The poem as icon of the painting
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Marthinus Beukes
Abstract
The focus of this paper is to investigate the poetic expression of a painting as it is transposed into a poem. Such an interaction between the verbal and the visual text results in what Simonides of Ceos describes as “poema pictura loquens, pictura poema silens” — the poem is a speaking painting, the painting is a silent poem. How does the poem become such a depiction or representation of the painting? Assuming that the poem contributes to the significance of the painting by adding additional layers of meaning to it, the iconic aspects in the poem text therefore suggest the painting’s content as its visual embodiment. In the following discussion, I will argue that the iconic meaning-making processes taking place in Tom Gouws’s (2010) Vermeer poems function as a meta-language of the paintings. I will suggest a descriptive framework for delineating the iconic processes that are present in and around Gouws’s poetic texts in order to try to show that the poet not only explores the painting’s visual text but also investigates and confronts language iconically in several of his poems based on Vermeer’s paintings, e.g. “The Astronomer”, “The Geographer”, “Woman in Blue Reading a Letter”, ‘“Lady Weighing Pearls” and “The Men of Vermeer”. This comes however particularly to the fore in his poem “The lacemaker’ ” which will be read in conjunction with another of Gouws’s poems, “ars poetica”. These two poems will be read as verbal figurations of visual writing through which a particular kind of iconic narrative is established.
Abstract
The focus of this paper is to investigate the poetic expression of a painting as it is transposed into a poem. Such an interaction between the verbal and the visual text results in what Simonides of Ceos describes as “poema pictura loquens, pictura poema silens” — the poem is a speaking painting, the painting is a silent poem. How does the poem become such a depiction or representation of the painting? Assuming that the poem contributes to the significance of the painting by adding additional layers of meaning to it, the iconic aspects in the poem text therefore suggest the painting’s content as its visual embodiment. In the following discussion, I will argue that the iconic meaning-making processes taking place in Tom Gouws’s (2010) Vermeer poems function as a meta-language of the paintings. I will suggest a descriptive framework for delineating the iconic processes that are present in and around Gouws’s poetic texts in order to try to show that the poet not only explores the painting’s visual text but also investigates and confronts language iconically in several of his poems based on Vermeer’s paintings, e.g. “The Astronomer”, “The Geographer”, “Woman in Blue Reading a Letter”, ‘“Lady Weighing Pearls” and “The Men of Vermeer”. This comes however particularly to the fore in his poem “The lacemaker’ ” which will be read in conjunction with another of Gouws’s poems, “ars poetica”. These two poems will be read as verbal figurations of visual writing through which a particular kind of iconic narrative is established.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Preface and acknowledgements vii
- List of contributors ix
- Introduction: Signergy 1
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Part I. Theoretical approaches
- Literary practices and imaginative possibilities 23
- The bell jar, the maze and the mural 47
- Iconicity as meaning miming meaning and meaning miming form 73
- A view from the margins 101
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Part II. Visual iconicity
- Iconic and indexical elements in Italian Futurist poetry 129
- Taking a line for a walk 157
- Iconicity and naming in E. E. Cummings’s poetry 179
- Bunyan and the physiognomy of the Wor(l)d 193
- From icon to index and back 211
- The poem as icon of the painting 225
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Part III. Iconicity and historical change
- Iconicity and etymology 243
- Iconicity typological and theological 259
- An iconic, analogical approach to grammaticalization 279
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Part IV. Iconicity and positionality
- Iconic signs, motivated semantic networks, and the nature of conceptualization 301
- Iconicity and subjectivisation in the English NP 319
- Metrical inversion and enjambment in the context of syntactic and morphological structures 347
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Part V. Iconicity and translation
- Translation, iconicity, and dialogism 367
- Iconicity and developments in translation studies 387
- Author index 413
- Subject index 417
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Preface and acknowledgements vii
- List of contributors ix
- Introduction: Signergy 1
-
Part I. Theoretical approaches
- Literary practices and imaginative possibilities 23
- The bell jar, the maze and the mural 47
- Iconicity as meaning miming meaning and meaning miming form 73
- A view from the margins 101
-
Part II. Visual iconicity
- Iconic and indexical elements in Italian Futurist poetry 129
- Taking a line for a walk 157
- Iconicity and naming in E. E. Cummings’s poetry 179
- Bunyan and the physiognomy of the Wor(l)d 193
- From icon to index and back 211
- The poem as icon of the painting 225
-
Part III. Iconicity and historical change
- Iconicity and etymology 243
- Iconicity typological and theological 259
- An iconic, analogical approach to grammaticalization 279
-
Part IV. Iconicity and positionality
- Iconic signs, motivated semantic networks, and the nature of conceptualization 301
- Iconicity and subjectivisation in the English NP 319
- Metrical inversion and enjambment in the context of syntactic and morphological structures 347
-
Part V. Iconicity and translation
- Translation, iconicity, and dialogism 367
- Iconicity and developments in translation studies 387
- Author index 413
- Subject index 417
