Petrőczi Éva: Holt költők társaságában. A Puritanizmuskutató Intézet és a Medgyesi Pál Puritán Kiskönyvtár emlékére - Nemzet, egyház, művelődés 9. (Sárospatak, 2014)
Emily Dickinson, the Poetess-Queen of the Webster Dictionary To Tamás Magay, the eternal lexicographer-theologian
pages of The Tread of Ariadne he dedicated a long chapter to E. D. And in it some very remarkable passages appear about her dictionary-and-lexicogra- phy centred attitude as well: “She even confesses that in her great solitude she could find but one friend: the old dictionary; a fountain of her joys. From nouns she fabricated adjectives, and vice versa; her text was constructed from such omissions and metaphors which shocked the audience; she also turned to the idioms of Massachusetts; paying too great honour to canonized rules meant a decay of one’s expressive abilities. Her stylistic combinations, instead of simply naming the things are in a very natural way just indirectly referring to them... Metaphors were never so flowering before her, almost running wild into obscurity.”317 In other words: just as her poetics, her grammatical thinking is also “homemade”. The same fact is emphasized about her religious world in one chapter of a recent history of American literature: “Dickinson is religious, but her world of faith seems homemade. She knew very well the painful erosion of belief that was taking place among the orthodox who surrounded her.. .”318 The key-word of this above quoted short passage is “erosion.” Dickinson felt not only the erosion of religious life, but also the erosion of the American English tongue, which began to become destroyed by the bluntness of everyday usage and also by the almanac-like diction of mid-nineteenth-cen- tury average lyrics. Judith Farr, who was already mentioned in this essay, does one of the most understand Dickinson scholars of the end of the twentieth century. In 1996 she edited a versatile and colourful anthology of critical papers on her, in which we can find several episodes dealing with the E. D. and her dictionary, or E. D. and WORDS topics.319 One of them is Richard B. Sewall’s Emily Dickinsons Books and Reading. This excellent survey puts a stress on her as someone being addicted to books, to written words: “The conditions of Emily Dickinsons life and her temperament, made her especially dependent on books... She could hardly have lived without them. If, using a legal term, she must have heard around the house a good deal, she called her friends her 317 This important passage was re-translated by me (in lack of the original French one), based upon the Hungarian version of a reliable Hungarian tranlsator, György Tímár. - Tímár György 1964,413-414.) 3.8 Ruland-Bradbury 1992,174. 3.9 Farr, Judith 1996. 147
