“Preciser what we are”: Emily Dickinson's poems in translation: A study in literary pragmatics

Abstract

This article argues for an analysis of poetry in translation taking into account phonology, syntax and semantics, and pragmatics. Some poems by Emily Dickinson in three Spanish translations have been analysed in order to show how rhythm and rhyme, grammatical indeterminacy and difficulties in interpretation have been dealt with by the translators. Pragmatics offers a powerful tool when analysing poetry, due to the fact that it accounts for elements that are not present “on the face” of the utterance, but have to be inferred. When a poem is read in the source language, such lines of inference cross-cut the phonetic, lexical and syntactic levels. One of the difficulties in translating poetry, which by definition lacks redundant clues for interpretation, lies in the conservation of such ‘inference lines’. When inference triggers are absent and lines of inference are severed, interpretation is hampered. In the case of the translated poems by Emily Dickinson, the failure in preserving prosodic elements, lexical mistranslation, and syntactic oddity in the target language coexist with the elimination of inference triggers, to the extent of seriously impairing understanding of the poems. The main aim is to show how the different levels present in a poem interact to produce a certain effect, and how the reduction or elimination of one of them affects the other levels.