Translating Emily:

Digitally Re-Presenting Fascicle 16

Sharon Cameron uses the violent sentence, "Then she stabbed them and bound them with string" to describe the final steps in the process of self-publication that Emily Dickinson employed. The publication history of Emily Dickinson is a history of a continual and sometimes violent re-fashioning and re-presenting of both the poet and the poems.

In this project, I attempt to offer you a journey through that history, a chance for you as reader to experience the process of construction of this canonized American poet. I take as my focus a small group of Dickinson's poems, the eleven poems grouped together in what we have termed Fascicle 16. The eleven poems of the fascicle are (in the order in which they appear in the fascicle):

Before I got my eye put out--
Of nearness to her sundered Things
Tie the Strings to my Life, My Lord,
I like a look of Agony
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
"Tis so appalling--it exhilarates--
How noteless Men and Pleids, stand,
When we stand on top of things--
'Twas just this time, last year, I died.
Afraid! Of whom am I afraid?
He showed me Hights I never saw--

If you want to read more about the project, my motivations, how I understand the poet and the texts and how they have both been constructed to be consumed, allow me to tell you all about it

Or, you can head directly to the index

The editions of Dickinson's poems which I have included in this project are:

Fascicle 16 as published in facsimile in The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson edited by R. W. Franklin and published in 1981.
Poems, the first collection of Dickinson poems, edited by Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson and published in 1890 by Roberts Brothers, Boston. I have taken my images from an 1892 reprint.
Poems, Second Series, the second collection, also edited by Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson and published in 1891 by Roberts Brothers, Boston. I have taken my images from an 1892 reprint.
Poems, Third Series, the third collection, edited by Mabel Loomis Todd and published in 1896 by Roberts Brothers, Boston. I have taken my images from a 1917 Little & brown reprint.
The Further Poems collection, edited by Martha Dickinson Bianchi and Alfred Leete Hampson and published in 1929 by Little & Brown, Boston.
The Centenary Edition, edited by Martha Dickinson Bianchi and Alfred Leete Hampson and published in 1930 by Little & Brown, Boston.
The Bolts of Melody collections, edited by Mabel Loomis Todd and Millicent Todd Bingham and published in 1945 by Harper & Brothers, New York.
The Final Harvest collection, edited by thomas H. Johnson and published in 1961 by Little & Brown, Boston.
One poem's publication in Atlantic Monthly, February 1929 also is included.