Authors

Discussion

My paper examines how the nineteenth-century American poet Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), was translated into Russian by Vera Markova (1907-1995) in 1976. Markova, a poet in her own right, as well as a distinguished Soviet translator from Japanese and a scholar of Japanese literature, was the first person to translate a significant selection of Dickinson’s poems during the Brezhnev period (1964-1982). My analysis investigates what kind of Dickinson, reshaped by the translation and adaptation processes, emerges in Markova’s work. I look at the disruptive potential of these acts, while acknowledging Markova’s negotiations as a translator within the constraints of the Soviet Union of the 1970s.

This paper argues that Markova’s translations of Emily Dickinson proved politically ambivalent in the Soviet Union of the 1970s. 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.

This study combines the use of close readings of both the original and translated poems, and an in-depth analysis of the introductions. Concerning the original and translated texts, I examine gendered language and look at how images that may be ambivalent or striking in the original are downplayed or muted in the Russian translations. My analysis of the introductions draws on Emily Lygo’s study (Lygo 2016) where she highlights Soviet paratexts’ potential to be both a site for providing a ‘correct’ ideological understanding of a translated work and a means of negotiation with censorship.

With its interplay of cultural studies, gender studies, literary studies and translation studies, my paper hopes to enrich the scholarship on Dickinson’s poetry translated into Russian, as well as research into Western literature in the USSR under the Brezhnev leadership. Beyond Russian studies, this study seeks to enhance Dickinson scholarship by outlining a different way of interpreting her poetry. This is shaped not only by a process of translation, but also by the adaptation of her poems to another cultural and political environment, revealing the degree to which Dickinson’s poetry can be adjusted in order to suit the Soviet environment of the Brezhnev period.