Emily Dickinson's poems often begin with lines that belong to the true wonders of literature: "Hope is the Thing with Feathers", "My Life closed twice before its close", "Have you seen a Soul at the White Heat?", "Split the Lark - and you'll find the Music", "Autumn overlooked my knitting, Bee! I'm expecting you, Go not to near a House of Rose, Water is taught y thirst”. The list can be made almost as long as her poems left behind around 1780. Common to these first lines is an address that is as direct as it is enigmatic; they settle on the brain and the reader often talks about the opening phrase that would be the title of that poem. Moreover, it may be added, they are in principle untranslatable.
In Fascikel 26 there are the famous poems that begin "The brain - is further than the Sky -" and "I heard a Fly buzzing - When I died". Surprising, even provocative, statements that Dickinson manages to develop and sometimes even explain, without robbing them of their counterintuitive logic. The latter surprises in at least two ways. First, the phrase seems to come from a place after death. Second: Is it really the buzz of an insignificant fly that becomes the bearing experience of the moment of death? What are we to think of a poem that begins with someone who should neither be able to remember nor speak telling us about something no one should remember?
"We don't play with graves" is the title of Faskikel 26, the third Dickinson title translated by Jenny Tunedal and Ulf Karl Olov Nilsson that Anti editor publishes. At the Stadshallen in Lund, we gather on December 7th to let the translators, starting from the new fascicle - translated into Swedish for the first time - broaden the conversation from the untranslatable in Dickinson's poems to her view of poetry as such. They will of course also explain what a "fascicle" is and why it is called that, as well as possibly disagree on how it is pronounced.
Date: December 7
Time: 19.00
Location: Botulfshörnan/Lunds City Hall
Free entrance! We encourage visitors to obtain a copy of Faskikel 26, which is produced in a limited edition.
The event involves a collaboration between Anti editor and Hedlandet residence, which is carried out with the support of Region Skåne and Lund municipality.