Dickinson…………………………………………11
1.3 Idiostyle of E. Dickinson…………………………………………………….26
Chapter 2. Images of the nature in the poetry of Emily
Dickenson………………………………………………………………………..34

2.1. The main problems of translation of poetry by E. Dickinson……………….47

2.2. Analysis of the translation of poems about the nature of

poetry E. Dickinson……………………………………………………………….51
Conclusion………………………………………………………………………..56
Bibliography……………………………………………………………………..59

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 Introduction

Currently, researchers are paying more and more attention to the work of
women writers, poets, who have long remained on the periphery of literary studies.
It is impossible to reason with good reason about many phenomena of the world
literary process (for example, about the English novel, American and French
romanticism) without considering the work of women writers and poets.
One of the brightest pages in the history of world women's literature that deserves
the close attention of researchers is the fate and work of the American poet Emily
Dickinson. Her work, along with Whitman's, defines the main contribution of
American poetry to the world poetry of the second half of the XIX century.
Thus, the choice of the topic of the graduate qualification paper and its relevance
are due to the problem of perceiving the forms of expression of the world of Emily
Dickinson's personality as a single letter that needs to be deciphered, creating a
psychological portrait of the poetess based on her poetic creativity.
The main purpose of the work was to study the artistic diversity of E.
Dickinson's work by analyzing the description of nature in her poems, as well as
ways of translating descriptions of nature. In connection with this goal, the
following main tasks are solved in the work:
• to show the variety of influences that contributed to the formation of the poetess'
worldview, her poetic creativity;
• give a general analysis of Dickinson's poetry;
• show the place of nature in the life and work of E. Dickinson
• consider the features of the description of nature in Dickinson's poetry.
• consider ways of translating descriptions of nature in the poetry of E. Dickinson.
The object of the study is Emily's Dickinson poetic creativity.
The subject of the study is the ways of describing nature in the poetry of E.
Dickinson.
The material for the study was the poetic works of E. Dickinson, touching
on the theme of nature and related phenomena in the original and translations of

5
Russian poets-translators (M. Zenkevich, V. Markova, A. Gavrilov, I.Kashkin, A.
Grishin, A. Kudryavitsky).
Research methods. Several research methods are used in the work:
1) the method of historical and philological analysis, which allows us to consider
the features of the poetic language of E. Dickinson in the historical context of the
state of language and culture in American fiction of the XIX century;
2) the method of linguistic stylistic description (characteristics of linguistic and
stylistic features of a poetic work);
3) the method of comparative linguistic analysis of the original and
translations;
The scientific novelty of the graduate qualification paper is that it presents
for the first time the results of a study of the linguistic features of Emily
Dickinson's poetic language when describing nature.
The theoretical significance of the thesis is that it makes a certain
contribution to a more detailed study of the work of E. Dickinson, namely nature
as an integral part of the life and work of the poetess.
The practical significance of the study is determined by the possibility of
using its results in further studies of the poetic creativity of E. Dickinson.
This thesis consists of an introduction, three chapters, conclusion, bibliography.

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Chapter 1. Emily Dickinson poet of American Romanticism

1.1. General characteristics of American Romanticism.

The romantic era in the history of American literature covers almost half a
century: its beginning falls on the second decade of the XIX century, the end is
illuminated by the flames of the Civil War of the 60s. Romanticism is one of the
most complex, internally contradictory and turbulent periods in American literary
history. However, it is difficult to overestimate its importance. The enduring
traditions of national literature were laid here.
The foundation of the romantic ideology was the rapid socio-economic
development of the country at the beginning of the XIX century, which raised it to
the level of the most developed European powers and provided a springboard for
subsequent capitalist progress. It was in this process that the ugly moral meaning
of the pragmatic ethics of bourgeois America began to gradually emerge.
The energetic transformations in the economic and social structure of the
USA in the 20-30s of the XIX century explain not only the very fact of the
emergence of romantic ideology, but also some of its specific features, in particular
a kind of dualism — a combination of patriotic pride for the young fatherland and
the bitterness of disappointment caused by the rebirth of the democratic ideals of
the revolution.
With the further development of romantic ideology in the United States,
the initial balance of these elements was quickly disrupted. The first steadily
decreased, the second increased. The era of Romanticism in the history of
American literature is more or less clearly divided into three stages. The early (20-
30s) is the period
of "nativism" — the romantic exploration of national reality, nature, history,
attempts at artistic research of the American bourgeois civilization, its delusions,
errors and anomalies. It is significant, however, that this study proceeds on the
whole from the conviction in the healthy basis of American democracy, capable of
coping with "external" negative influences.

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 The mature stage (late 30s — mid 50s), the onset of which is associated
with the economic upheavals of the late 30s, the powerful rise of radical
democratic movements, severe domestic and foreign policy conflicts of the 40s, is
characterized by a number of tragic discoveries made by romantics, and first of all
the discovery that social evil does not affect the supposedly ideal social structure
from the outside, but is rooted in the very nature of American bourgeois
democracy. This is associated with pessimistic and tragic notes in the works of
many American poets and prose writers: E. Poe, N. Hawthorne, G. Melville, et al.
The final stage (from the mid-50s to the beginning of the Civil War)
is the era of the crisis of romantic consciousness and romantic aesthetics in the
United States, as a result of which American writers and thinkers gradually came
to understand that romantic consciousness is unable to further cope with the
material of public life, cannot give the keys to explaining its mysteries and indicate
ways to resolve its contradictions. [Apenko E. 2001: 124]
The creative path of E. Dickinson covers the 1850s-80s - a transitional
period in the history of American literature. If the 1850s-60s are the time of the
continuing flourishing of Romanticism (the so-called "Renaissance"), when the
works of G. Melville, N. Hawthorne, W. Whitman were created, then since the late
1860s - early 1870s, romanticism has been waning, giving way to realistic
tendencies and naturalism. At the same time, a number of major writers continue to
follow the example of the Romantics. A striking phenomenon of late American
Romanticism was the poetry of Emily Dickinson.
In modern literary studies, it is customary to consider E. Dickinson as the last
romantic who was influenced by Emersonian ideas (A.M.Zverev,
T.D.Benediktova, E.F.Osipova, S.D.Pavlychko, K.Keller, G. Bloom, R.Chase,
P.Bennett, etc.).
The appearance of E. Dickinson's peculiar poetry was also prepared by the
special female culture of the 50s - 60s of the XIX century, when serious women's
literature first appeared. In the second third of the XIX century, George Sand shone
in European literature - in France, the Bronte sisters, Elizabeth Browning, George

8
Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Christina Rossetti - in England. Almost a stronger
women's literary movement appeared a little later in the literature of the United
States - the works of Margaret Fuller, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sarah Orne Jewitt
and other writers and poets became world famous. Dickinson was characterized in
many ways by a purely "feminine" view of the world, of her place and purpose in
it, formed in the same conditions as the ideas of her compatriots, and therefore
having similarities with them. However, E. Dickinson's attention was focused on
the works of English writers Elizabeth Browning, the Bronte sisters and George
Eliot.
Romantic ideology and romantic literature in the United States emerged
much later than in the advanced countries of Europe. American thinkers and poets
made extensive use of the conquests of European — especially English —
Romanticism. We are talking not only about imitations and borrowings, of which
there were plenty, but also about the creative use of the experience of European
romantic philosophy, aesthetics and literature.
Although researchers have long denied the importance of literary
influences for the development of E. Dickinson, a careful examination of her
poetry reveals historically conditioned connections with English literature. Like
most romantics, E. Dickinson has a special attitude to the spiritual heritage of the
past — a "deeply personal, lyrical penetration" into the depths of the work, the
perception of artists of the past as "spiritual companions", a sense of their
"presence and involvement" in her fate. [Belinsky V. 1956: 147]
He left his mark on romantic creativity and regionalism, which is very
influential in American spiritual life and, accordingly, in literature. He turned out
to be one of the most persistent elements in the sphere of ideology and culture.
Participating in the national cultural movement, the literature of each of the regions
had its own ideological and artistic specifics, its own pace of development. E.
Dickinson was also influenced by this as a native of New England.
Transcendentalism was a movement in which the reaction against the
rationalism of the XVIII century was reflected and the general humanistic trend of

9
the development of thought of the XIX century was expressed. This movement
was based on the belief in the unity of the world and God. The soul of each
individual was considered identical to the whole world and represented this world
in miniature. The doctrine of "self-confidence" and individualism developed by
convincing the reader that the human soul was connected with God and identified
with him.
Transcendentalism was geographically associated with Concord, a small
town in New England, which is located 32 km west of Boston. Concord became
the first rural colony of artists and writers. It was here that a spiritual and cultural
alternative to American materialism emerged. It was a place where people had
lofty conversations, but lived simply and modestly. It can be assumed that the
society of transcendentalists was formed in 1836. At various times it included:
Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, Channing, Bronson Olcott, priest Orestes Brownson,
abolitionist and preacher Theodore Parker, as well as E. Dickinson, a native of
New England, where the society of transcendentalists was formed.
Unlike many European groups, the transcendentalists have never issued
any manifestos. They insisted that all people have their own individuality, and this
individuality is unique. American transcendentalists have pushed radical
individualism to the extreme. Writers in America often considered themselves
lonely explorers of human society. All this could not but impress the free-thinking
E. Dickinson, who wrote: "It's wonderful that everyone is a Spirit by himself, like a
bird." She got acquainted with the ideas of the transcendentalists gradually and
casually, reading books, talking with her brother, who studied at Harvard. Emerson
was her idol not only as the author of "Nature", but also as a poet. Emerson, in
particular, believed that the Universal Soul, despite its transcendence, constantly
"flows" into the natural world, filling it with beauty and content. It is in the ability
to look at the world with a renewed look, a look capable of seeing glimpses of the
"spirit" in the material world, that the main task of a person, especially a creative
person, lies. It is the poetic artistic perception when the dust of everyday life is

10
blown away from nature and it (according to Dickinson) it seems to be filled with
"ghosts", helps to perceive the world spiritualized, meaningful and beautiful

The poet's special talent is the ability to see the "sublime in the simple", to see the
"spirit" in such ordinary things as grass, river, evening sunset. The closeness to
nature that Thoreau preached in Walden was also her ideal. Thus, already at that
time nature became one of the main themes of E. Dickinson's work.
Influenced by the transcendentalists, E. Dickinson inherited a theoretical interest in
nature. Transcendentalists deified nature, endowed it with spiritual power, wrote
about merging with nature, which is necessary and beneficial for the development
of personality. Considering man as a part of nature, Emily Dickinson dresses him
in a dress made of the purest snow (we are talking about a decent person):
"Why, I have lost, the people know
Who dressed in frocks of purest snow" [The complete 1875: 51].
She emphasizes the spiritual unity of man with nature.
The work of the American poet Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) as a poet of late
American Romanticism has been known for more than a century a wide American
readership. In recent decades, it has attracted more and more attention in our
country.
1.2. The life and work of Emily Dickinson.
This part of my graduate qualification paper is devoted to the work of the
famous English romantic poet Emily Dickinson. In this part we will try to trace her
creative path, describe the poetic world of Dickinson and give him a characteristic.
Emily Dickinson is one of the most mysterious figures in the history of world
literature, both humanly and creatively. Her creative destiny is extraordinary: all
her life, even her closest neighbors did not realize that she was writing poetry. The
biography of Emily Dickinson to this day is fraught with many mysteries. [1]

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson, who did not like her middle name, was born on
December 10, 1830 in a house built by her grandfather, in which she was destined
to die 55 years, 5 months and 5 days later. Emily was the second child in the
family. Her brother Austin was born in April 1829, and her sister Lavinia was born

11
in February 1833. All the family members were very attached to each other and did
not want to be separated. At first, Emily, like everyone else, studied in elementary
school, and from the age of nine she began going to the Amherst Academy for
Girls, the founder of which, like the college, was her grandfather. Religious
education was only part of the academy's curriculum. Emily's relationship with the
Bible was not easy, because she was forced to read this book as a child. But
already in adolescence, she found it "entertaining".

With the emergence of the future poetess's burning interest in the issues of
death and immortality, she began to look for answers to her questions in the Bible.
The answers found there did not always satisfy her, and then she wrote poetry,
trying to give her own answer, or at least to formulate the question correctly. [2;
222] Emily Dickinson received a good education at that time. At first, Emily, like
everyone else, studied in elementary school, and from the age of nine she began
going to the Amherst Academy for Girls, the founder of which, like the college,
was her grandfather. Nathaniel Fowler Dickinson was convinced that "daughters
need to be well educated... A woman's mind, so sensitive, so well amenable to
improvement, should not be left in neglect... God did not plan anything in vain".
[3] Emily met her seventeenth birthday in the neighboring town of South Hadley,
where she was studying at the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary at the time.

As in the academy, teaching here was based, as far as possible, on

Calvinistic religious dogma, but this did not reduce the value of real knowledge
that was communicated to the students at lectures on chemistry, electricity,
physiology, botany, algebra, geometry. Emily's favorite subject, judging by many
of her poems with references to various exotic places on the planet, was
geography. Emily studied at Mount Holyoke for only one year. This was the end of
Emily Dickinson's formal education, and in 1848 she returned to her native
Amherst under her father's roof, so as not to leave it for a long time anymore, and
not to leave it for a single day for the last twenty-one years of her life. But there

12
were books, there was her thirst for knowledge about earth and heaven, about
people and angels.

Having started writing poetry (this happened when she turned twenty),
Emily Dickinson became especially keenly interested in English writers and
poetesses, whose fame had crossed the borders of their native island. Her idols
were Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Miles and Charlotte Bronte. How to explain
such an interest in famous poets and writers? Probably, Emily Dickinson, from the
very beginning of her own writing, tried to try on their fate, their fame, and looked
for similarities in their life and work with her life, with her thoughts and feelings.
By their example, she learned to be a poet, apparently, in her youth, not knowing
that poets are born and that this is exactly what happened to her - she was born a
poet. [2; 220]Emily Dickinson's poems also have the property of "turning
thought... for eternal secrets." Her world was not whole, but dichotomous, which
left some "eternal" questions without definite answers, since she could not make a
choice from several mutually exclusive answers in favor of one of them. But
poetry is fueled by questions, not answers.

Gradually, E. Dickinson's social circle began to narrow and was limited only
to relatives and a few close family friends. Perhaps the reason for this course of
events was a love drama that began in Washington in 1855. There she met Charles
Wadsworth, the pastor of the Presbyterian Church, who made such an impression
on Emily with his sermons that when she returned to Amherst, she wrote him an
impassioned letter, which marked the beginning of their long-term correspondence.
Twice he visited the poetess in Amherst, but their love was absolutely hopeless,
because both were people with high moral principles.

In 1862, Charles moved to another state with his family, and Emily
Dickinson began the time of her "white election" (she dressed in white and locked
herself in the walls of her house for the rest of her life). Biographers wonder what
it meant - the color of the "royal mourning" (as it is known, the mourning of kings
is white) or the "bride's white color" of expectation (a new meeting really took

13
place, but only after twenty years)? Most likely, Wordsworth's departure was only
a push. The seclusion in which Emily Dickinson nurtured her unfulfilled love was
an attempt to build some kind of alternative universe in this everyday, mundane
and ordinary world.

The poetess's remark about the "country" that a friend "left" is not
accidental. I must say that she managed to build her own, self-sufficient world: this
is her poetry.

E. Dickinson voluntarily condemned herself to increasing loneliness. This

was not her only oddity: she never signed her letters, and remained an old maid,
although marriage proposals (albeit few) were made to her at one time. All this
gave rise to speculation and stories. In Amherst, she became something of a local
"weirdo." What was she really like? "Small, like a wren bird, with eyes the color of
cherries that guests leave at the bottom of glasses," is how she described herself.
"A woman with a light gait, a quiet childish voice and a quick mind," was how her
contemporaries perceived her. "She had a capricious intellect and the widest
spiritual demands," critics of the XX century note.[5]

In 1862, Emily Dickinson wrote a letter to the well-known New England

writer Thomas Higginson, who at that time published an article in a magazine in
which he urged young writers to send him their literary creations. This was the
reason for E. Dickinson to write the letter. But this is not the main motive that
made her write to a stranger. She needed an understanding interlocutor, she finally
needed a mentor. All her life she has been looking for guidance from a
"teacher".And Thomas Higginson became that teacher for her.

In 1891, a year after the publication of the first book of poems by Emily
Dickinson, warmly welcomed by readers, Higginson, who took part in the
preparation for the publication of this book and probably did not expect such
success, published in the Atlantic Monthly part of the poetess's letters to him. He
accompanied the publication with a memoir comment. "I saw her only twice,"
Higginson recalled, "and she impressed me with something completely unique and

14
distant, like Ondine..." [6; 9] This Ondine chose Higginson as her "Teacher" and,
starting with the fourth letter, stubbornly signed: "Your Student." Higginson
conscientiously treated the mission imposed on him and pointed out in letters to all
the mistakes and inconsistencies in the poems she sent, to non-compliance with the
size, weak rhymes, spelling, syntactic and stylistic errors, to absolutely wild, in his
view, punctuation (the poetess preferred a dash to all punctuation marks, putting it
even at the end of the poem - instead of dots). But the strange "Student", constantly
and fervently thanking the "Teacher" for help, never took advantage of his
qualified instructions and advice. It seems that in the most important business of
her life - writing poetry - she did not need a mentor, here. Emily Dickinson stood
firmly on her own feet. After reviewing Emily's sent poems, Higginson advised her
not to rush to publish. Before that, in her second letter, she hinted to him that the
editors of the Springfield Daily Republic were asking her for poems, not
mentioning that three of her poems had already been published in this newspaper.
Answering so, Emily Dickinson was not very cunning. Perhaps the issue of
publications had already been resolved by her in principle, and that decision was
negative. Subsequently, this question arose in correspondence with Higginson only
once more - when her former classmate at the Amherst Academy, who became a
famous writer, Helen Hunt Jackson, would persistently ask her for poems for the
anthology "The Poet's Mask", and she, after consulting with the "Teacher", would
reluctantly give her one poem. [2; 232]

By the 1860s, Dickinson had become almost a recluse, and after the 1870s
she did not leave the house at all. It was probably a desire, like that of any artist,
for solitude, because it was then that she seriously devoted herself to poetry. It
cannot be ruled out that there were elements of religious seclusion in her rejection
of worldly vanity. In 1874, Emily's father died. In 1878, Emily is visited by a
second- this time shared love-for Otis Lord, a friend of her father. In 1882, her
mother and Wadsworth died, in 1884 - Otis Lord.Then the poems began to wane,
but her whole life was built according to the laws of the highest harmony. Emily
Dickinson died in May 1886, in the same house where she was born.

15
 The poetic position of the poetess is very unusual: the work of E. Dickinson
is devoid of direct chronological guidelines, and, it would seem, does not respond
in any way to the most important events of American history and culture, of which
she was a contemporary. To the first readers of her poems, she might have seemed
an isolated and strange person, but the XX century welcomed her as an artist who
was ahead of his era. This is not entirely true: between the poetry of E. Dickinson
and the era in which she lived, there is a very deep and strong, although
inaccessible to a superficial glance, connection. Such events of the XIX century in
the USA as the civil war between the North and the South, the war with Mexico,
the formation of an original national literature and the formation of a national
philosophical system-transcendentalism had a great influence on the poetess and
on the formation of her creativity. It is also impossible to deny the fact that "the
poetess was influenced by great literature. But it can be assumed that there was no
one among her entourage with whom she could share her thoughts or discuss what
is happening in the world." [7;3] The natural and only way for E. Dickinson to
open the boundaries of her inner world and at the same time save it, without
exchanging for external activity associated with casual communication and spatial
movement, was her poetry.

In the work of Emily Dickinson, the type of consciousness formed under the
influence of Puritan spiritual culture was expressed. Puritan seriousness was based
on Calvinism, a harsh and dogmatic theology created by the Geneva religious
reformer Jean Calvin (1509-1564). Calvinism represents God as a sovereign,
against whose authority man in the person of Adam rebelled, breaking the sacred
and solemn contract between them. Calvinism was the dominant theology of New
England throughout the colonial period. [2; 224] The marked features of her poetry
go back to this source. Light, lightness, romantic irony color even the deepest
poems-reflections of E. Dickinson, so they are not philosophical treatises and not
sermons, but almost always a little game:

To make a prairie,

16
All you need is a bee and a clover flower.
Bee and clover - their beauty -
And even a dream.
And if there are few bees and rare flowers,
Then one dream is enough. [9;67]
The creative rise of Emily Dickinson, chronologically coincides with the
heyday of American Romanticism in the 40s - 60s of the XIX century. This period
is characterized by researchers as "romantic humanism". Let us add that, in terms
of its problems and even style, E. Dickinson's poetry, albeit with some
reservations, fits into the parameters of American "romantic humanism". The
latter's intense attention to the individual human consciousness is manifested in
different ways, but equally obviously in the works of E. Poe, N. Hawthorne, G.
Melville, in the abolitionist novels of G. Beecher Stowe, in the works of R. W.
Emerson and G.D. Thoreau. As for Emersonian transcendentalism, it, according to
Y.V. Kovalev, "is nothing but a philosophical form of romantic humanism."[8;50]
E. Dickinson's lyrics can rightly be called his poetic embodiment, a kind of poetic
formula.

At the same time, the work of E. Dickinson is not confined to the framework
of romantic humanism. Along with the poetry of G. Melville, W. Whitman, S.
Lanier, and the late lyrics of J. Whittier, E. Dickinson's work extends the living
tradition of "romantic humanism" beyond Romanticism in the United States up to
the penultimate decade of the XIX century.

As in the poems of her direct predecessors - the Puritan poets of New

England of the XVII-XVIII centuries, the Bible occupies an exceptional place in
the lyrics of E. Dickinson. Researchers who undertook to highlight the "Biblical"
poems of the poetess found that this is almost the entire body of her work; even
texts that do not mention events and characters from the Bible somehow come into
contact with her.

17
 A huge number of E. Dickinson's poems are directly based on Scripture. She
constantly conducts a conversation with God in them: she discusses individual
episodes of the history of the people of Israel, the characters of heroes, kings and
prophets, while demonstrating not at all puritanical independence of judgment. So,
for example, it "seems unfair to her, as they did to Moses," who was allowed to see
the Promised Land, but was not allowed to enter there. [4] God is a Father for her,
loving, but sometimes too strict, she is not always a submissive daughter, striving
to figure everything out on her own and get to the bottom of it.

The themes of Emily Dickinson's other poems, not as numerous as the

"Biblical" ones, are the eternal themes of poetry: nature, love, life, death,
immortality. At the same time, these concepts are not an abstraction for her, but
something quite real and concrete. In her poems, usually very short, devoted to
everyday life phenomena (morning, clover flower, well in the garden), there is
necessarily a second, philosophical plan. Therefore, any small detail of everyday
life acquires a special sound and special weight under the pen of the author:

The well is full of mystery!

Water - in his wilderness -

A neighbor from other worlds -

Hid in a jug. [9;72]

The distinctive features of her lyrics are the peculiarity of interpretation,

which consists in the organic interaction of everyday and philosophical plans; the
dominant place occupied by the question of immortality; as well as the form of
expression unusual in the literature of the XIX century.

Dickinson's immortality is not the posthumous glory that poets usually have
in mind and for which she, who did not even publish her poems, clearly did not
count, just as death for her is not the end of everything and not complete
hopelessness, because faith in the Savior provides "eternal life". [5] Her
understanding of love is also peculiar: it is not a purely spiritual union, as in the

18
poetry of most romantics, but also not just a carnal connection, but both, and
something else - a heavenly revelation. Actually, this is a deeply Christian
interpretation of love, which includes various shades, comprehensive and self-
sufficient, similar to the love of God.

Religious motives permeate her poetry, the thought of God never leaves her.
At the same time, Dickinson attracts with a wealth of realistic details, which testify
to her observation and philosophical way of thinking. So, the snow that falls looks
like "alabaster wool", the dog runs on "plush paws", and the clover is called
"meadow mischief", its images are visible, poetic and marked by sharpness of
thought. Her poems with their special imagery were the forerunners of some
features of the aesthetics of imagism, a poetic school active in the 1910s.

Her images are metaphorical, even "dark", need to be deciphered, because

they are built on chimerical associations. In her poems, a world arises - complex,
contradictory;. At the same time, her poetry is not descriptive, but as if
overflowing with inner energy. She called it a "message to the World," from
which, nevertheless, she did not expect a response. According to one of the critics,
Dickinson "accurately reflected all the subtlest experiences of the female soul, as
she learns all the burden of eternal devotion and moves from self-sufficient
illusion, and then painful disappointment to the torment of impossible desires and,
finally, is reborn, invulnerable, in a new form of being." Unlike V. Wittman with
his "cosmism", loose free intonation and fusion with all the diversity of being,
Dickinson is his poetic antipode, a "miniaturist" artist who reflects reality, on the
contrary, in its sharp disharmony - spirit and matter, the sinfulness of the world and
the impossibility of redemption, the disunity of people who strive for unattainable
happiness. The theme of death is constantly present in her poems, tinged with
sadness, with thoughts about the impracticability of dreams.

E. Dickinson's style, very rich, filled with images, now seems even more
modern and innovative than Whitman's manner. She never uses two words if one is
enough; she combines concrete things with abstract ideas. Her lines are aphoristic,

19
and her style is concise and dynamic. Her poems are usually 10-line miniatures,
plotless, dedicated to impressions, sometimes presented as aphorisms about God,
human love, death, being. There is nothing superfluous in her best poems. Many
ridicule the sentimentality fashionable at that time, and some poems sound simply
heretical. Sometimes she shows such a knowledge of reality and human nature that
it looks overwhelming. Like Poe, she explores the dark, secret corners of
consciousness; dramatizes death and the grave. At the same time, she glorifies
simple objects - a flower, a bee, etc. There is a deep mind in her poetry, and
readers have a painful thought that human consciousness is trapped in time. U e.
Dickinson has a wonderful sense of humor, and the range of her poetry is
surprisingly large and diverse.[5]

The monotonous provincial life and the unsociable, closed character of E.

Dickinson left a deep mark on her poetry. It was as if the movement of history did
not exist for her. Even the Civil War responded in her poems only indirectly -
reflections on the vicissitudes of fate, snatching from the lives of people full of
strength and hope. Her spiritual interests were broad. But neither the range of E.
Dickinson's poetic themes, nor the nature of the problems that worried her, hardly
changed.

Among her literary mentors, E. Dickinson especially appreciated Emerson,

not only sharing the basic principles of his interpretation of nature, but also
adopting some features of the poetic creativity of the head of the
transcendentalists: a predilection for symbolism that conveys the invisible
philosophical meaning of the landscape, free rhyme, syntactic violations as a way
of accentuating key lines. Dickinson the private grows into the universal, from
deeply individual experiences a majestic image of a man is born in the struggle
with dramatic circumstances and his own weaknesses.

She believed that it was the inner direct movements of the soul that dictate
the poem's content and form. Moreover, she often felt a burning sense of inability
to convey the feelings that visited her:

20
found the words to every thoutever had - but One -that - defies me -a hand did try
to chalk the Sun.

I found words for every thought -

But One slips out of my hands -

He doesn't want to give in to me -

It's like drawing a circle of the Sun with chalk.

(Per. A. Gavrilova) [10; 69]

Her interpretation of many topics is also original. Her poems are usually
known by the numbers by which they were designated in the now canonical edition
of Thomas X. Johnson (1955). They abound with an unusual abundance of capital
letters and dashes. Like Thoreau, she did not agree with the conventional way of
thinking: she often uses words and phrases in the opposite sense. All this is
manifested in the description of nature.

This is the lyrics of Emily Dickinson, a phenomenon that is both

contradictory and integral in its own way. It is significant that with all the breadth
of spiritual interests, the nature of the problems that worried the poetess practically
does not change. In her case, there is no need to talk about the evolution of
creativity: this is an ever-deepening of the motives outlined in her very first texts,
evidence of the ever-deepening life of the spirit.

Emily Dickinson's innovative and original verse seemed to her

contemporaries either "too elusive" or "formless" at all. E. Dickinson's poems are
characterized by a pulsating rhythm (she never puts commas, using dashes
extensively to highlight rhythmic segments within a line). Faith and doubt will
prove to be the most important motives of E. Dickinson, giving her poetry a
dualism not peculiar to any of the late American Romantics. Like them, E.
Dickinson is a singer of the ideal, but she is least able to satisfy the
"sophistication" achieved by silence about the "unpleasant". Her poetry very

21
frankly depicts the painful moments so frequent in this diary of a lonely soul who
does not recognize any compromises in the knowledge of the truth.

The publisher of eight poems published during the poet's lifetime, Higginson,
wrote that they "resemble vegetables dug out of the garden right now, and rain,
dew, and stuck pieces of earth are clearly visible on them." This definition seems
to be absolutely correct, especially if the word "earth" does not mean dirt, but soil
as the primary basis of everything that exists and is essential. E. Dickinson's lyrics
are really devoid of euphony and smoothness, so appreciated by readers of her
time. This is the poetry of dissonances, the author of which has not experienced the
polishing and standardizing influence of any "circle" or "school" and therefore has
retained the originality of style, clarity, sharpness and sharpness of thought. [4]

Her poetic technique is only Emily Dickinson's technique. What is its

specificity? First of all, in laconism, which dictates the omission of conjunctions,
truncated rhymes, truncated sentences. The originality is also reflected in the
punctuation system invented by the poetess - in the widespread use of dashes that
emphasize the rhythm, and capital letters that highlight key words and emphasize
the meaning. This form is generated not by the inability to write smoothly
(Dickinson has quite traditional poems) and not by the desire to stand out (she
wrote exclusively for herself and for God), but by the desire to highlight the very
grain of thought - without a husk, without a shiny shell. This is also a kind of
rebellion against the then fashionable verbal "curlicues". [1]

The form of Dickinson's poems is natural to her and is determined by

thought. Moreover, her incomplete rhymes, irregularities of style, convulsive
changes of rhythm, the very unevenness of her poetry is now perceived as a
metaphor for the surrounding life and is becoming more and more relevant.
Actually, the time of Emily Dickinson came only in the 50-70s of the XX century,
when philosophical lyrics filled with complex spiritual and moral collisions
became one of the most important trends in American poetry, and when the

22
innovative and free style of the author ceased to shock the ears of compatriots
already accustomed to dissonances.

The first publications of E. Dickinson's poems began to appear only in the

1890s, after her death. Readers and literary critics of the late XIX - early XX
century saw in E. Dickinson's poems only an innovation atypical for modern
literature: she was sharply criticized for her "fragmentary" presentation of thought,
for "incorrect" rhymes. Several definitions that have appeared in criticism can
characterize the ideas about the work and personality of Emily Dickinson at that
time - "immortal lady", "epigrammatic Walt Whitman", "puritan metaphysician",
"recluse of Amherst", "feminist". Each of these metaphors subsequently turned into
a separate problem of studying the works of Dickinson.[10;147]

Interesting and productive in relation to E. Dickinson's lyrics is the approach

of "new criticism", which analyzes in detail various aspects of her poetic heritage
as a text: the use of figurative means and the originality of the author's lexical
constructions. [9; 86] It is noteworthy that many of the articles included in one of
the latest collections of works on E.Dickinson.

The approach of mythocriticism seems to be very interesting and quite

legitimate in relation to E. Dickinson's lyrics. Researchers such as K. Aiken, S.
Berkovich, C. Anderson, O. Warren and D. Oberhaus point to the Bible as the
main source of E. Dickinson's poetic power. Their observations and conclusions
are justified by the poet's really deep knowledge of biblical texts and her intensive
use of biblical images and language. However, these observations are insufficient
to clarify the ways of E. Dickinson's spiritual quest, because the specifics of
Dickinson's interpretation of Scripture occupy researchers less than the fact of
referring to it. Even from the extremely concise review of Western criticism given
above, it is clear that E. Dickinson, as a phenomenon of American literature of the
XIX century, has been widely studied in the USA. This, however, does not mean
that the poet's work has been studied comprehensively and all his "riddles" have
been solved.

23
 Emily Dickinson wrote about 1800 poems that she never decided to publish.
It was only after her death that the world learned about the great poetess, whose
works were parsed into quotations.

When she was 14 years old, a tragedy happened in the family — her cousin
Sophia Holland died. This shocked the young poet. She became quiet and
indifferent to everything. To help her recover, her parents sent her to Boston. Later,
the girl mentioned the event in the poem.

After graduating from school, the girl began attending the Mount Lion
Female Seminary, which was located 16 km from her hometown. But 9 months
later, she dropped out of classes for unknown reasons and returned to her parents'
house, which she almost did not leave until the end of her days. The exception was
in 1855, when Dickinson made a trip to Washington and Philadelphia to
accompany her congressman father.

Little is known about Dickinson's personal life. Researchers have not come
to a conclusion about her sexual orientation. The woman was credited with affairs
with Susan Huntington Gilbert and with Otis Phillips Lord, but there is no
documentary evidence of this. Emily was not married and had no children.

Shortly before completing her studies at the school, Emily became friends
with the director Leonard Humphrey, whom she later called her mentor. Another
ideological inspiration was the lawyer Benjamin Franklin Newton, who introduced
her to the works of William Wordsworth and Ralph Waldo Emerson. The man
listened with pleasure to the poems of young Emily and prophesied to her the
future of the great poet. He died early from tuberculosis.

The girl was interested in the work of writers of her time. She was reading
Letters from New York by Lydia Maria Child and Kavanagh by Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow. She was greatly influenced by the novel Jane Eyre, written by
Charlotte Bronte. The girl named her only dog Carlo, as the character of St. John
Rivers did.

24
 After staying in Amherst, Emily devoted herself to household chores, but
enjoyed participating in holidays and events organized in the city. She led a
carefree and cheerful life, which was overshadowed by the death of Leonard
Humphrey. In a letter to Abia's friend Ruth, the poet described the extent of her
sadness, calling tears the only tribute she can pay to the late teacher.

Most of the messages from Dickinson were received by a school friend

Susan Huntington Gilbert, who later married her brother William. The poetess
called her daughter-in-law a muse and adviser. Researcher Lena Koski interprets
the relationship between the girls as romantic. This idea was reflected in the
comedy "Wild Nights with Emily", which was released in 2018.

After the poet's mother was diagnosed with a chronic illness, Dickinson was
finally confined to the estate in Amherst. She took over most of the household
chores and spent a lot of time reading and tending the garden. This period marked
the peak of her creativity. Emily also rewrote and arranged old works, collecting
them into full-fledged books, but did not dare to publish, fearing criticism.

In the last years of her life, the woman rarely appeared in public. Neighbors
thought she was an oddball, because she preferred to wear white and talk to visitors
through a closed door. But Emily continued to communicate through letters.

The poetess was ill a lot. During her studies at the academy, she had to miss a year
due to poor health. Shortly before her death, the woman experienced the loss of her
parents, friends and beloved nephew, which crippled her health. But the cause of
death is considered to be nephritis, which lasted 2.5 years.

Emily died in 1886, when she was 55 years old. She was buried in the
Western Cemetery in Amherst.

Her famous quotes

"Fate is a dwelling without doors"

"My poems are a message to the World,

25
But he doesn't answer me"

"They shut my mouth with Prose"

"There is the sweetness of Paradise In Goodbyes,

But still they were invented by Hell"

Poems

"That's all I brought you!.."

"A friend of poets – Autumn has passed..."

"How every hill has changed!.."

"I find out – why?.."

"I drink from pearl mugs ..."

"Sheltered in Chambers of alabaster..."

"Mossy joy of the book soul ..."

"Civilization chasing the Leopard..."

"Open the lark! There the music is hidden..."

"The distance is not in the power of foxes..."

Dickinson's poems were published posthumously in 1890 and gained success

with readers. The talent of the poetess was recognized all over the world, and the
works were disassembled into quotations. The bibliography contains about 1800
poems, some of which have been translated into Russian. The woman wrote about
love, nature, sadness and death.

Homestead Manor, where she spent her life, was turned into a museum
where memorabilia and letters of the famous American woman are kept.

The biography of the poetess was reflected in the cinema. In 2019, the
comedy series "Dickinson" was released, starring actress Hailee Steinfeld.

26
1.3. The Idiostyle of E. Dickinson.
E. Dickinson's work of the 1850s-80s encapsulates the aesthetic principles
and values of romantic art, embodied in an innovative form unusual for the era.
The first publications of E. Dickinson's poems began to appear only in the 1890s,
after her death. Readers and literary critics of the late XIX - early XX century saw
in the poems of E. Dickinson only an innovation atypical for modern literature: she
was sharply criticized for a "fragmentary" statement of thought, for "incorrect"
rhymes. Attention to her poetry increased in proportion to the popularity of the
poetics and aesthetics of modernism in American literature.
In the first significant article about E. Dickinson, T.W. Higginson,
although underestimating her innovation, noted the "brightness and objectivity of
the paintings" created in her poems, the "inner content" of her natural images and
the striking similarity with Blake.
In 1891, an anonymous article appeared in Scribner's Magazine, where questions
of the experimental form of Dickinson's poems were raised.
The publisher of the first collections of poems, E. Dickinson M.L. Todd, was the
author of several articles based on the information delivered by the poetess's sister,
and on her own brief acquaintance with her. In addition to interesting comparisons
of Dickinson's poetry with contemporary English women's poetry (E. Bronte, E.B.
Browning, K. Rossetti), Todd finds in her poems something in common with the
paintings of European Impressionists, Wagner's music.
Some critics believed that, in contrast to Coleridge, E. Dickinson asserts
the dominance of form over content; others, on the contrary, reproached her with
excessive intellectualism. The fragmentary style and thought of the poetess was
unusual and sometimes led to a complete misunderstanding of her poems.
In general, in the criticism of the end of the XIX century there were two
points of view on the poetry of E. Dickinson: on the one hand, it was declared
amateurish, on the other - admired its originality.
Several definitions that have appeared in criticism can characterize the ideas about
Emily's creativity and personality Dickinson at that time was an "immortal lady",

27
an "epigrammatic Walt Whitman", a "metaphysical puritan", an "Amherst recluse",
a "feminist". Each of these metaphors subsequently turned into a separate problem
of studying Dickinson's work. [Bobrova M. 1972: 147]
The monotonous provincial life and the unsociable, closed character of E.
Dickinson left a deep mark on her poetry. It was as if the movement of history did
not exist for her. Even the Civil War responded in her poems only indirectly —
reflections on the vicissitudes of fate, snatching from the lives of people full of
strength and hope. Her spiritual the interests were broad. But neither the range of
E. Dickinson's poetic themes, nor the nature of the problems that worried her,
hardly changed. When the chronological order of writing poetry was restored in the
definitive edition of 1955, it turned out that 35 years of E. Dickinson's poetic work
were marked by deepening motives that had already emerged in her first works.
And not the last place even then in her work is occupied by the theme of nature.
These motives are very far from the popular themes of that time. E.
Dickinson was brought up in the Puritan spirit, having deeply assimilated from
childhood the concepts of sin, guilt and redemption, on which generation after
generation grew up in New England, starting with the first settlers. Biblical
imagery occupies an exceptional place in her poetry, but it never bears signs of
illustrative reminiscence — behind it one always feels the immediacy and depth of
one's own experience, naturally expressing itself in the language of Scripture, full
of living meaning for E. Dickinson. Her, as a rule, short poems are usually devoted
to the nature of her native places or some inconspicuous everyday incidents. But in
these poems there is always a second plan — philosophical reflection on the soul,
the universe, beauty, death and immortality, and every small detail of the
description of nature, conveyed with the utmost reliability and accuracy, acquires a
special meaning and weight, participating in that endless dispute of faith and
doubt, which is the thematic center of E. Dickinson's poetry.
E. Dickinson's poems are characterized by a pulsating rhythm (she
never puts commas, using dashes extensively to highlight rhythmic segments
within a line). Faith and doubt will prove to be the most important motives of E.

28
Dickinson, giving her poetry a dualism not peculiar to any of the late American
Romantics. Like them, E. Dickinson is a singer of the ideal, but she is least able to
satisfy
the "sophistication" achieved by silence about the "unpleasant". Her poetry very
frankly depicts painful moments, so frequent in this the diary of a lonely soul who
does not recognize any compromises in the knowledge of the truth.
The emotional scale of E. Dickinson is extremely rich: passionate enthusiasm is
replaced by depression, the happiness of merging with nature — despair from the
inability to dissolve in it, the tides of hope — bouts of disbelief.
Among her literary mentors, E. Dickinson especially appreciated Emerson,
not only sharing the basic principles of his interpretation of nature, but also
adopting some features of the poetic creativity of the head of the
transcendentalists: a predilection for symbolism that conveys the invisible
philosophical meaning of the landscape, free rhyme, syntactic violations as a way
of accentuating key lines. Dickinson the private grows into the universal, from
deeply individual experiences a majestic image of a man is born in the struggle
with dramatic circumstances and his own weaknesses and a special artistic cosmos
is created [The complete 1875: 78]:
Life, and Death, and Giants—
Such as These—are still—
Minor—Apparatus—Hopper of the Mill—

Beetle at the Candle—

Or a Fife's Fame—
Maintain—by Accident that they proclaim—

Жизнь — и Смерть — Гиганты —

Их не слышно — молчат.
А механизмы поменьше
— Всяк на свой лад —
Коник на мельнице —

29
 Жук возле свечи —
Свистулька славы
Свидетельствуют—что Случай правит.
(Перевод В. Марковой)
She believed that it was the inner direct movements of the "soul" that
dictate the poem's content and form. Moreover, she often felt a burning sense of
inability to convey the feelings that visited her. Where is there to think about the
correctness of rhyme, if even what is born often seems incomplete, imperfect,
limited [The complete 1875: 91]:
I found the words to every
thout I ever had – but One –
And that – defies me –

As a hand did try to chalk the Sun.

Я для каждой мысли нашла слова —

Но Одна ускользает из рук —
Поддаться не хочет мне —
Словно мелом черчу Солнца круг. (Пер. А. Гаврилова)
E. Dickinson's style, very rich, filled with images, now seems even more
modern and innovative than Whitman's manner. She never uses two words if one is
enough; she combines concrete things with abstract ideas. Her lines are aphoristic,
and her style is concise and dynamic. There is nothing superfluous in her best
poems. Many ridicule the sentimentality fashionable at that time, and some poems
sound simply heretical. Sometimes she shows such a knowledge of reality and
human nature that it looks overwhelming. Like Poe, she explores the dark, secret
corners of consciousness; dramatizes death and the grave. At the same time, she
glorifies simple objects - a flower, a bee, etc. There is a deep mind in her poetry,
and readers have a painful thought that human consciousness is trapped in time. U
e. Dickinson has a wonderful sense of humor, and the range of her poetry is
surprisingly large and diverse. Her interpretation of many topics is also original.

30
Her poems are usually known by the numbers they were designated in the now
canonical edition of Thomas X. Johnson (1955). They abound with an unusual
abundance of capital letters and dashes.
Like Thoreau, she did not agree with the conventional way of thinking: she
often uses words and phrases in the opposite sense. All this is manifested in the
description of nature. A poem describing one of Dickinson's favorite themes of the
sky is indicative [The complete 1875: 657]:
A Pit – but heaven over it –

And Heaven beside,

and Heaven abroad,

And yet a Pit –

With Heaven over it.

Дыра – но над
Дырой До Горизонта
– Небо, И все ж
Дыра – куда
Провалишься как не
был. (Перевод А.
Гаврилова).
As we noted earlier, the theme of nature was one of the main themes in
the work of E. Dickinson. She was a source of information about the surrounding
world for the poetess, she believed that nature can tell a lot more than people. He
was one of the few living interlocutors of Dickinson, given the poet's closed
lifestyle [The complete 1875: 66]:
This is my letter to the World
That never wrote to Me –
The simple News that Nature told –

With teneder Majesty.

31
 Я миру шлю мое письмо,

хоть он не шлет вестей –

Природа нашептала мне

Немало новостей.
(Перевод А. Гаврилова)
It is worth noting that, since Nature is a living organism for E. Dickinson,
the poetess always uses this word with a capital letter in her poems. In April 1862 ,
Emily Dickinson wrote in a letter to T. W. Higgison:
"you are asking about my comrades. Hills, sir, and Sunsets…
They are better than human beings because they know everything, but they
don't talk." Hills are in the first place, because they are green in summer, yellow
and crimson in autumn and white in winter surrounded her all her life, and their
description is found in a large number of poems by the poetess. "When ...
unexpected lighting in the garden or a new sound in the howling wind suddenly
captured my attention, I was paralyzed – only poetry freed me from it," she told
Higgison.
Dickinson saw herself and the world around her as inseparable from
nature, she believed that humanity and nature are inextricably linked, this is how
she says about it in one of her poems [The complete 1875:750]:
Growth of Man, like Growth of Nature --
Gravitates within --
Atmosphere, and Sun, endorse it --

But it stir -- alone --

Each -- its difficult
Ideal Must achieve --
Itself --
Through the solitary prowess
Of a Silent Life ...

32
 E. Dickinson's poems continue to attract the attention of critics, who are
very ambivalent about her work. Some emphasize the mystical side of her poetry,
others emphasize a special love for nature. Many people note her strangeness,
craving for the exotic.
"This is my letter to the World — To the One from whom there are no
letters," is how she described her poetry. The letter was read in earnest many years
after the sender's death. E. Dickinson's poems were on a par with the highest
achievements of romantic poetry. Emily Dickinson was the last great romantic in
American literature.
conclusions
Thus, the life and work of the poetess was influenced by the era in which
she lived, the people around her and their ideas. In particular, under the influence
of the transcendentalists, she inherited an interest in nature. Transcendentalists
deified nature, endowed it with spiritual power, wrote about merging with nature,
which is necessary and beneficial for the development of personality. Considering
a person as a part of nature, Emily Dickinson writes a huge number of poems about
the place of nature in human life, about the influence of nature on the events of the
surrounding world, simply paints landscapes of the surrounding area. Dickinson
saw herself and the world around her as inseparable from nature, she believed that
humanity and nature were inextricably linked, and tried to realize and convey to
others this connection, which the poetess did not doubt.

33
2. Chapter 2. Images of the nature in the poetry of Emily Dickinson

Nature as a creation of God. The theme of the Sky in the poetry of E.

Dickinson. As we have already noted earlier, nature occupies one of the central
places in the poetry of E. Dickinson. The poetess compared her to a living
organism, preferring communication with nature to communication with people.
Nature was an intermediary between E. Dickinson and God, the poetess
found the greatness of God in the greatness of Nature. That is why in all the poems
of the poetess the word Nature is written with a capital letter: From Nature's
sentinels – from the sentinels of Nature; Where Nature's Temper cannot reach –
Where Nature's temper will not overtake us.

34
Here is how E. Dickinson herself spoke about what Nature is for her [The complete
1875: 668]:
Nature is what we see –

The Hill – the Afternoon –

Squirrel – Eclipse – the Bumble

bee Nay Nature is a Heaven…
Природа – то, что видим мы –
Холмы – Поля – Леса –
Лисица – Шмель – а впрочем, нет –

Природа – Небеса…

(пер. В. Марковой)
– however, no –
Nature is Heaven...
(V. Markova line)
It is also significant that she also writes all the names of natural objects
with a capital letter (Bobolink – butterfly, the Sea – wave, etc.)
In poem No. 1672 [see appendix] E. Dickinson emphasizes the connection
of Nature with God, says that all natural phenomena originate in heaven, about that
it is the Lord who is the creator of all living things:
Father I observed to Heaven,
You are punctual.
The poetess does not question the connection between God and nature,
which is why the sky, where, in her opinion, God exists, attracts the poetess and
occupies one of the central places in her poetry [The complete 1875: 239]:
“Heaven” – is what I cannot reach!..
The Color, on the Cruising Cloud -
The interdicted Land…
Cruising Cloud - The interdicted Land…

35
 In this poem, E. Dickinson says that he wants to reach heaven, to get closer
to the Lord, but he is so far and inaccessible that the sky, as well as his deeds, can
only be admired from afar.
The apple on the Tree
Provided it do hopeless-hang
That – “Heaven” is –to Me!
The comparison of the sky with an apple seems to suggest that if one could
reach the forbidden apple, then one could easily reach the heavens. Here, speaking
about such a simple thing as an apple, the poetess draws a more visual picture in
front of the reader, it feels like you can easily eat this fruit, and, having felt its
divine taste, you will taste like the Sky itself.
The metaphor of Cruising Cloud paints a picture of wandering clouds in
front of the reader, and if it were possible to reach these clouds and travel with
them, then it is possible to reach heaven.
The poetess emphasized that the divine is a part of all living things, that it
is in every being, and you just need to take a closer look to notice it.
E. Dickinson also believed that nature is a teacher for a person, gives him
information and encourages him to act, just a person is still he does not fully
realize this. This is how she says in one of the early poems [The complete 1875:
74]:
The neighbors do not yet suspect!
The Woods exchange a smile!
Orchard, and Buttercup and Bird
-- In such a little while!
Buttercup and a Bird - In such a short time!
In the following poem [Complete Edition 1875: 243] E. Dickinson
says:

I’ve known a Heaven like a Tent –

To wrap its shining Yards…

36
 Here it is not butted as an abstract concept of something impermanent,
something that can disappear at any moment without a trace. We believe that in
this poem the author wanted to convey to the reader the idea that everything in the
world is impermanent, and even such a seemingly natural and unshakable entity as
the sky can go into oblivion: No trace – no Figure of the Thing. It is the
comparison of the sky with a tent (Heaven like a Tent), and the tent, as you know,
is a protection from bad weather, helps the reader to feel the inevitability of events,
the inevitability that something that gives a person support and support in life can
disappear without a trace.
Another poem emphasizes E. Dickinson's attitude to heaven as a gateway leading
to God [The complete 1875: 568]:
Heaven has different Signs - …

All these – remind us of the place

That Men call “Paradise

All nature

All nature is subordinate to God

A mighty look runs round the World…

And all the beautiful phenomena of nature that lead not only the poetess, but also
all people to delight (The Triumph of the Birds, The Rapture of a finished Day) is
paradise. To emphasize this, the author uses such emotionally sublime expressions
as Superior Grace, Carnivals of Clouds
Description of the wind in E. Dickinson's poetry
E. Dickinson admired all the phenomena of nature: wind, sunset and dawn,
the change of seasons, sea, hills, sky, the arrival of day and the onset of night.
Everything made her heart flutter and charmed the poetess. Nevertheless, in the
poems of E. Dickinson, where there is a description of nature, it is possible to
distinguish several natural phenomena that were especially close to her, and
therefore occupy a central place in her works.

37
The theme of the wind can be traced in most of her poems, and the wind for the
poetess is not just a natural phenomenon, for her the wind is associated with
freedom.
In one of the poems [The complete 1875: 436], the wind is compared to
something airy (No One had He to bind Him - ), elusive
A Rapid – footless Guest –
To offer whom a Chair
Where is impossible as
hand A Sofa to the Air.
Comparison with a tired traveler (The Wind – tapped like a tired Man -)
helps to present to the reader the image that E. Dickinson sought to draw more
fully: the wind is always in motion, it wanders around the world. When describing
nature, the poetess has personifications in almost every poem, and the theme of the
wind is no exception here. The wind walks, penetrates, flashes (He passed, He
tapped, He visited). In this poem, the idea of the wind as a living organism is
reinforced by the author's use of the masculine singular pronoun He instead of the
inanimate it, and in order to show the greatness of the wind, E. Dickinson writes
the pronoun He with
a capital letter. The author compares the sound of the wind's voice with the quiet
ringing of broken glass: as of tunes Blown tremulous in Glass.
E. Dickinson does not say that the wind just blows, the poetess "eats miles" - tap
the Miles, he rushes by himself, independent of anyone – chase himself.
The wind is compared to the "son of thunder" [A. Gavrilov 2001: 21] - And neigh
like Boanerges, and thunder, as you know, is a creation of heaven. But the wind
cannot constantly move, and sometimes it needs rest.:
Stop – docile and
omnipotent At its own stable
door
E. Dickinson wind is not only a thoughtless ever-wandering traveler, he is
also a creator, an assistant to Nature as a whole. He will "drive away the clouds of

38
the shadow" - correcting errors of the sky; and "opens the way for the sun" -
Encamping on a thousand dawns.
But the wind in E. Dickinson's poetry has not only a positive coloring, at
the same time as a creator, it can also be a destroyer [The complete 1875: 1593]
There came a Wind like a
Bugle… It quivered through the
Grass
The comparison of the wind at the beginning of the poem with the sound
of a hunting horn – a Wind like a Bugle - is also not accidental, because here the
wind is a kind of force that breaks into the calm, measured life of nature, as the
sound of a hunting horn pierces the silence of a peaceful sleeping forest. The Green
Chill metaphor enhances the feeling of something hard, cold, and the Emerald
Ghost metaphor, used in relation to the wind, completes the picture, because a
ghost is a kind of force from which only something unkind, repulsive blows, and
you cannot expect warmth from this force.
In this poem, the squall is an allegory. E. Dickinson here wants to convey
to the reader the idea that, sometimes, similar "storms" occur in life, but "The
world is used to such things and still stands":

How much can come

And much can go And
yet abide the World!
Everything in life can change, something comes, something goes,
sometimes suddenly and unexpectedly, but a person can adapt to any situation and
will continue to live.
But the wind as a natural phenomenon cannot form by itself, E. Dickinson
has his own opinion on this.:
I think that the Root of the Wind is Water -
Very accurately and vividly, the poetess uses the metaphor of the Root of
Wind here, since the root is the support, the basis of the origin of everything, and
the poem says exactly where, according to the poetess, the wind comes from,

39
namely from water. Water, as you know, is the basis of all living things, everything
comes from water, and since for the poetess the wind is a living organism, it
should also originate from water.
It would not sound so deep

Were it a Firmamental Product –

Он не звучал бы глубоко -
Когда бы над землей
рождался.
E. Dickinson uses a large number of metaphors to describe the wind: he is
lonely at night – How lonesome the wind must feel Nights, and pompous on a
summer day – How pompous the Wind must feel Noons, and strong in the
morning, dispersing clouds by sunrise – How mighty the Wind must feel
Mornings.
But not only metaphors create a particularly colorful description of the
wind, the use of the personification technique in all descriptions complements the
picture: the Wind... correcting errors of the sky; the Wind... soaring to his Temple
Tall –It is also important for us that the word Wind in all poems is used only with a
capital letter and only with a definite article, which once again emphasizes the
poetess's attitude to him as a living, independent organism capable of experiencing
all the emotions that are inherent in a person.
Thus, the wind for the poetess is a symbol of freedom, lightness and relentless
travel to all places of the world, which E. Dickinson herself could not afford.
Seasons as one of the central themes in the description of the nature of poetry by
E. Dickinson.
E. Dickinson finds the change of seasons even more mysterious
phenomenon of nature. It is mysterious and amazing. It is beautiful and at the same
time predictable. The largest number of poems about this phenomenon is devoted
to autumn, spring and summer, since these seasons are "alive", in winter
everything freezes, nature rests, being renewed for awakening.

40
 Here is how E. Dickinson speaks about spring [The complete 1875: 812]:

A Light exists in
Spring Not present on
the Year At any other
period –
When March is scarcely here
And here all the phenomena of nature are personified: A Color stands, the
Sun passes, the Sun waits. In this poem, E. Dickinson describes the spring sun,
which shines especially brightly at this time of year and gives the surrounding
world a unique flavor that defies description:

That Science cannot overtake…

That shows the furthest Tree…
Tree…
And here is an appeal to March, the first month of spring [The complete
1875: 1320]:
Dear March – Come in
- How glad I am -
I hoped for you before –

… I have so much to tell…

before –
… I have so much to tell…
In this poem there is such a device as an appeal to an inanimate object. The poetess
conducts a conversation with the month of March as if they are old friends. This
poem is a kind of ode to March as the month that gives the beginning of spring.
The saddest noise, the sweetest noise,
… Between the March and April line –
That magical frontier
Печальный и сладчайший звук,…
Меж Мартом и Апрелем вдруг

41
 Возьмется таять лед…
(Пер. А. Гаврилова)
It would seem that once again a joyful and optimistic poem about spring.
But the juxtaposition of “saddest” and “sweetest" is alarming. And indeed, the
arrival of spring brings sad thoughts to the poetess:
It makes us think of all the dead…
It makes us think of what we had
And what we now deplore…
With the onset of spring and the awakening of nature, E. Dickinson
involuntarily remembers those whom she lost (her father, deceased friends), who
will no longer hear the singing of birds. In this poem, one can clearly trace the
opposition between life and death, and the poetess says that death is the final, there
is no return from where.
In the following poem, the poetess writes about the transience of human
life and the immortality of nature, talking about the change of seasons [The
complete 1875: 985]:
New children play upon the green –
New Weary sleep below –
And still the pensive Spring returns –
And still the punctual snow
The metaphors of pensive Spring and punctual snow help to reveal, as in
the previous poem, the inevitability of the onset of spring and winter, since time
has no power over them. Everything changes, everything passes, but nature lives
by its own laws. Anaphora here only increases the repeatability of phenomena:
New feet…
New fingers…
New
children…
New weary…

42
 Spring is inevitably followed by Summer: It will be Summer – eventually.
And summer is the time of the flowering of nature, when

The Lilacs – will sway with purple load…

The Bees – will not despise the tune - …
And here nature lives its own life: The wild rose blooms (The Wild Rose –
redden in the Bog – The Aster – on the Hill).
Everything in nature is busy with urgent work until "
Summer hides wonders like a woman – outfit":
Till Summer folds her miracle –
As Women – do – their Gown…
The comparison with a woman hiding an outfit is not accidental, since
summer is just a short moment in the life of nature, like a beautiful outfit for one
evening for a woman.
And now, after a busy summer, autumn comes [The complete 1875: 656]:

The name – of it – is
“Autumn” The hue – of it- is
Blood –
Она зовется Осенью
Ее оттенок кровь»
( пер. А. Гаврилов)
In this poem, autumn is red, like blood. Nature seems to be falling asleep,
preparing for winter. That is why E. Dickinson uses such epithets as Scarlet Rain,
ruddy Pools. Streams of water from the slopes of the mountains – An Artery,
streams along the roads – a Vein, leaves driven by the autumn wind – the
Globules. Blood in a person's mind is always associated with something terrible,
with the disaster that has occurred, the more unexpected it is at the end of the poem
to meet such lines about this time of year:
Then – eddies like a Rose – away –

43
 The rose is a symbol of love and passion. The poetess seems to want to say
that autumn is not so sad, it comes suddenly and also ends suddenly. Thus, the
change of seasons also occupies one of the central places in E. Dickinson's poetry
about nature.
Other natural phenomena in the poetry of E. Dickinson.
E. Dickinson wrote in her poems about other natural phenomena. Here, for
example, is how she describes the dawn [Emily Dickinson: 304]:

The Day came slow – till Five o’clock

Then sprang before the Hills

Like Hindered Rubies – or the

Light A Sudden Musket – spills –
День медлил до пяти утра –

Затем внезапно свет

Сверкнул Рубином над Холмом –

Как выстрелил Мушкет

(пер. А. Гаврилова)
In the poem, the sun is compared to topaz, it is so great and beautiful:
The Sunrise shook abroad

Like Breadths of Topaz – packed a Night.

There is a metaphor in the poem – The Happy Winds, which allows the
reader to understand how nature rejoices in awakening. Comparing The Orchard
sparkled like a Jew creates a sense of celebration and solemnity of the situation.
The hills surrounded and still protect the hometown of E. Dickinson Amherst. How
often did Emily meet the sunrises and see off the sunsets, looking at these hills.
Let's give an example of one of the poems where, in our opinion, these silent
witnesses of the poetess' life are most vividly described:

An altered look about the hills

44
Such stylistic device like anaphora:

A print of vermillion foot –

A purple finger on the slope –

It helps to create the effect of alternating events, and the reader gets the
feeling that life does not stop here, it goes on as usual. This impression is
reinforced by the author's use of metaphors (a wider sunrise, a deeper twilight, an
axe shrill singing, a furtive look) to describe everyday, unremarkable events, which
creates a more colorful and understandable picture for the reader.
And here, when describing nature, E. Dickinson uses the technique of
personification (the author dresses the hills in clothes worn by a person, nature is
spiritualized):
"Hills take off their purple frocks, and dress in long white nightgowns" The
adjective "white" acquires a metaphorical meaning, replacing the description of
snow with the image of a "white shirt". Nature is animated, and the change of
seasons is likened to a change of clothes.
In his poetry, E. Dickinson addresses not only the world of inanimate
nature, but also animate beings [Emily Dickinson: 533]:
Two Butterflies went out at Noon –

And waltzed upon a Farm –

Then stepped straight through the Firmament

And rested, on a Beam –
Butterflies are bright, fast funny insects, so it's not for nothing that the
author uses the metaphor of a shining Sea to tell the reader about where these light
and airy travelers went. After all, as you know, everything beautiful tends to
beauty. That's just the outcome of this path is impossible to predict:
If spoken by the distant Bird - …
No notice – was – to me –

45
The phenomena of reality through the description of the elements of nature in the
poetry of E. Dickinson.
E. Dickinson uses nature as a colorful palette. She takes the whiteness
from the snow. And the expression "white as snow" is used in describing objects,
concepts, things that have nothing to do with snow: "a Little shell of a snail, so
whitened by the snow" [The Letters 1958: 203]. In this case, we are talking about a
snail shell, the color of which is compared with the white color of snow.
"A little snow was here and there
Disseminated in her Hair -
Since she and I had met and played

Decade had gathered to Decade" [The complete 1875: 614].

"Snow in the hair" in the poem means gray hair. Dickinson describes a
meeting with a friend she hasn't seen for many years. Replaces the epithet "white"
with an element of nature.
E. Dickinson speaks about many phenomena and events of the surrounding
world through the description of natural phenomena.
The Civil War (1861-1865) remained the bloodiest in
the history of the United States, a huge number of people died in it. E. Dickinson
also did not ignore this topic. This is how metaphorically she speaks in the
language of nature about the soldiers who died in this war [The complete 1875:
409]:
They dropped like Flakes –
They dropped like Stars –
Like Petals from a Rose –
The comparison of people with falling snow flakes and falling stars is not
accidental, since both disappear without a trace, snow flakes are lost in snowdrifts
or melt when they reach the ground, stars burn up in the atmosphere. So, the dead
warriors disappear without a trace, the war seems to consume them.
But God can summon every face
On his Repealless – List.

46
 And only the Lord remembers everyone, says E. Dickinson. Here, as in
many other poems, one can trace how strong the poetess's faith in God was,
because people forget about many things, including the dead, and only God is able
not to forget about everyone. In this poem, the theme of war is intertwined with the
theme of death.
And in the following poem, the poetess speaks about the power of human
thought, comparing the breadth of human knowledge with the vast firmament [The
complete 1875: 632]:
The Brain – is wider than the Sky –
For – put them side by side –
The one the other will contain
With easy – and You – beside –
It is not for nothing that the author uses a comparison with the sky here,
because the sky has no end, no edge, and the human brain is able to accommodate
not only the breadth of the heavens, but also many other things, the more the
imagery of the expression of the poetess's thoughts increases.
The brain is deeper than the sea –
E. Dickinson says in the following quatrain, emphasizing that even such an
immense creation of nature as the sea easily fits into human consciousness (The
one the other will absorb – As Sponges ...).
Here, by comparing with such huge natural objects as the sea, the sky, E.
Dickinson clearly expresses his idea that human consciousness has no boundaries.
The desire for freedom is also reflected in the poems of E. Dickinson with
descriptions of the elements of nature. In one of the works, the poetess compares
herself to a bee and says [The complete 1875: 661]:
Could I but ride indefinite
As doth the Meadow Bee
And visit only where I liked
And No one visit me
And flirt all Day with Buttercups

47
 And marry whom I may…
Here, comparing himself with a bee, free in his choice, E. Dickinson says
that a person, unlike nature, is limited in his actions, he is not free to act only as
he wants, because he is imposed certain obligations by the society in which he
lives, life circumstances, and many others. other surface factors affecting his
behavior. Complete freedom for E. Dickinson is freedom in all senses of the
word: freedom of choice, freedom of action, freedom of movement. The main
idea of this poem, we believe, is that man, unlike nature, will never be free in his
choice, but will rely on certain conditions in which he is placed. And when we
talk about human freedom, we are talking only about relative freedom.
What Liberty! So Captives deem
Who tight in Dungeons are.
In these final lines, E. Dickinson compares freedom with a prisoner
(captives), imprisoned in a dungeon, and a person is enclosed in the framework of
the conventions of the surrounding society.
The theme of death and immortality is also one of the main themes in E.
Dickinson's poetry. The poetess has always wondered if there is life after death,
what awaits a person who has crossed the threshold of death? She was always
afraid of this moment and believed that a person, having died, continues to live in
some other world where everything is calm and peaceful. She believed that the
human soul is immortal [The complete 1875: 974]:
The Soul’s distinct connection
With immortality

2.1. The main problem of translation of poetry by E. Dickinson

The first translations from Emily Dickinson published in Russian were made
by Mikhail Zenkevich. The "amazing metaphorist" (this is how Pasternak
characterized Zenkevich) probably felt a stylistically close beginning in Dickinson,
but did not particularly single her out, since he intended to build a "coherent picture
of the whole" of American poetry over two centuries. To be included in the "whole",
he selected only four Dickinson poems, to which he gave himself (absent in the

48
original) precise rhymes, melodic melodic rhythm, rather complex syntax and correct
punctuation, but he carefully preserved imagery and tonality. This lady appeared to
the Russian reader for the first time - in the collection "From American Poets" (1946)
and its later version "American poets translated by M. Zenkevich" (1969).
In the same 1946, Zenkevich's repeated co-author, critic and translator Ivan Kashkin
(1899-1963), took up an essay about Emily Dickinson.
Presenting the recluse of Amherst to the reading public, Kashkin decisively
introduced her precisely into the circle of his own contemporaries: her neighbors in
the book are R. Frost, K. Sandberg, E. Pound, T.S. Eliot, W. K. Williams.
The 119th volume dedicated to the American poetry of the XIX century is
being prepared within the framework of the "Library of World Literature". In 1976,
218 Dickinson poems (out of a total of 1775) appeared in it in translation by Vera
Markova; five years later they were published in a separate book. The colleagues in
the workshop will later make a lot of claims to these translations, but the significance
of the publication does not decrease from this: the lyrical miniatures of the American
received a slight "oriental accent" in her translation, in the manner of haiku, and the
theme of renunciation, closure, modest and persistent overcoming of fate looks
equally relevant in relation to the fate of the poetess and her translator.
It is worth noting here that absolutely all Russian translators of E. Dickinson
tend to describe communication with her poetry as "peculiar", emphasize closeness
in the circumstances of creativity or in the trajectory of intellectual search.
In many cases, the work of translation was preceded by the rewriting of poems
in the library - forced by circumstances (both the books themselves and the
photocopiers were unavailable), but it is important, I think, for their perception: in
fact, the text was personally transformed
"back" - from the impersonality of the print to the intimacy of the manuscript. In
many cases, the transformation of the manuscript into print was not even intended:
the translation was done without hope of publication, out of pure love for art and
interest in the subject. The original translations of E. Dickinson's poetry were not
approved by publishers: strange syntax, bad rhymes. Although the translators
referred to the fact that the rhymes in the original are bad and the syntax is strange.
The milestone that marked the beginning of the turn can be considered the
49
publication by A.M. Zverev of a selection of poems by Emily Dickinson in the
journal "Foreign Literature" (No. 5 for 1994): three poems in nineteen translations by
eleven translators is a qualitative difference compared to publications of the past
years, always "one-voice"! Three more years have passed - and the flow "broke
through": in 1997-2001, books of Dickinson's poems were published in Moscow, St.
Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, almost simultaneously - in mono- and bilingual editions,
repeated and expanded, in considerable circulations. Together, they present the work
of almost two dozen professional translators. The result of this stage of stormy and
largely spontaneous publishing activity was summed up by the volume of "Literary
Monuments" (Moscow, 2007).
Judgments about the "Russianness" of E. Dickinson are common among
translators and reflect, for the most part, the presence of thematic or emotional
consonances. A number of comparisons often include Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva.
E. Dickinson's poems are often translated figuratively so that the poems more
fully convey the inner world of the poetess. Gavrilov loved the aspiration to the sky,
the ability to be internally free in a situation of external captivity, and emphasized in
every way in Dickinson - he loved so much that, with all his careful attitude to the
figurative fabric of her poems, he was ready in other cases to openly reinterpret the
"letter" into "spirit". Here is a characteristic diary entry: "Translated "I stepped from
Plank to Plank" (No. 875). If literally, then "From plank to plank ...", but in the spirit
of all of E. Dickinson's work - "I'm up the stairs..." She always aspired to the sky, she
was not interested in moving along the plane.
"Non-literary" E. Dickinson always confused and alarmed critics and
publishers, and was perceived by translators as the most serious creative a challenge.
It is extremely difficult to convey the simple-minded and provocative wrongness,
incompetence, awkwardness, naivety of the verse in another language: not every
translator will decide on the degree of risk that for the poetess herself turned into
lifelong self-isolation in the literary field.
The language of Dickinson's poetry is difficult - this is self-evident; but what
exactly? The point, really, is not in the quirkiness of the poetic form, not in
experiments with rhyme or its absence, but in the very way of functioning of the
language, which does not formalize only feelings and thoughts, but provides a place -

50
a stage - for their manifestation, formation, action.
The meaning is not spoken out, but "worked out", is not contained in the
word itself, but in a suggestive aura that envelops it and signals its own presence
with a graphic hint, such as, for example, an inappropriately used capital letter,
"lifting" a modest word to a symbol, or crushing a line, sometimes verbatim, a
dash, or an unexpected framing quotation marks, which the translator almost
always discards as an imaginary excess… Dickinson's way of expressing himself
makes a paradoxical impression - both arbitrariness and necessity at once. In her
manuscripts, a whole "queue" was sometimes built up to a single noun - up to
fifteen candidate epithets: the author seemed to be looking closely, listening to
them - which one would suit? The choice often seems random, and yet the feeling
of absolute accuracy "touching" the meaning does not leave the reader. "Punctual"
is one of her favorite words, Tatiana Stamova notes about E. Dickinson and
generalizes already in relation to her work: "this "punctual" (which has nothing to
do with literalism) she demands from the translator, almost physically resisting any
falsehood. We need to get into it, otherwise everything is useless."
We are talking about a meaning that is clearly localized and at the same time
not specifically highlighted in any way - accurate, but subjective, mobile, different
for different readers and readings. In connection with Dickinson's work, it turns out
to be more productive to talk not about the features of the poetic form in its
traditional sense, but about something completely different. As Olga Sedakova
aptly puts it, - about the "experience of thought and passion" in unity with
"the way of writing it", which turns out to be "cursive, not much like anything in
the Russian tradition." The poetic miniature gives, as it were, a snapshot of the
experience, opening up to endless peering, reading, pondering.
Translator Jan Probstein notes Dickinson's everyday simplicity of intonation.
She seems to reason out loud, sharing her thoughts with a secret interlocutor, and
more often with an ideal interlocutor - a diary. Sometimes it is not difficult to
determine the addressee, but in the process of writing, E. Dickinson seems to
outgrow both the genre of the message and the diary, and sometimes the

51
conventions of the genre, that is, poetry itself. In the process of this "outgrowth"
something important and strange happens - a departure from emotion, disciplined
by poetic convention, to its free production in the order of improvisation; moving
away from poetry as a high ritual to poetry-as-everyday life, naive, frank, humanly
intelligible, but discouraging literary critic.
Relevant here are properties that in "real" poetry were not even considered
properties. For example, quantity. The most remarkable thing about Dickinson's
poems, translator Leonid Sitnik writes, is that "there are a lot of them," and they
are almost all simple and the same, like pebbles on the seashore: "Individually,
they have little value. But all together they produce a strange effect - something
like an empty beach, a lonely figure at the water's edge. In short, eternity.
Personally, I always liked to sort out the pebbles on the shore. There is no running
value in them. They become beautiful only if you soak them in a sea of human
sentimentality or put them in an aquarium - in an artificial world with purchased
goldfish. Moreover, the bottle glass will shine the brightest" [L. Sitnik 1981: 231].
Emily Dickinson is an amazing example of a poet whose originality catches
the eye, but on closer examination it blurs into a set of banal components:
something borrowed from a collection of psalms, something from kitchen life or
from artless girlish poetry, which no one indulged in, etc.

2.2. Nature in the poetry of E. Dickinson. Aspect of translation.

As for the translation of the description of nature, the translator needs to be
extremely careful to convey the author's words in such a way that the main idea of
the poem becomes clear to the reader. After all, Emily Dickinson was especially
sensitive to the description of nature, which in her poems acts not only as a
description of landscapes and natural phenomena, but also helps to convey images,
feelings and emotions that arise in the imagination of the poetess. Since nature is a
living organism for Dickinson, a large number of personifications are found in the
poems of the poetess (There are so few things for the grass – how few worries the
grass has (A.Gavrilov), The leaves broke off from the trees – the foliage broke off

52
from the branches (A. Gavrilov), the leaves confer - the leaves whisper (A.
Gavrilov). Gavrilov)), metaphors (greedy wave – greedy wave, wide meadows,
etc.). The most accurate translation of the description of nature is the most
important for understanding the images of E. Dickinson's poetry. Since these
descriptions are especially saturated with various stylistic and expressive means,
the adequacy and equivalence of their translation is the most difficult task for the
translator. The wealth given to the poetess by nature, she returned to the world
with a profit, considering herself a confidant of nature, an intermediary between
her and people, so often in her poems E. Dickinson's attitude to the world and the
events taking place in it is described with the help of her attitude to nature.
It is worth noting that the translation of descriptions of nature is due to the large
number of personifications and metaphors used by the poetess in poems, the
process is laborious. Naturally, each translator interprets the translated verses in his
own way and uses different translation methods. It is also worth noting that a
particular difficulty in translating poems in the general aspect is the need to search
for rhymes in the target language.
Let's look at some examples of the translation of poems about nature by E.
Dickinson. For example, the poem [Completed in 1875: 1634]:
Talk not to me of Summer Trees
The foliage of the mind
A Tabernacle is for Birds

Of no corporeal kind

And winds do go that way at noon

To their Ethereal Homes…
Ты мне о лесе не толкуй – В
листве моей души Находят
птицы свой приют Не хуже,
чем в глуши,
И ветры поспешают там В

53
свои дома…
(пер. А. Гаврилова)
Here the translator's understanding of the author's main idea is clearly
traced and the desire to convey this idea in translation most accurately, while
preserving the author's style. The phrase The Summer Trees is conveyed by one
word "forest", the translator sees the expression Talk not to me as a colloquial
expression "do not interpret", which creates a sense of simplicity of the original
author's language in the reader. Further, A. Gavrilov uses the metaphorical
translation: The foliage of the mind - "in the foliage of my soul", and also, as a
poetess, uses the technique of personification: "the winds are hurrying".
Consider the translation of another poem [The complete 1875: 106].

The Daisy follows soft the Sun -

And when his golden walk is done -
Sits shyly at his feet -

He - waking - finds the flower there -

Wherefore - Marauder - art thou here?
Because, Sir, love is sweet!
Цветок следит за солнцем взглядом,
И к вечеру, заметив рядом
С собой глаза цветка,

Оно ворчит, склонившись низко:

"Зачем ко мне садишься близко?"

"Затем, что жизнь сладка!"
(пер. И. Кашкин)
In this translation, the figurative expressions of the poem are not translated
as figuratively as they sound in the original, namely, I. Kashkin translates the
metaphor And when his golden walk is done simply as "by evening". This choice
of the translation method, we believe, is not accidental, since the translator needs
to find a rhyme in the translating language, and the decrease in the imagery of the

54
vocabulary used in the translating language is justified by the fact that, in general,
the poem in style is not sublime, it describes simple phenomena, so the main thing
when translating here is to convey the events that it tells the poetess, and through
them the main idea of the poem.
In the following poem, the translator makes an almost literal translation
[The complete 1875: 180]:
As if some little Arctic flower
Upon the polar hem -
Went wandering down the Latitudes
Until it puzzled came
To continents of summer -

To firmaments of sun -

To strange, bright crowds of flowers -

And birds, of foreign tongue…
Представь, что маленький цветок
Из северных широт Спустился
вниз вдоль долготы И вот,
открывши рот,
Глядит на летний континент,
На солнце без границ,
На пеструю толпу цветов,

На иностранцев-птиц

(пер. В.Марковой)
In this example, such a translation method is quite appropriate, since the
translator was able to choose the words closest to the original, harmoniously and
accurately conveying the main idea of the poem without using the method of
functional replacement in translation.: On the polar edge - "from the northern
latitudes", continents of summer – "summer continent", crowds of flowers –
"crowd of flowers".
55
 Dickinson's "non-literariness" has always confused and alarmed critics and
publishers, and was perceived by translators as a serious creative challenge. It is
extremely difficult to convey the simple-minded and provocative wrongness,
incompetence, awkwardness, naivety of the verse in another language: not every
translator will decide on the degree of risk that for the poetess herself turned into
lifelong self-isolation in the literary field.
Since nature is a living organism for Dickinson, a large number of
personifications are found in the poems of the poetess, which, when translated, all
translators also convey personifying nature and its images. When conveying
imagery in the description of nature and related phenomena, many translators also
try to preserve the imagery of poems, using functional substitutions and
conversions that are appropriate in meaning.

Conclusion

56
 In this graduate qualification paper, we came to the conclusion that the
theme of nature occupies a special place in the work of E. Dickinson. Here it
echoes the philosophy of the Boston "transcendentalists". It is in the ability to look
at the world with a renewed look, a look capable of seeing glimpses of the "spirit"
in the material world, that the main task of a person, especially a creative person,
lies. It is the poetic artistic perception when the dust of everyday life is blown
away from nature and it (as Dickinson puts it) it seems to be filled with "ghosts",
helps to perceive the world spiritualized, meaningful and beautiful.
The poet's special talent is the ability to see the "sublime in
the simple", to see the "spirit" in such ordinary things as grass, river, evening
sunset. Thus, it can be concluded that the time of life and the place of birth of the
poetess also influenced her work. As a consequence of E. Dickinson's fascination
with the ideas of transcendentalism, the theme of nature occupies a special place in
the poetess' poetry.
This topic is considered by the poetess in many ways: in the poems there is
not only a simple description of natural phenomena, but also an explanation and a
personal view of E. Dickinson on the events of the world in the language of nature.
For E. Dickinson, the language of nature is universal, using it you can also convey
the world of personal feelings, because man is a part of nature, he is inextricably
linked with this creation of God.
Most of E. Dickinson's poems about nature also have a religious
connotation. The main idea of these poems is that nature and man as part of it are
subordinate to God, that nature and the processes taking place in it are a kind of
language, a language of signs, with which God informs people of his opinion, and
people should draw conclusions and decipher these signs themselves. Language
nature is a kind of hint to a person in which direction he should move on.
The poetess compared nature with a living organism, communication with
which she preferred to communicate with people. Nature was an intermediary
between E. Dickinson and God, the poetess found the greatness of God in the
greatness of Nature.

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 E. Dickinson admired all the phenomena of nature: the wind, sunset and
dawn, the change of seasons, the sea, hills, sky, the arrival of day and the onset of
night. Everything made her heart flutter and charmed the poetess. Nevertheless, in
the poems of E. Dickinson, where there is a description of nature, it is possible to
distinguish several natural phenomena that were especially close to her, and
therefore occupy a central place in her works.
A special place in E. Dickinson's description of nature is occupied by the
theme of wind and freedom, which he personifies. Also, poems about the seasons
occupy one of the main themes of poetry describing nature. Each season brings the
poetess to a certain emotional and mental state: in spring – the joy of awakening all
living things, hope for the future, summer – the time of active activity, autumn –
the time of withering and corresponding depression. It is worth noting that the
theme of winter, unlike a huge number of poems about other seasons, is not
considered by the poetess so closely.
Based on the analyzed poems by E. Dickinson, in which
elements of nature occur, it can be concluded that the poetess not only described
natural phenomena as such, but also through the use of individual elements of
natural phenomena in her poems, she conveyed to the world her thoughts,
emotions, her vision of the surrounding reality.
As for the stylistic techniques used by E. Dickinson in describing nature, it
is worth noting that the poetess's attitude to nature as a living organism determines
the predominance in the description natural phenomena such as metaphor and
personification. To create a more colorful picture, the poetess uses epithets.
Nevertheless, the most characteristic feature, in our opinion, is the use of
the personification technique in every poem where there is a description of nature.
The most frequently used figure of stylistic syntax in E. Dickinson's poems
about nature is, without a doubt, an anaphora. This figure gives the poems a special
rhythm and creates the effect of alternating events, so E. Dickinson's poems are
distinguished by special dynamics.

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 Dickinson's poems (and their total number is 1775) continue to attract the
attention of critics who are very ambivalent about her work. Some emphasize the
mystical side of her poetry, others emphasize a special love for nature. Many
people note her strangeness, attraction to the exotic. Emily Dickinson's pure, clear,
chiseled poetry is one of the most captivating and challenging pages in American
literature.

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