The Emily Dickinson Reader: An English-to-English Translation of Emily Dickinson's Complete Poems [Hardcover]

Paul Legault (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 14, 2012

Perfect for the poetry fan who is short on time, The Emily Dickinson Reader offers Paul Legault’s ingenious and madcap one-line renderings of each of Dickinson’s 1,789 poems. Take that familiar chestnut, #314, a la Legault: “Hope is kind of like birds. In that I don’t have any.” Or the classic hymn, #615: “God likes to watch.”

As Dickinson herself said in #769 (basically, via our translator): “This dead person used to be a person!”—and The Emily Dickinson Reader is here to tell you what that person meant.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"You know the kind of joke that's super-hilarious but also points in some genius way to the whole thing of the universe? Like that."—Daniel Handler

"If Emily Dickinson had a Tumblr, these witty one-liners are what she'd be posting...You'll want to not only display this one on your coffee table, but also read it from start to finish."—Marie Claire

"Let us agree that Legault’s version cannot, and is not meant to, rephrase Dickinson’s original, but rather seeks to recreate the spirit of the poem in a style and length that speak to today’s readers (who tweet and text while reading multiple books on a single flickering screen)."—The Millions

"There are so many ways into and out of this book. If you want to put it on your coffee table and pick it up at random to have a good laugh, then that’s fine, but you can also read it all the way through (as I did), letting yourself be pulled between diverse ways of reading...n the end, through this structure of repetition, Legault’s Dickinson emerges just as bold, queer, crass, hungry, sexual, demanding, and repetitive as I always knew she was."—Los Angeles Review of Books

"A valuable contribution to the field of radical translation. "—Lambda Literary Review

"Sheer genius that begs to be recited aloud."—Daily Candy

About the Author

Paul Legault was born in Ontario and raised in Tennessee. He holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Virginia and a B.F.A. in Screenwriting from the University of Southern California. He is the author of two books of poetry, The Madeleine Poems (Omnidawn, 2010) and The Other Poems (Fence Books, 2011). He co-founded and co-edits the translation press Telephone Books.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 248 pages
• Publisher: McSweeney's (August 14, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1936365987
• ISBN-13: 978-1936365982
• Product Dimensions: 5 x 0.9 x 7.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #509,958 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Paul Legault is the co-founder of the translation press Telephone Books and the author of three books of poetry: The Madeleine Poems (Omnidawn, 2010), The Other Poems (Fence, 2011), and The Emily Dickinson Reader (McSweeney's, 2012).

He's here: www.theotherpaul.com.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 21 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Beautifully Realized Book August 18, 2012

By Sarah

Format:Hardcover

I don't want to start this review negatively--especially because I've found so much pleasure from these translations--but I have to totally disagree with the previous commenter. Why would Legault spend so much time and love on this project if he weren't totally enamored by Ms. Dickinson.? This book is a joy to have. The translations are clever, the project as a whole, brilliant. If anything it makes for a more interesting read of Dickinson's work. Legault clearly did his research, E.D. 764 actually points directly to another scholar, "See My Emily Dickinson, by Susan Howe (p. 76-120)." For those of you that aren't familiar, Susan Howe's My Emily Dickinson is a wonderful portrait of a great enigmatic figure, and does a beautiful job of interpreting 'My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun' that Legault pays reverence to. He has a huge amount of respect for the genre, zero interest in replacing Emily Dickinson and if anything is asking us to start a dialogue about how we respond to (contemporary) poetry. I commend Legault on making something witty, beautiful and thought-provoking.

15 of 21 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars I wanted to like this... September 15, 2012

By kelsie VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

I actually pre-ordered this: that's how much I wanted to like it.

Emily Dickinson is my favorite poet, hands-down. She has a tightly-compressed language that crams mountains of meaning into tiny molehills of words and sentences. I approached this book with a great deal of expectation, because I do believe that if any poet, 1) has a body of work reducible to forceful, single sentences, she would be a good candidate; and 2) I like contemporary re-interpretations of great writing. I don't think Dickinson or anyone else has a body of untouchable work, sacrosanct and sufficient in itself with no need for each generation to find its own meaning from the words.

All that being said: this book was enormously disappointing. I'm just fine with being damned as a "person with no humor" by the book's apologists, because it simply is not funny. Legault's decision to reduce Dickinson down to (usually) one sentence is an interesting idea that he completely bungles in execution. Zombies? Do we really need another handful of zombies awkwardly thrown into literature in a desperate attempt to "modernize" it?

Legault's reinterpretations are, on the whole, uneven: at times, he's spot-on (reducing "Much Madness is divinest Sense" to "Logic is a trap from which few ever escape," for example), but overall the "reductions" of the originals into single sentences usually rests on vastly oversimplified language that's neither funny nor insightful.

Dickinson has always seemed mysterious and difficult to interpret--she knew that about herself, and owned it ("The Soul selects her own Society"). Legault has attempted to take away almost everything that made her, her. She DIDN'T write in this juvenile, shallow manner our Twitter-and-Facebook present has so ruthlessly embraced, and just like any translation, Legault's attempt to translate her polished English into the "vernacular of the 'hood" often strips her poetry of its meaning and the very quality that's helped it endure for so long.

In short, this book was an intriguing concept but a flawed product. It does have redeeming value, though: we can hope the curious reader picking up the "Emily Dickinson Reader" will eventually make it to the real The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition, just as the curious news junkie will, hopefully, graduate from "The Onion" to the New York Times.

19 of 29 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars OMG!!! Shoot me NOW! September 9, 2012

By D. Fineman

Format:Hardcover

I have noted -- with what little capacity I have left for distress --- that the negative reviews of this book have gotten themselves panned by those who evaluated them. Trying to understand that secondary defense of this text is a much more interesting problem than the book itself. My guess is that this work's defenders think those of us who hate it "do not get the joke" or, perhaps, "have an inadequate sense of humor." I actually think the opposite is true. While I can only remember one short book on ED's sense of humor, the comic is one her major moods. Further, it's clear from his "straight" translations that the author here, Legault, did not get it when both his legs were being pulled off. I mean, I am tempted to rage by his reductionist erasure of music, trope, philosophy, and beauty in the name of an infantile witticism, but I want to hope that this midget enterprise will bring some to ED herself. The situation now is like watching a hubristic gnat trying to block out the sun. Poetry has enough disrespect and neglect without this bathetic changeling.