Stitch and Suture: Translating Emily Dickinson in Brazil

Stitch and Suture: Translating Emily Dickinson in Brazil

After narrating my personal journey to becoming a translator of Emily Dickinson, I present some ways to approach poetry translation that led me to a methodology consisting of two attitudes: stitch and suture. By stitching, the translator plays an active role in the editorial choices in order to create textual stability. On the other hand, the suturing process accepts the instability of the work and provokes the creative searching for an always elusive subject (or meaning) that flickers in the discursive chain and is unattainable by its own nature. Therefore, the translator's task is to work both under aesthetic and ethical constraints, since his choices are made before the transfer of the original to his own language.