This corset is certainly coquettish and elegant: it gives a generous view of the bosom and tapers down to form a seductively narrow waist – and this is what counts. For this reason I preferred to translate as slanciata nel suo corsetto dalla vasta scollatura serrato a vespa da grandi nastri (that is, a corset with a deep scoop neck fastened by large ribbons to form a wasp waist) – and that the ribbons are in scale ought to be suggested by the fact that the corset fastening gets progressively narrower towards the waist.
The French expression contained nine words. The three English translations have respectively ten, nine and eight words. Mine has thirteen. That is certainly too many from the rhythmic point of view, but I felt that this aural loss was necessary in order to gain visual precision. This was for me an interesting case of negotiation. The relevant element in that visualisation was the exciting and seductive waistline of the young bride, and it was that that I had to make visible, thus abandoning any effort to translate literally. At the same time my solution represented an effort to make the translation archaic, that is, to put the modern reader in the situation of a contemporary of Nerval.
Ekphrasis
I shall deal in my next essays with many cases of so-called intersemiotic translation, that is, of transposition from a given semiotic system to another, as happens when a novel is transformed into a movie or a painting is described by a poem. When a verbal text describes a work of visual art, classic tradition spoke of ekphrasis, a specific literary genre, which has a venerable pedigree. Note that many visual works of the past are known today only through the verbal descriptions given by ekphrasis.
Today ekphrasis is no longer celebrated as a literary tour de force, but many pages of art criticism are good examples of ekphrasis, as is the description of Velazquez’s Meninas at the beginning of Les mots et les choses by Foucault.
As a matter of fact, even today, many poems and stories begin life as the description of a visual work. But authors usually conceal their source, or are at least not preoccupied with making it explicit. I shall characterise these cases as examples of occult ekphrasis.
Classical (and explicit) ekphrasis was meant to be appreciated as a good description of a painting or of a statue. Modern occult ekphrasis aims at evoking in the mind of the reader a vision, as precise and evident as possible. Think of the Proustian descriptions of the paintings by Elstir. The author, pretending to describe the work of an imaginary painter, was in fact sticking to the paintings of artists of his time.
In my novels I frequently play the game of occult ekphrasis. Such are the descriptions of two church portals (Moissac and Vezelay) and of many pages of illuminated codes in The Name of the Rose ; such is the whole description of the nave of the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers in Foucault’s Pendulum (to such an extent, I hope, that now that this museum has been unfortunately refurbished, historians of the future might guess from my text how it was at the time of its lost splendour).
Let me consider two occult ekphrases from The Island of the Day Before: one inspired by Georges de la Tour and another inspired by Vermeer. When writing, I looked at the paintings and tried to describe them as vividly as I could. I did not mention them; I wanted the readers to believe that I was describing a real scene. This permitted me to try some little variations, so that I added or modified some details – without feeling guilty of the sin for which Steiner reproached Dante Gabriele Rossetti (who in the title of one of his poems explicitly referred to an Ingres painting and then described a considerably different scene). But I also trusted that a cultivated reader would be able to recognise my visual source and to appreciate that, if I made an ekphrasis, it was a description of a painting belonging to the same period in which my story took place – and therefore my ekphrasis was not merely a rhetorical exercise but an attempt to reconstruct the visual atmosphere of that historical moment.
Usually I signal these visual sources to my translators, but I do not ask them to translate by looking at them. I assume that, if my description is good, it should work even in another language. However, in an occult ekphrasis one starts from the double premise that (i) if naive readers do not recognise the visual source, they can in some way discover it through their imagination, as if they were watching the scene for the first time, and that (ii) if educated readers already know the visual work, they will get an additional pleasure from the rediscovery of the work through a verbal description.
So I hope that many readers can recognise not only one, but many of Georges de la Tour’s paintings, in a description like this one from chapter 31, and since Weaver’s translation is absolutely correct it is not necessary to provide the original text:
Roberto now saw Ferrante in the darkness at the mirror that reflected only the candle set before it. Contemplating two little flames, one aping the other, the eye stares, the mind is infatuated, visions rise. Shifting his head slightly, Ferrante sees Lilia, her face of virgin wax, so bathed in light that it absorbs every other ray and causes her blonde hair to flow like a dark mass wound in a spindle behind her back, her bosom just visible beneath a delicate dress, its neck cut low.
Now let us read this description from chapter 12, inspired by Vermeer:
Qualche sera dopo, passando davanti a una casa, la scorse in una stanza buia al piano terra. Era seduta alla finestra per cogliere un venticello che mitigava appena l’afa monferrina, fatta chiara da una lampada, invisibile dall’esterno, posata presso al davanzale. A tutta prima non l’aveva reconosciuta perché le belle chiome erano avvolte sul capo, e ne pendevano solo due ciocche sopra le orecchie. Si scorgeva solo il viso un poco chinato, un solo purissimo ovale, imperlato da qualche goccia di sudore, che pareva l’unica vera lampada in quella penombra.
Stava lavorando di cucito su di un tavolinetto basso, su cui posava lo sguardo intento [. . .] Roberto ne vedeva il labbro, ombreggiato da una calugine bionda. A un tratto ella aveva levato una mano più luminosa ancor del viso, per portare alla bocca un filo scuro: lo aveva introdotto tra le labbra rosse scoprendo i denti bianchi e lo aveva reciso di un sol colpo, con mossa di fiera gentile, sorridendo lieta della sua mansueta crudeltà.
Certainly Bill Weaver’s translation makes the readers visualise the image pretty well even if they are not acquainted with Vermeer’s painting:
A few evenings later, passing a house, he glimpsed her in a dark room on the ground floor. To enjoy the faint breeze that barely mitigated the Monferrino sultriness, she was seated at the window, in the light of an unseen lamp placed near the sill. At first he failed to recognize her because her lovely hair was wound around her head; just two locks escaped, falling over the ears. Only her face could be seen: bent slightly, a single, pure oval beaded with a few drops of sweat, it seemed the real lamp in that penumbra.
At a little table she was occupied with some sewing, on which her intent gaze rested [. . .] Roberto noticed that her lip was shaded by blonde down. Suddenly she raised a hand even more luminous than her face, to hold a length of dark thread to her mouth placing it between her red lips, she bared her white teeth, severing it with one bite, the act of a gentle animal happily smiling in her domestic cruelty.
My only stricture is that the translator underestimated an Italian expression, to such an extent that I suspect that he was translating without having Vermeer in his mind. I say that the girl was fatta chiara (made clear) by an invisible lamp. Weaver translates that she was in the light of an unseen lamp (Jean-Noel Schifano translated that she was éclairée par une lampe invisible, Lozano that she was aclarada por una lámpara, and Kroeber says das Gesicht im Schein einer Lampe). They are good descriptions, but to say that one is lit up by a lamp is not the same as to say that one is made or rendered clear by a lamp: my expression transfers the source of light from the lamp to the face, and it is the girl’s face which becomes the luminous source. This should be a clue for competent readers, who know that, in seventeenth-century paintings, the light radiates from faces, hands and fingers, as if the bodies themselves were alight.
Intertextual irony
Ekphrasis quotes a visual text by means of verbal texts. There is also a way to make a second verbal text visible, or detectable, though a first one. I am speaking of the procedure called intertextual irony. To scatter a text with non-explicit quotations of other works of art or literature is considered a form, perhaps the typical form, of postmodern literature – the natural effect of its intertextuality
