The ED Reader

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Fair Copy by Hazelton, Rebecca, and: The Emily Dickinson Reader:

An English-to-English Translation of Emily Dickinsons Complete

Poems by Legault, Paul (review)

Christina Pugh

The Emily Dickinson Journal, Volume 22, Number 1, 2013, pp. 100-102

(Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/edj.2013.0001

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Book Review

CHRISTINA PUGH

Hazelton, Rebecca. Fair Copy. Columbus: Ohio State University UP/The JournalAward in Poetry, 2012. $16.95.

Legault, Paul. The Emily Dickinson Reader: An English-to-English Translation of Emily

Dickinsons Complete Poems. San Francisco: McSweeneys, 2012. $11.56.

Taking her work as their inspiration, Fair Copy and The Emily Dickinson Reader

show both the rewards and risks of contemporary poets sustained engagement withDickinsons poetry. In Fair Copy, Rebecca Hazelton adapts a series of Dickinsons

rst lines as acrostics for her own poems. These acrostics oer form and limit to a

collection whose tone tends to be both whimsical and evasive, whose handling of

line is often astonishingly virtuosic, and whose material is only personal in the

coyest and most mercurial of ways. Some of these claims can characterize notes in

Dickinsons oeuvre itself; it is unsurprising, then, that Hazelton describes the book

as a conversation with Dickinsons poetry. Hazeltons choice of acrostic lines

also depended on an element of chance: On my 29thbirthday, I began a formalexperiment with Emily Dickinsons work. I took my copy of The Complete Works of

Emily Dickinson and selected the rst line of every 29thpoem (56).

Such a method does not have the urgency of, for example, Anna Rabinowis

Darkling (2001), a book-length poem that acrostically spelled out the entirety of

Thomas Hardys The Darkling Thrush throughout a family narrative involving

the Holocaust: in the peripheral visitation that acrostics provide, Hardys

melancholic scene becomes eerily prescient of genocide during the Second World

War. In contrast, Hazeltons counting may initially seem an under-theorized oreven self-indulgent approach to gathering lines for acrostic use. But the poems in

Fair Copy can often feel satisfying in an almost subterranean way, as if this poets

2013 The Johns Hopkins University Press


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Book Review

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interrogation of Dickinson were taking place along pre-verbal or even arterial

channels. Take, for example, the opening of [I gave myself to Him]:

I thought it something small. Everything was. Girling from one party to anotherI was the preiest

abbess, my wimple crisply folded, my cocktail habit

vaccinating me against all thought.Amor vincit omnia

engraved the length of my thigh (5)

What compels here is the tonal estrangement between Dickinsons inaugural line

and the weird scene narrated in Hazeltons stanzawhich goes on to uncover,

leer by acrostic leer, some previously inchoate textures in Dickinsonsdeclarative itself. The enjambment separating preiest from the surprise

abbess, with its wink of near-rhyme, is a snapshot of Hazeltons lyric deftness

and density, qualities that she uses to strong and sometimes even thrilling eect

in the collection. The microscopically ploed shape-shifting of the taooed,

girling monastic is also typical of the book as a wholewhich, in Dickinsonian

manner, turns on shocks of identity that are inhabited and lost by speakers both

contemporary and anachronistic: some women, some men.

Hazeltons linguistic agility is a distinct pleasure in the collection, yet thepassage also shows one of her rhetorical temptations: a strong proclivity for

anthimeria, or the substitution of one part of speech for another (for example,

girling), which comes across as too much manner after a while. Also, a yen for

repetition culminates in the word prey being repeated six times in a poem near

the end of the book, an entire section of which leans too heavily on the word and

concept of world. This knee-jerk abstraction looks like a grasping at gravitas,

which the collection has no need to do.

To Hazeltons credit, howeverand perhaps ultimately to Dickinsonsthese impulses do not take over the work. Dickinsons hand seems nearly living

here, in the Keatsian sense: it functions as a curbing limit that, in the guise of

acrostics, constrains an ever-hovering specter of excess as rhyme and meter might

do in other contexts.

Dead peoples startlingly living handsand sexy nuns, for that maer

are right at home in Paul Legaults The Emily Dickinson Reader, an English-to-

English translation of every Dickinson poem in the Franklin edition. The

volumes gilt-edged pages and ribbon bookmark act as an ironic commentary onnineteenth-century readerly decorum, since Legault has translated Dickinsons

poems into a series of one-liners (or several-liners) that are at times sexually graphic


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The Emily Dickinson Journal, Vol. XXII, No. 1

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and that speak with twenty-rst-century abandon. The heresy of paraphrase is

thus the stu of comedy here. Legaults translations show several recurring

strategies: they activate farce and anachronism, literalize sexual metaphor, and

re up Dickinsons gothic or Goth elements in a deadpan and demotic way.

For example, Legault translates Dickinsons #330 (He put the Belt around my

life - ) as Gods into bondage. Im only kind of into bondage, / but Im geing

used to it (54).

Legaults Dickinson (with air quotes, perhaps) could star on HBO as a

cross between Lena Dunham and Larry David. Sometimes his one-liners are

funnybut when Legault overdoes sexual references to Sue, or forces the poet-

speaker to wax philosophical about zombies too frequently, they can become

predictable and tiresome: a re-hash of ground already dubiously covered by

male poets from Archibald MacLeish to Billy Collins. Still, there may be more

than Dickinson at stake here. Legault is at his most engaging, and his funniest,

when he takes on the absurdist perils of metaphoric thinking, or the lyric poets

insistently metaphoric or personied relation to the empirical world. In #979 (His

Feet are shod with Gauze - ), for example, Dickinson declares, Bees have a

really good sense of style (131); in #507 (Like Mighty Foot Lights - burned the

Red), God loves forest res. He also likes to wear dresses (77).

At these moments, Legault shows how potentially uproarious lyric obsessions

can be. Yet an obsession is, of course, repetitive in nature: it does not become itself

in a single instance. To appreciate this aspect of Legaults humor, then, the reader

would need to read the book sequentially, which I doubt many will do. This is

in part because The Emily Dickinson Readerpresents itself so thoroughly as a joke

book, a book to dip into for a laugh. In order to get the joke in an integral way,

however, one cannot take these translations as the isolated one-liners that they

seem intent on appearing to be. Such is the conundrum of Legaults project: it

needs to be read sequentially but will likely frustrate readers who try to do so,

partially due to the noise of the weaker translations I described above. For those

who are able to soldier on, however, the rewards can be hilarious.

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