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
For additional information about this article
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The Emily Dickinson Journal, Vol. XXII, No. 1
100
Book Review
CHRISTINA PUGH
Hazelton, Rebecca. Fair Copy. Columbus: Ohio State University UP/The Journal
Award 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 with
Dickinsons poetry. In Fair Copy, Rebecca Hazelton adapts a series of Dickinsons
frst lines as acrostics for her own poems. These acrostics ofer 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 29
th
birthday, I began a formal
experiment with Emily Dickinsons work. I took my copy of The Complete Works of
Emily Dickinson and selected the frst line of every 29
th
poem (56).
Such a method does not have the urgency of, for example, Anna Rabinowits
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 or
even 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
Book Review
101
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 pretiest
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,
leter by acrostic leter, some previously inchoate textures in Dickinsons
declarative itself. The enjambment separating pretiest 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 efect
in the collection. The microscopically ploted shape-shifting of the tatooed,
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 the
passage 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 prety 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 Dickinsons
these 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 mater
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 on
nineteenth-century readerly decorum, since Legault has translated Dickinsons
poems into a series of one-liners (or several-liners) that are at times sexually graphic
The Emily Dickinson Journal, Vol. XXII, No. 1
102
and that speak with twenty-frst-century abandon. The heresy of paraphrase is
thus the stuf of comedy here. Legaults translations show several recurring
strategies: they activate farce and anachronism, literalize sexual metaphor, and
fre 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 geting
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 personifed 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 fres. 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 Reader presents 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.