Imágenes de la traducción y relaciones interartísticas

Abstract

The present article examines the relationship between ekphrasis and translation from a comparative perspective. It proposes an intertextual, critical reading of a series of analogies between translation and painting, from Joachim du Bellay in the 16th century to Alejandra Pizarnik in the 20th century; it also undertakes a synthetic analysis of the possible coincidences and differences between the characteristic features of ekphrasis and translation from an ekphrastic studies point of view. After a discussion of the essays of Mme. de Staël (1816) and Virginia Woolf (1933) on the problem of inter-linguistic translation in the context of the influence of the Coppet Group and the Bloomsbury Group on the field of aesthetics, we analyse the poetic theory put forward by another member of the Bloomsbury Group, Roger Fry, in the prologue to his translation of Mallarmé’s poetry (1921). This theory invokes translation and painting, and it is related to some problems posed by the translation of ekphrastic poetry, that is to say, poems which have works of art as their framework of reference.