A Happy Transmigration? Silvina Ocampo Translates Emily Dickinson.

Abstract

The Argentinian poet Silvina Ocampo’s translation of Emily Dickinson has gone through three editions, and was praised by Jorge Luis Borges as ‘a sort of happy transmigration’. Borges implies that the versions are respectful, literal, and that the translation is an authentic expression of Dickinson’s poetic diction. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the accuracy of Borges’ description and to examine the thorny questions of ‘faithfulness’ and ‘literalness’ in order to find out whether Ocampo’s apparent mistranslations might be part of a deforming tendency.