Translated from the French by Rhonda Mullins, Pale Shadows by Dominique Fortier follows up on the author’s previous novel, titled Paper Houses in English, about the life of the poet Emily Dickinson. Interestingly, the new novel begins not with the poet, but with her sister, Lavinia, as she tends Dickinson’s dead body. Beginning a sequel after the death of its central character poses a pointed existential question, as Fortier herself explains in an author’s note: “Constructing what comes after death is what we do every day of our existence. It is called continuing to live.”

Emily Dickinson has had a long life in the minds of her readers, far beyond her fifty-five years, and perhaps surprising for a person who lived such a cloistered and compact existence. Fortier’s pair of books speak to Dickinson’s continued relevance. Why else would a writer from Quebec—a translator herself, who concedes, in a 2022 interview for French-Canadian Savoir Média, that Dickinson’s poems are difficult to translate—choose to inhabit the life and afterlife of a woman who died in 1886?

Pale Shadows tells the story of the lives, loves and losses of the small group of Dickinson’s intimates who first assembled her writings, scribbled on scraps of paper, into a printed book, saving the work from oblivion and establishing the poet’s legacy. This was no small feat. Dickinson had instructed Lavinia to burn her letters and diaries, which she did, but in the absence of strict guidance, she chose to preserve her poems found as “an avalanche of scraps of paper, blown by an invisible storm.” Fortier’s fictionalized account makes the reader feel how easily these ephemeral materials could have been lost. Yet, in Pale Shadows, Lavinia thinks: “It is no surprise that her sister wrote her poems on bits of envelope and packaging. Nothing is more solid than these remains; they are survivors, they are what endures when everything else has disappeared.” 

It is easy to understand why this book is titled Pale Shadows. The novel begins as Emily is prepared for burial in a white dress; her skin is like marble, and her coffin is made from white wood. Later, a character named Millicent describes the poems themselves in terms of shadows. “Miss Emily’s poems do not have a shadow. Her poems are pale shadows, texts woven from the silence between words, a house made of windows.”

There’s another shadow in this book, the shadow of the author who looks in from time to time. Fortier writes of her affinity for the nineteenth century, of “dreaming, finally, of the life of a poet shut away in her bedroom who could imagine a whole field from just one clover, just one bee.” Like much of the world, Fortier had her own moments of enforced solitude, shut away at home during the early pandemic. “For a few weeks, we all lived like Emily Dickinson,” she says. These cameo appearances add to the book’s charm, creating a feeling of connection with the poet, the people who survived her, and the modern-day writer who resurrects them all in fiction. As Lavinia realizes during a visit to the cemetery: “She is, we are all, nesting Russian dolls, made of ghosts, memories, the departed, down to the heart of wood that is both living and dead, always at risk of going up in flames.”

To this image of Russian dolls, one must add the book’s modern Canadian author and its translator, who, like the best of translators, is herself a pale shadow, working behind the scenes to bring this book to an Anglophone audience. With her seamless translation from the French, Rhonda Mullins has managed to be nearly invisible, but she is always there behind the scenes.

Later, in the same Savoir Média interview, Fortier elaborates on her desire to continue writing about Dickinson, about not only her life but also the period after her death. “If we write, it’s because we know that we are not eternal […] that we need something that will, precisely, survive us, something which is on the order of a trace or a witness or a legacy” (translation mine). Pale Shadows is a fitting tribute to the poet who wrote of death: 

Since then—’tis Centuries—and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses’ Heads
Were toward Eternity—

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Dominique Fortier is an editor and translator living in Outremont, Quebec. Her first novel, Du bon usage des étoiles (2008), was nominated for a Governor General’s Award and the Prix des Libraires du Québec, and Au péril de la mer won the Governor General’s Award for French fiction. She is the author of five books, four of which have been translated into English: On the Proper Use of Stars, Wonder, The Island of Books, and Paper Houses.

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Rhonda Mullins is a Montreal-based translator who has translated many books from French into English, including Jocelyne Saucier’s And Miles To Go Before I Sleep, Grégoire Courtois’ The Laws of the Skies, Dominique Fortier’s Paper Houses, and Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette’s Suzanne. In 2015, she won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation for her translation of Jocelyne Saucier’s Twenty-One Cardinals; and in 2018, she was the inaugural literary translator-in-residence at Concordia University. She mentors emerging translators in the Banff International Literary Translation Program.

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Shara Kronmal is a physician, writer, and translator from French to English. She is an Associate Editor at CRAFT Literary Journal. Her essays, reviews, and translations have appeared in Please See Me, The Journal of the American Medical Association, Hunger Mountain Review, MAYDAY Magazine, Chicago Review of Books, World Kid Lit, and Necessary Fiction. She lives in Chicago.