Emily Dickinson in the Soviet 1970s: A Revolutionary Poet or The Angel in The House?

• In Event: Memory in Translation: Gender, Poetry, and Politics

Abstract

My paper examines how the nineteenth-century American poet Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) was translated into Russian by Vera Markova (1907-1995) in 1976, and it investigates what kind of Dickinson, reshaped by the translation and adaptation processes, emerges in Markova’s work. On the one hand, Markova sought to present Dickinson as a ‘revolutionary’ poet, a formally experimental one who challenged the politics and culture of the time. On the other hand, Markova at times blunted the radical edge of Dickinson’s poetry, particularly with respect to gender and sexuality, making her more palatable to the relatively socially conservative Brezhnev era.

Author

• Francesca Zuccaro, U of Bristol (UK)