The International Reception of Emily Dickinson.

Edited by Domhnall Mitchell and Maria Stuart

London: Continuum, 2009. 320 pp. $150.00

Emily Dickinson is exemplary exactly in her extremity. Her lyric stands for lyric as such. In her,

compression is extent, omissions demand elaborations. Her very privacy is a public intervention.

She attests and tests the limits of lyric, as well as its limitlessness.

The potential reach of Dickinson’s condensed texts is reflected in this collection of essays

engaging Dickinson across the world. Such a project immediately entails its own set of

questions: what marks the borders for discussing “reception”? How are the categories of nation,

language, or culture to be demarcated and defined, and what might govern their

interrelationship? What aspects of reception are cogent? Scholarly, popular, elite, performative?

What is the role and what are the possibilities of translation, with its fraught theoretical and

practical problems? What interpretive frameworks does Dickinson’s work call for or conform to?

The essays collected in The International Reception of Emily Dickinson address these

questions to different degrees and with different emphases, enacting them in ways that vary

according to each cultural forum. Most essays are grouped around a national rubric: Dickinson in

the Low Countries (by Marian de Vooght), in Norway (by Domhnal Mitchell), in Sweden (by

Lennart Nyberg), in Portugal (by Ana Luisa Amaral and Marinela Freitas), in Brazil (by Carlos

Daghlian), in Japan (by Masako Takeda), in England and Ireland (by Maria Stuart), in Australia

(by Joan Kirkby). Some adopt essentially linguistic borders: Dickinson in Germany, Austria and

Switzerland (by Sabine Sielke); in francophone Europe and North America (by David Palmieri);

in Hebrew (by Lilach Lachman); in Slavic traditions (by Anna Chenokova). Within each

bounded frame, others emerge, reflecting the interests and traditions these national/linguistic
orders themselves deploy. The result is Dickinson reading different cultures as much as different

cultures reading Dickinson.

The opening essay by Sabine Sielke on Dickinson in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland,

for example, in effect offers a history of theoretical engagements with Dickinson. The author

thus proceeds to confirm Robert Spiller’s remarks on German scholarship as tending “to look at

human experience in terms of absolutes and to clear your theoretical positions before proceeding

to empirical practices” (8), fulfilling her own description of Germanic literary study as

theoretically inclined, emerging out of the idealist-phenomenological philosophical traditions of

German thought. This essay accordingly traces Dickinson studies through its categories of

formalism, modernism, transcendentalism, gender, and New Historicism.

The second essay by David Palmieri on francophone Dickinson studies, however, turns

from theory to translation of Dickinson poems, not only into the French language but into French

literary culture, as deployed through psychoanalysis and symbolism. “Puritanisme” becomes a

French category. Dickinson comes to share French views of America. Over time and somewhat

slowly, Dickinson thus comes to join Whitman but mainly Poe—who the French, in Baudelaire’s

translations, read as French—as an American classica.

It is impossible here to review each approach offered through the course of the essays in

this collection. All the essays offer a cogent account of the main figures, scholarship,

translations, editions, chronologies, and genres– including music, drama, cinema and art—

associated with Dickinson’s appearance and emergence within each national-linguistic world.

Formalism, modernism, and gender are recurring topics, often tracing a literary and cultural

history—Domnhall Mitchell emphasizes, as do others, the institutional strata of Dickinson’s

reception via libraries, curricula, university settings, and the development of American studies—
a
Delete since Mallarme is not an American classic? Sure OK
in each language/territory. As Lilach Lachman reflects, changing approaches to Dickinson

“reveal differing preferences and practices of poetry, but also a change in zeitgeist that is

historical and cultural (156).” The portraits of Dickinson that emerge are equally portraits of

each cultural world, often, as Maria Stuart traces, through misreadings, not least across such

overlapping cultural boundaries as American, Irish, Australian and British English. Dickinson,

despite her being so emphatically circumscribed both geographically and culturally, finds

astonishing recognition across great distances—as seen in Masako Takeda’s discussion of

Dickinson in terms of haiku.

On the whole Dickinson’s own historical specificity is less emphasized in the essays. Her

religious and political contexts tend to be viewed in terms of the religion and politics of the

receivers—as is especially evident and impelling in Anna Chesnokova’s account of Dickinson in

the Slavic world reaching from Russia through the Ukraine and across the Cold War and the

revolutionary changes that came with the fall of the Soviet Union. It is rather the texts, in all their

mysterious resistances, that travel best. Indeed, what emerges is a striking number of individual

encounters, where a poet or scholar or translator, transformed by Dickinson’s own reclusive

biography and poetics, begins groundbreaking work that inaugurates new literary histories. This

collection, to me, attests to the enduring strength of immediate confrontation with Dickinson,

even as this confrontation arises out of and then contributes to shaping wider cultural events and

courses.

What aesthetic norms might be inferred from these wide-ranging and variegated

discussions of Dickinson, across national and linguistic and, not least, interpretive borders?

Dickinson writes of “[s]preading wide my narrow hands to gather Paradise.” Her texts indeed

gather into their intense condensation a great range of interests: philosophical, psychological,
religious, ethical, historical, political, gendered. Far from constructing an exclusionary realm of

language reflecting on language—a reading Dickinson tempts in her verbal intensities and

fracturing of linguistic norms—Dickinson’s poetry ultimately insists on the intersection of

different fields and territories of experience in mutual interrogation and investigation. This, I

would argue, is the aesthetic that emerges—surprisingly and yet also inexorably—out of the

cross-cultural experiences of Dickinson assembled in this collection: the lyric as a site of

encounter among multiple and variant fields of experience.

Shira Wolosky

Hebrew University of Jerusalem