Editorial Introduction: Testing our Horizons

Abstract

Editorial Introduction:Testing our Horizons Adeline Chevrier-Bosseau (bio), Li-Hsin Hsu (bio), and Eliza Richards (bio) These tested Our Horizon -Then disappearedAs Birds before achievingA Latitude. (Fr934) Although Dickinson claimed to see "New-Englandly," her localized perspective has not impeded the broad and varied reception of her "letter to the world." However, because Dickinson is an American author, because the United States is historically a center for Dickinson scholarship, and because English is a dominant language globally, excellent scholarship in other languages does not gain the recognition or carry the impact and influence that it merits. As Domhnall Mitchell and others have noted, interest in Dickinson's writing continues to grow in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and other parts of the world. Major translation projects have been undertaken recently, for example, in Brazil, China, Spain, Mexico, Japan, and Taiwan.1 Indeed, global interest in Dickinson's work has surpassed scholarly communication networks, which tend to be restricted by national and linguistic boundaries. For that reason, this special issue of the Emily Dickinson Journal, "International Dickinson: Scholarship in English Translation," seeks to promote scholarly dialogue across languages and cultures. It indicates the international diversity of Dickinson studies by presenting scholarly work published in other languages now translated for the first time into English. We include abstracts as well as essay-length translations of peer-reviewed work published in China, France, Hungary, Italy, Mexico, Taiwan, and Spain. To [End Page ix] highlight the work of younger scholars, we feature abstracts of Ph.D. dissertations recently defended in Germany, Spain, India, and Mexico. (With the exception of Rocío Saucedo Dimas' work, these dissertations were written in English.) The first-ever digital Annual Meeting of the Emily Dickinson International Society in August 2020 was exceptionally diverse in terms of international participation; it is our hope that this special issue will continue to broaden the available range of scholarly perspectives on Dickinson in English and to promote opportunities for discussion and collaboration across national and linguistic boundaries by making the work of scholars publishing in other languages available to a wider readership through translation into English. Several of our contributors reflect on the linguistic, cultural, and even ontological challenges that translation poses, as well as the way the act of translation changes how we approach Dickinson's writings. For María-Milagros Rivera Garretas, who translated Dickinson's poems into Spanish, translating female writing is an experience of embodiment that amounts to "becoming intimate" with the text, in a continuum of experience which allows the female translator a particular closeness with Dickinson's writing. Mexican scholar Juan Carlos Calvillo challenges the frequently "alleged untranslatability" of poetry and proposes a method to evaluate the many translations of Dickinson's works into Spanish; he aims to provide "stable criteria" that will afford a means of determining the ways in which translations fall short. Paul S. Derrick, summarizing his work with Nicolás Estevez and Francisca González Arias, offers insight into the themes and techniques that emerge in their annotated translation of fascicles nine and ten and assesses the role of these fascicles within Dickinson's poetic corpus. Min-Hua Wu translates a classic 1961 essay by Yu Kwang-chung, whose highly influential translation of Emily Dickinson's poems into Chinese aims at optimal fidelity with the source text. Yu's introduction to his translation, "A Bee Gatecrashing Eternity," contextualizes Dickinson's poetry within a Euro-American literary tradition and introduces her work to readers in Taiwan and Hong Kong; his work, however, was not available in China in the 1960s and 70s, largely for political reasons. Cuihua Xu translates twenty-two early letters from Dickinson to Abiah Root into Chinese and explores their role in the development of Dickinson's unique poetic voice through a study of the way themes like death, religion, and life choices discussed in these letters later blossom in her poetry. Other contributions provide insights into the formal and rhetorical aspects of Dickinson's poetic writing: Enikő Bollobás' book about Dickinson's poetry testifies to the popularity of the Amherst writer in Hungary and focuses on [End Page x] Dickinson's daring experiments with poetic form. Bollob...