Paul Legault and his experimental rewritings of Emily Dickinson: explorations of paraphrase in poetry
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.30827/impossibilia.272024.29859Keywords:
Rewritings, Poetry, Paraphrase, Lyric Theory, Queer, HumorAbstract
In this paper I analyze a strange poetic artifact: the book The Emily Dickinson Reader: An English-to-English Translation of the Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (2012), by Paul Legault. This experiment, whose legitimacy has been questioned, displays queer affects and ironic humor. However, the fact that this work presents itself as a sort of “impossible translation” (as a “homolinguistic translation”) leads us to focus on another topic: the effects of accepting the metaphor that “rewritings are translations”. We suggest that Legault's entire book is articulated around a key question in the field of lyric theory: is paraphrasing possible in poetry?
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