Authors

Discussion

How was the nineteenth-century American poet Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), who engaged with themes of gender, politics, and religion, mediated and adapted for the Soviet audience of the late 1960s? What kind of similarities and discrepancies can be identified between her original poems and the ones translated into Russian by Ivan Aleksandrovich Kashkin (1899-1963)? How did Dickinson’s unorthodox poetic style and gender identity translate into the language and culture of Soviet Russia? These are the questions that lie at the centre of my paper, which explores Kashkin’s literary portrait of Emily Dickinson and his 1968 translation of her poetry. Drawing on scholarship from Russian and American literary studies, Translation and Gender Studies, this paper combines a close reading methodology of the original and translated poems with an analysis of Kashkin’s paratexts, namely the ‘literary portrait’ he wrote about Dickinson.

My analysis reveals an unexpected reading of Emily Dickinson, whom I argue Kashkin transforms into a proto-Soviet poet. I demonstrate how Kashkin's account of Dickinson’s nature and poetry magnifies and, at times, manipulates traits of her life and poetics that can be perceived as (proto-)Soviet. In this process of ‘sovietisation’ of Dickinson, however, Kashkin must also confront Dickinson’s features that prove problematic for the Soviet ideological system, such as the question of her formal experimentation. Furthermore, I will show evident contradictions emerging from Kashkin’s essay in terms of gender dynamics: on the one hand, as part of the Soviet official structure, he should demonstrate a commitment to gender equality; on the other, he continues to make gendered assumptions about Dickinson, proposing a traditional and stereotyped take on women’s writing and female poets. My study considers Kashkin's translations of Dickinson critically alongside his Realist translation theory, showing the high degree of simplification operated on Dickinson’s poems, which now lack their ambiguities and complexities, whilst resonating well within the Soviet ideological framework.