Emily Dickinson, Read and Translated from Sexual Difference

In 2012 the first 600 poems by Emily Dickinson appeared (following the numeration proposed by Ralph W. Franklin in 1998) in a Spanish translation carried out by Ana Mañeru Méndez
and María-Milagros Rivera Garretas (Madrid: Sabina editorial). After remembering certain silences, secrets and lies that have accompanied the publication of the North-American poet over the last century, in this article we find a discussion of the elements that make of this edition a feminist translation out of sexual difference. These reside basically in the perspective that guides the reading and interpretation of her poetry and in the lexical and syntactic choices of the maternal tongue. The perspective taken by the translators consists fundamentally in one that recognises the relevance that Susan Gilbert had in the life and work of Emily Dickinson, it refuses to seek failed romances with different men, it
recognises authority in the author as a poetess, it seeks female genealogy and investigates in its lyrical poetry the free sense of sexual difference as it expresses itself in the relationship between women and in the maternal tongue. This perspective is shown in the translation through a language that deliberately breaks with the patriarchal symbolic order.