Which Emily Dickinson in Translation?

Abstract

“Which Emily Dickinson in Translation” discusses the choice of source text/s for translations of poems by Emily Dickinson into Swedish, mainly from the point of view of line division. Should translators use source texts with conventional layouts or opt for trying to reproduce also the less conventional ones found in Dickinson’s manuscripts as today shown on the Internet or in R.W. Franklin’s facsimile edition (1981), as poet Ann Jäderlund does in her 2012 translations? What are the consequences of choosing one or the other? Five poems from about 1860 to about 1884 in a number of different translations illustrate the discussion, which concludes that the former is to be preferred, for the sake of syntactical and metrical clarity.