Translating a Milestone: Mon Emily Dickinson in France

In what follows, I explore how the 2017 French translation of Susan Howe's landmark 1985 text, My Emily Dickinson, as Mon Emily Dickinson by the Dickinson scholar and prolific translator Antoine Cazé for Ypsilon Éditeur constitutes a milestone in French-American poetic exchange. In particular, I am interested in reading it as a symptom of a turning point in postcolonial and feminist activisms in France.1

Howe's innovative poessay brings together literary scholarship, literary history, American history, and feminist theory into a dazzling whole. Her elaboration of the foundational American dialectic between what she calls "sovereignty" and "the wilderness" can help us to understand the tensions between present-day public policies and activist groups that resist them, particularly those representing indigenous populations and environmental conservation. The text remains a model for retracing the agency of vulnerable populations, from women and the indigenous to the disabled and the undocumented, in which Dickinson and Howe stand in solidarity with discourses of decolonization. Finally, it raises the question of how, from a space of limited agency, we can resist the prevailing hegemony — in Dickinson's case, as an unmarried woman subject to the strictures of nineteenth-century New England's puritanical patriarchy — so as to live and write according to conditions we deem ethical. Cazé's monumental French translation, Mon Emily Dickinson, demonstrates how translation newly configures not only literary forms but also social, political, and historical concerns, activating new possibilities in the social worlds into which they are translated.

Cazé has rendered Howe's poetic prose with great attention to its interweaving threads of interpretation and its daring feats of rhythm, pacing, and sound. He elegantly translates the compressed content of Dickinson's last known letter, "Called Back," as the delicate "Rappelée" (9/31). Other passages deliver to us, all over again, in French, the poet-scholar's precise analysis and breathless imagination as it encompasses unfathomable swaths of the space-time continuum. Consider this: "The decision not to publish her poems in her lifetime, to close up an extraordinary amount of work, is astonishing. Far from being the misguided modesty of an oppressed female ego, it is a consummate Calvinist gesture of self-assertion by a poet with faith to fling election loose across the incandescent shadows of futurity" (49), which becomes "La décision de ne pas publier ses poèmes de son vivant, de garder secrète une quantité de travail aussi colossale, ne laisse pas de surprendre. Loin d'être la marque d'une modestie malencontreuse de la part de la femme opprimée, il s'agit d'un geste calviniste par excellence, celui d'un poète qui affirme son moi et se prévaut de sa foi pour renvoyer l'élection divine au théâtre des ombres incandescentes du temps futur" (90-91). With these two sentences, Howe communicates how grounded Dickinson was in her awareness of her historical moment when she decided not to publish, Dickinson's appreciation of the ephemerality of human life, and her sense of the importance of her work beyond her own lifetime. Cazé not only captures all of this but also marshals his translational choices to further emphasize Dickinson's agency. For example, rendering "to close up" as "garder secrète" offers both the sense of "keeping close" and "closed up" but also the sense of knowing one is hiding away something precious. Translating "misguided" as "malencontreuse," with its connotations of "unlucky" or "unfortunate," contrasts the outdated madwoman in the attic stereotypes all the more with Howe's argument for Dickinson's intentionality. Many of Cazé's stylistic choices are also reminiscent of Howe's style, like the internal rhymes "moi" (ego) with "foi" (faith), and "futurity" as "temps futur" rather than just "futur," a phrase whose extra syllable emphasizes its distance from the present, as "futurity's" extra two syllables do.

No less impressively, Cazé also translated, with great alacrity, the text's numerous, centuries-spanning citations, from Saint Thomas Aquinas, Shakespeare, and Milton to Blake, the Brownings, Keats, and the Brontës, all the way to Louis Zukofsky, to say nothing of the many citations of Dickinson, with much consideration of their historicity and the necessity of making visible their intimate relationships with and within Howe's text. (He did make an exception for citations from the Bible, for which he used the Louis Segond translation.) Cazé's suggestively titled afterword, "Fusil ChargéE," reflects on how translations may question and make critical use of assumptions present in the target language. In particular, translating from English to French required him to "overstitch" the text's gender markings, so that Dickinson's feminization of "Gun" in the poem, "My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun," complicates the use of the masculine word "Fusil," and the title's translation, "Mon Emily Dickinson," which relies on the rule that a masculine possessive pronoun must precede a noun beginning with a vowel, slyly rejoins the woman poet-author and woman poet-subject by invoking the patriarchal structures that haunt their connectivity. Finally, Cazé humbly offers, just as the Master makes use of the Gun, Susan Howe's essay made use of him as a translator and "pushed him to the frontiers of identification in language" (246-47).

Mon Emily Dickinson newly places Howe's text and Dickinson's oeuvre in conversation, moreover, with French writings on America as colony and postcolony, complicating them and what they reveal about the French imaginary of the New World. Texts that may have been available to Dickinson during her lifetime include Abbé Prévost's novel L'Histoire du chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut (1731), which culminates in a vision of as-yet unsettled Louisiana as impenetrably sauvage and immoral, and Alexis de Toqeuville's study De la Démocratie en Amérique (1835, 1840), which meticulously describes the American frontier, at that point in the process of manifesting so-called American destiny, as eminently conquerable and profitable. My Emily Dickinson's refrain of post/colonial terror — "the vivid rhetoric of terror was a first step in the slow process toward American Democracy" (38/74), "Jonathan Edwards' apocalyptic sermons voice human terror of obliteration in our lonely and inexplicable cosmos" (48/89), Dickinson "studied terror" (116/192) — is revelatory for both American and French readerships. For an American reader, Howe's presentation of the foundational ubiquity of terror in early America gives the lie to present-day, mainstream accounts of terror as exclusively external to the nation, either because it takes place overseas or is brought to American soil by foreigners. In translation, Howe's insistence on historical terreur also powerfully reminds today's French readers that the French Terror inaugurated France's movement away from monarchy and toward democracy, forcing confrontations between its present-day narratives about the importation of Islamic fundamentalist terror and the terror-soaked foundational narrative of the French Republic.

In all these cases, terror is not straightforward but rather consists in the paradoxical simultaneity of state terror and the terror of statelessness, a paradox that characterizes the violence of settler colonialism. Howe's account of the European conquest of the American "wilderness," to which Dickinson's poetry testifies, thus also speaks to France's history of settler colonialism, especially in Algeria. In his afterword, Cazé remembers that, for him, as a student, Dickinson's wilderness resembled the blank spaces of Stéphane Mallarmé's writing, despite the vast distance between them — made more evident by Howe's contextualization of the former (241). This Dickinson-(Howe)-Mallarmé rapprochement remains an inviting one. The presumption and the privileging of the blank, white, unoccupied space of modernist poetry is a paradigm complicit with imperialism's blindness to already existing indigenous peoples that has legitimated settler colonies throughout history. Howe's hyper-awareness of the American colonists' incursions into indigenous territory yields a melancholic poetic critique of this complicity. Although she cannot restore histories that have been forever erased, she fills the pages of this book and many others with all the remaining traces and fragments she can find, the black ink of her writing a protest against the void produced by colonial violence. Contemporary French writers similarly interrogate the relationship between textuality and imperial entitlement, such as the poet Nathalie Quintane, whose Grand ensemble critiques the effacing properties of France's 2003 nation-wide exhibition, L'Année de l'Algérie, which, in her view, "celebrated [the colony] only to erase it all over again,"2 and the novelist and sociologist Kaoutar Harchi, whose Je n'ai qu'une langue, ce n'est pas la mienne (a title borrowed from Jacques Derrida's Le Monolinguisme de l'autre), details how Algerian Francophone writers are simultaneously appropriated and excluded by the French literary canon.3 

Mon Emily Dickinson takes on added significance for French feminism, appearing as it does in the midst of the #MeToo movement. Although the French version of #MeToo, #balancetonporc (translated as "squeal on your pig"), took off quickly, leading to a 30% increase in reports of sexual violence in October 2017 alone, France made the most international #MeToo headlines with an opinion piece, signed by 100 women, famously including Catherine Deneuve, who accused the movement of going too far. As these two highly mediatized events indicate, France faces criticism from within and without for its conservative tendencies when it comes to gender equality. The recent uptick in American-to-French feminist poetic translations is a small but not insignificant counterpoint to those tendencies. Mon Emily Dickinson is not the only important text in recent French translation from a major post-Language feminist poet: Lyn Hejinian's My Life has appeared in the beautiful translation Ma Vie by Abigail Lang, Maïtreyi, and Nicholas Pesquès for Les Presses du réel in 2016, and Ypsilon will also soon bring out a French translation of Howe's The Birth-mark, another major work of feminist literary history. In the context of the ongoing fallout from the long fight for Mariage pour tous (the legalization of gay marriage in 2013) and the divisiveness of #MeToo, #MoiAussi (the Canadian movement), and #Balancetonporc, these poetic texts will not spark a media frenzy, but they do offer readers models of patient, dignified formations of women's subjectivity that resist patriarchal oppression and imagine intellectual and social formations beyond it. What new French feminisms might they call forth, and how and when might these arrive in translation to U.S. American readers as a symptom of our readiness to move beyond the limitations of our struggles for gender justice?

While Mon Emily Dickinson has the potential, as I hope to have shown, to engage substantively with postcolonial and feminist discourses in France, it remains to be seen what actual effects Cazé's translation will have on its French and Francophone readerships and how those effects will compare to those it has had on its American readers. But the direction its publisher, Ypsilon, is taking, might indicate some possibilities. Ypsilon stands at the vanguard of American-to-French translations of twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary activism. In addition to publishing Mon Emily Dickinson, it has recently published translations of Toni Cade Bambara's The Salt Eaters and Gorilla, My Love; Fire! a single-issue Harlem Renaissance literary review, published in 1926, that features texts by such luminaries as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Gwendolyn Brooks; and previously untranslated texts by James Baldwin, C.L.R. James, Djuna Barnes, and H.D.4

It is not a coincidence that such translations are appearing in a moment when the French tradition of mass protest is ever more ascendant, with groups including SOS Racisme, Les Indigènes, Mariage pour tous, Nuit debout, #balancetonporc, and the Gilets jaunes taking center stage, one after the other, in France. These movements have in common a critique of French Republicanism, which has traditionally sought to render difference invisible in order to establish equality among citizens. (The most controversial example is the interdiction of the Muslim headscarf in schools and other government-run spaces.) In response, these mass protest movements assert that the visibility of differences, especially identitary differences subject to structural injustices such as racism, sexism, homophobia, and classism, is necessary to achieve true equality. In French translation, American literary texts that highlight the visibility of differences within struggles for justice can offer models for articulating French struggles in new ways. I am not suggesting that France should adopt the policies or values of American multiculturalism (which faces its own problems), but rather theorizing more broadly that literary translations can serve as prescient, valuable interlocutors of contemporary activist movements as they open new avenues to social justice.

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Teresa Villa-Ignacio is Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Stonehill College. She is the co-editor of Souffles-Anfas: A Critical Anthology from the Moroccan Journal of Culture and Politics (Stanford University Press, 2016) and Traduire le Maghreb/Translating the Maghreb, a special issue of Expressions maghrébines (15.1, Summer 2016), and is completing a book on the centrality of ethics in relations of translation and collaboration among France- and U.S.-based contemporary poets.

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