Ekphrasis as Translation

This project explores the meaning of translation as it moves across text type. Ekphrasis, meaning description in Greek, has a long history of poets responding to artwork. What does it mean to think about ekphrasis as translation? Thousand Languages special project intern, Cecilia Savala, explores this question by engaging with Maria Nancy Thomas's artwork published in Hayden's Ferry Review Issue 63.

I see the defense of ekphrasis as translation as portraying different states of matter. If the original artwork is the solid state, heat that up, and the poetry that emerges is the liquid form of the original art. By reading the ekphrastic poetry aloud, we’ve transformed it into a gas, a piece of art that takes the shape of the container and is harder to possess. Throughout this process, I’ve taken existing art and shaken it up; I’ve created artistic interpretations of art that already exists. The original artwork stands on its own, but through ekphrasis, I’ve translated the images, shapes, and tones into words, stanzas, and spaces.

I’ve approached my work in ekphrasis as intermedial translation. Semiotics, the study of signs, says that from signified to sign to signifier, there lies necessary translation. Ekphrasis is defined as the interpretation of a visual representation as a verbal representation. Ekphrasis, instead of being a sign, takes the sign (art) and translates it into the thing. Using semiotics and compositional analysis, I’ve translated three art works, originally appearing in Hayden’s Ferry Review, into individual ekphrastic poems.

These poems take shape in reflective forms of the artwork and describe what’s happening in shapes and colors to literally translate each piece of art (sign) into poems (signifier). I approached each piece of art as it’s own entity but as simultaneously connected to the other pieces. Since all three were contributed by the same artist, Maria Nancy Thomas, there were certain elements that threaded the three together.

For example, each photo included an image of the artist herself transposed over the scene. This artifact indicated to me that the poems should all be written from the first person perspective; I used I and we throughout all three poems. Because of the facelessness and/or disconnected look on the face of the artist in the images, the tones of the poems became haunted or discontent. I also included details from the art in each poem, such as the metal instruments in “El Cuarto Donde Nací,” and the clothesline in “Quinceañera,” which can be seen as direct translation, in contrast to the fictionalized details added.

The masculine silhouettes in the background of “Billar” became “handsy old men” and “our ex-husbands.” In “El Cuarto Donde Nací,” I took the artistic liberty of assigning identity to the second woman’s head, framed in multiple doorways. She became the speaker’s mother who had made the difficult decision to leave her newborn child behind. These choices within the act of translation can be seen as comparable to the translator who has to choose between two meanings of a word or who has to create an equivalent metaphor for an idiom that doesn’t exist in one language.

The process of translating art into poetry was one that I approached with much care. The act of reconfiguring and restating another artist’s work was at times daunting, and throughout the whole process, I was concerned with what the original artist would think of what I’d done to her art. I hope I did these pieces justice and look forward to doing more ekphrasis in the future.