French Emily Dickinson and germen Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson is hardly in need of critics to come to her defense among the French-speaking public. Since the fifties, various translators have drawn a wide audience which appreciates her work. The first translators did, however, have a fairly modest ambition, namely to enable readers to penetrate the meaning of her poems. It was only with the translations of Claire Malroux that French readers began to understand the organic significance of the movement and sound-patterning of Dickinson’s poems. Malroux adopts Ezra Pound’s translation project to offer a poem in place of a poem. In doing so, she does, nevertheless, abandon the meter of Dickinson’s poems, a four-beat meter which gives a hymn-like quality to the movement of her meaning. In contrast, Gertrud Liepe maintains the meter in her translations into German. As a result her extremely sensitive translations enable the reader to hear the way Dickinson harnessed the movement of the poetry of her period and fashioned her own voice from a traditional versification. Though this article concerns a woman poet translated by two women, in analyzing the success of the translations, it is not a question of defending a “feminist translation” of an écriture feminine: the aim of the article is to compare and contrast the constraints of three languages, English, French and German, as well those of their metrical traditions, in order to investigate the way a poet adapts her language and her tradition and the way a translator must seek to do the same.