This passage occurs as part of an argument that it’s possible to port videogames between platforms without changing the underlying game design (an argument that I ultimately agree with). However, I think that Emily Dickinson is—for reasons I’ll get into shortly—an inopportune choice as an example of a poet whose work “can survive a transcription.” In fact, I think Emily Dickinson’s work is an example of how, in fact, nothing survives transcription, and that’s the statement that I set out to prove in this talk. But along the way, it occurred to me that the converse is also true: nothing doesn’t survive transcription, and that the tension between these two seemingly opposite claims actually informs and explains them both.