Text 01

Everything is unusual about the poem you've just read. The author is a woman, though men dominated poetry, just like any other sphere of activity, for centuries. She was a self-taught poet, and never cared about publication. Her language is dazzling: she chooses most common words, there is nothing strange or 'poetic' about most of them, yet the unexpected juxtapositions of these words bring new meanings into the ordinary. She was far ahead of her time in the concentration and spareness of her verse. Like all great poetry hers helps to bridge a gap between the physical and the spiritual.

Curiously, Emily Dickinson, just like many great authors, never knew how to sort out the best of her stuff. Her first letter to the world came to light on April 15, 1862. A professional essayist and lecturer Thomas Higginson received a mere letter from a young woman named Emily Dickinson who enclosed four of her poems. She was writing to inquire whether her verses "breathed". But Higginson's problem was that he was literally unable to classify the poems. He said later that "the impression of a wholly new and original poetic genius" was distinct on his mind.

Dickinson's entire life illustrates the fact one could take a single household and an inactive life, and weave enchanting poetry out of it. Miss Dickinson was born in Amherst, and she never married. Emily Dickinson wrote nearly 1,800 poems. She had only seven of them – some say eight or ten – published during her life time, and contended herself by enclosing or incorporating verses from time to time in letters to friends. During the year of 1862, her most productive verse-writing period, she completed three hundred and sixty-six poems!

The poems by Dickinson are usually brief, many of them are based on a single image or symbol. But within her little lyrics she writes about some of the most important things in life: love and a lover, nature and immortality. She writes about success, which she thought she never achieved, and about failure which she considered her constant companion. Dickinson writes so brilliantly that she is indisputably ranked as one of America's greatest poets.

1.4 Poetry in English – and/or in Russian

The first English-speaking poets who left a permanent record of their work welded and wielded a language which was loud with theclashing of swords. It was not the language fit for serenades.

The Anglo-Saxon language, or Old English, died a heroic death on the battlefield of Hastings. A new kind of poetry came, that of soft vowels to be sung beneath a lady's window. The magnificent language of Chaucer was the child by marriage of French vowel and English consonant. That language was already ripe for the Renaissance poets, for Shakespeare. The language of Sweet William, along with that of the King James' Version of the Bible played a tremendously important role in the development of the literary language.

Curiously, it was at the Elizabethan time that cultural contacts between Russia and England began. One would say, strangely did the contacts begin. In 1612, for instance, a John Merrick elaborated the project of invasion and subsequent occupation of Eastern Russia, which was approved by James I in May 1613, "out of compassion for the fate of Moscovites".

Small wonder, English poetry of the New Times gradually became an essential part of Russian literary and cultural heritage. Translation work facilitated the process. The early 19th century saw a great interest in English poetry on the part of Russian writers. Vassilyi Zhukovsky, for instance, made his first appearance as the author of a translation from Thomas Gray.

Shakespeare was probably the most 'translated' of all. It was in the 1840s that the popularity of his sonnets spread in Russia. The translators had a real crush on Sweet William. There were lots of attempts to translate the sonnets both in prose and in rhyme. Some of them may reflect the complexity of the phenomenon named 'translation'. There were translators, for instance, who insisted on translating the sonnets in prose arguing that, if made otherwise, they would lack the beauty and the exactitude of the original. Shakespeare's popularity remains as high as ever in our times.

While reading the next poem (Text 02) written by Andrei Voznesensky, ask yourselves one question. What do you think the poem shows?