Likenesses

Translation, Illustration, Interpretation

Matthew Reynolds

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351560139
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Idiomas

Translation, illustration and interpretation have at least two things in common. They all begin when sense is made in the act of reading: that is where illustrative images and explanatory words begin to form. And they all ask to be understood in relation to the works from which they have arisen: reading them is a matter of reading readings. Likenesses explores this palimpsestic realm, with examples from Dante to the contemporary sculptor Rachel Whiteread. The complexities that emerge are different from Empsonian ambiguity or de Man's unknowable infinity of signification: here, meaning dawns and fades as the hologrammic text is filled out and flattened by successive encounters. Since all literature and art is palimpsestic to some degree - Reynolds proposes - this style of interpretation can become a tactic for criticism in general. Critics need both to indulge and to distrust the metamorphic power of their interpreting imaginations. Likenesses follows on from the argument of Reynolds's The Poetry of Translation (2011), extending it through other translations and beyond them into a wide range of layered texts. Browning emerges as a key figure because his poems laminate languages, places, times and modes of utterance with such compelling energy. There are also substantial, innovative accounts of Dryden, Stubbs, Goya, Turner, Tennyson, Ungaretti and many more.

Part I
Introduction

Essay 1
Illustrations, Translations, and Interpretations

Illustrations of Tennyson, a book by John Churton Collins published in 1891, contains no pictures. It does not illustrate Tennyson in the usual way of volumes like The Doré Gift Book of Illustrations to Tennyson's Idylls of the King (1878). Rather, Collins's 'illustrations' are quotations from written texts to which he thinks Tennyson's poetry is indebted. By displaying them, he will 'illustrate' the poetry in the sense of casting light on its 'esoteric' side, its 'niceties of adaptation, allusion, and expression'.¹ Back in the Renaissance, editions of the classics had often used the word 'illustrated' in the sense of 'annotated': by making his own esoteric allusion to titles such as Virgilius Collatione Scriptorum Graecorum Illustratus, Collins was framing the Tennyson book as part of his campaign to define the new university study of English literature as, not only scholarly, but also comparative.² The texts he takes as illustrations are correspondingly multilingual: Latin, Greek, Italian, French and German, as well as English; for a proper understanding of English literature — he thought — requires an awareness of its continuities with writing in the classics and other modern languages (this is a point that still needs affirming today). But his title also takes for granted that there is a kinship between the kind of illumination that can be brought to a text by a visual illustration and the kind that comes with the discovery of a verbal analogue or source.

As of course there is, at least in the sense that both can contribute to the work of imagination and elaboration that happens when a text is read, responded to, and thought about. Collins quotes a line from 'Locksley Hall' — 'A sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier things' — and remarks that it 'is, of course, Dante's — Nessun maggior dolore/Che ricordarsi del tempo felice/Nella miseria (Inferno, v. 121—23)'. He then lists other echoes of Dante's line, in Chaucer, 'Occleve' (Hoccleve) and 'Fortiguerra' (the Italian eighteenth-century priest and poet Niccolò Forteguerri), together with antecedents in Boethius, Pindar and Thucydides.³ This proliferative verbal illustration separates the single line of Tennyson from the text in which it appeared and inserts it into a different one, rather as a caption might extract a name or phrase and attach it to a visual illustration. In 'Locksley Hall', the line is part of a surge of distraught rumination, where it is flagged as a reference to a 'poet', in fact 'the poet' — but not to Dante:

Where is comfort? In division of the records of the mind?
Can I part her from herself, and love her, as I knew her, kind?

I remember one that perished: sweetly did she speak and move:
Such a one do I remember, whom to look at was to love.
Can I think of her as dead, and love her for the love she bore?
No — she never loved me truly: love is love for evermore.
Comfort? Comfort scorned of devils! This is truth the poet sings,
That a sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier things.⁴

The protagonist's thoughts are caught in a compulsive rhythm of question and answer which makes them hopscotch around the woman who is their object. If he were to say, not 'the poet sings', but 'that Dante sings', he would achieve a momentary focus on something other than his own troubles. As it is, he is so absorbed in them that the 'truth' he remembers seems to arrive from a generalised, authoritative elsewhere, catapulted into his mind by his unstoppable machine of thought. As though short-circuited in its struggle between remembering and not remembering his lost love, his mind retrieves a memory of something else — an apothegm against remembering.

So Collins's 'illustration' breaks into the narrow channel of the protagonist's ratiocination. It opens a different dimension of textuality, one which the protagonist himself has both gestured towards and, in so doing, turned away from. Collins says that Tennyson's line 'is' Dante's; but in fact it both is and is not, and the illustration's value lies as much in its contrast to Tennyson's poem as in its harmony with it. One can see the nature of the protagonist's gesture more clearly if one knows what he is shutting out: it would be different if 'the poet' were fictional, for instance. We are also led to wonder about latent points of relevance which the protagonist might deny but which may have helped the line to appear in Tennyson's mind as it imagined his mind. Does his grief at his own abandonment grow the sharper by contrast with Francesca, the imagined speaker of Dante's lines, since she is in the company of her beloved for eternity? Should we notice that she goes on to do what she says will cause such sorrow, and remember happy times, whereas he does not? How far should we think of his state as being like the Hell that she is in? Is it the fierceness of his pain or a disposition to self-dramatise that makes him intensify her 'nessun maggior dolore' ('no greater grief') to 'a sorrow's crown of sorrows' with its further echo of the crown of thorns? These are not questions that can be answered: the effect of Collins's illustration is to create a connection from which they arise, allowing them to be weighed as part of the activity of interpretation.

The same is true of visual illustrations. Take Millais's painting 'Mariana' (figure 1.1), which was flagged as an illustration of Tennyson's poem of the same name not only by its title but by the fact that, when it was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1851, it was accompanied by a transcription of the poem's refrain:

She only said, 'My life is dreary,
He cometh not,' she said;
She said, 'I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!⁵

The lines seem chosen to cause puzzlement about the painting's relation to the poem, for Millais's Mariana is quite clearly not saying anything. Almost everything else that is mentioned in Tennyson's poem does not appear in Millais's painting either: there is no 'blackest moss', nor 'rusted nails', nor 'broken sheds', nor 'clinking latch'; no 'flitting bats', no 'glooming flats', no 'moon', no 'clock'. There is a 'casement', but it has no 'curtain'; there is a mouse, but it does not peer 'from a crevice', instead scurrying in full view; there appears to be a 'bed' at the back, but it is hard to see how the 'shadow' of a 'poplar' could fall upon it since the tree that crowds the window seems from its leaves to be a sycamore (rather, it is her shadow that extends towards the bed). And, with further contrariety, the painting is crammed with details which not only do not figure in the poem but feel at odds with it: the sumptuous wall decoration, the stained glass, the rich blue velvet dress. In Tennyson's text, Mariana herself is not explicitly described. We are told what she says, and a bit of what she does, but nothing at all of what she looks like: her mood is suggested by the description of the house, the landscape around, the shifts of light, the wooing of the wind, and the sounds that come to her such as the sparrow's chirrup on the roof and the blue fly's song (perhaps this is the incongruous origin of her blue dress?)

By giving body to the bodiless, Millais's 'Mariana' fills a marked and haunting absence, one that was so powerful that in fact Tennyson himself seems to have felt compelled to do something of the same. When, after a year or two (but still two decades before Millais's painting), he wrote a second poem, 'Mariana in the South', he gave the transplanted Mariana 'streaming curls of deepest brown', 'melancholy eyes divine', and a 'form ... That won his praises night and morn'.⁶ Millais continues this process of compensatory response: the little triptych altar in the background appears to derive from the second Mariana's 'secret shrine.'⁷ The disparities between his work and Tennyson's are, then, not mere differences but significant ones: they embody a process of interpretation and response, and so can nourish the interpretation done by other readers. Just like Collins's verbal illustration, this visual one is as suggestive in its differences from the source as in its similarities. It argues that Tennyson's descriptions are symbolic and that if Mariana is to be re-imagined in the realist mode of Millais's painting then quite different elements are going to have to be brought in. Tennyson shows a landscape of the mind; Millais shows the person whose thoughts (but not her actual environment) might be represented by Tennyson's words. This is why her mouth stays closed while Tennyson's Mariana speaks. And, again just like the Collins, Millais's illustration pulls in further strands of textuality. The Annunciation in the stained glass, the other religious image in the little triptych which, though invisible, seems likely to be either a Crucifixion or an Assumption of the Virgin — these elements sketch Christian narratives which, though left unmentioned in Tennyson's poem, may still be felt to bear upon it.

Millais's 'Mariana' is an unusual illustration. A painting by a major artist, exhibited in a gallery, accompanied by only a snippet of source text, it has more of its own identity than printed illustrations that are bound up with the poetry in mechanically reproduced books. And yet, they too share the traits I have described in the Millais, though perhaps to a less commanding degree. They introduce significant differences from the source which can be as interpretively nourishing as the similarities; and they bring with them new filaments of intertextual connection. For instance, a more ordinary illustration of 'Mariana' was done by W. E. F. Britten for another Churton Collins volume, The Early Poems of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, edited with a Critical Introduction, Commentaries and Notes (Figure 1. 2). It has fewer enumerable differences than the Millais (for instance, the casement has a curtain, and the tree could well be a poplar) and its monochrome tonality and dreary look might seem more in keeping with Tennyson's poem. Yet this bodily visualisation of Tennyson's mindscape inevitably introduces something new simply by showing what Mariana looks like; and it strikes me as having a note of sentimentality which is foreign to the poem, where Mariana's dreariness is described with great imaginative vivacity. The style of the image connects it to Britten's illustrations to the fairy story The Elf-Errant by 'Moira O'Neill' (1895), and other work in a similar vein: in consequence, his Mariana looks a bit like a fairy who has lost her magic.⁸ As E. H. Gombrich pointed out some decades ago, a visual illustration cannot but introduce information that is not in its written source; and as J. Hillis Miller has added more recently, the same is true of verbal illustrations: 'each sign, whether graphic or verbal, brings something of its own into the light.'⁹

In following Miller and emphasising the similarities between verbal and visual illustration, I might be thought to be scanting the distinctiveness of visual images. Richard Wollheim has denounced arguments that 'assimilate pictorial meaning to something very different, which is linguistic meaning' and a similar stance has been adopted by James Elkins, for whom pictures, by contrast with 'writing' are 'stubbornly illegible, weirdly silent, "meaningless" artifacts where all our best attempts at understanding fall apart'.¹⁰ In Essay 5 below, I discuss another adherent to this view, T. J. Clark, for whom encounters with paintings offer a way of resisting the coercive encroachments of 'verbal discourse' with its 'quick tickets to meaning'.¹¹ The point to offer against these arguments is not that they are wrong about visual images, but rather that they pay insufficient attention to the complexities of verbal language. Written texts too can be stubbornly illegible, weirdly silent, 'meaningless' artifacts where all our best attempts at understanding fall apart.

For instance, you might say about the Millais painting that, by showing Mariana's body in such patient detail, it attends to the irreducible particularity of her existence. That we can imagine our way into her stance but cannot know finally what it means: perhaps there is back-ache, or period pain, or sexual longing; and how much mental suffering is manifesting itself in this way, and of what kind?¹² That the work draws us into a rewarding process of interpretation while also respecting the final unknowability of any human being (I discuss the painting further in Essay 20 below). And you might then feel that, when you glance at the lines that serve as caption, you are being given what is comparatively a rather quick ticket to meaning:

She only said, 'My life is dreary,
He cometh not,' she said;
She said, 'I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!'

Yet, if you dwell on these words with the same attention as you have given to the painting, a final indeterminacy emerges here too. She might speak in any one of an infinity of gradations of tone — impatient, resigned, suicidal — and the timbre of her weariness, the meaning of 'dreary', the strength of her wish to be dead will vary accordingly. This is partly because writing, like painting, is silent, and so leaves space for the utterance to be imagined in greater fullness; and partly because verbal language has vast stretches of what Elkins, following Mieke Bal, calls the 'subsemiotic', no less than visual images do.¹³ Rhythm, rhyme and all the other aspects of verbal arrangement can suggest meaning but, as with tones of voice, they are uncoded —just like the details of brushwork or tonality of colour. So, in 'Mariana', it feels odd that her melancholy utterance is represented in the jaunty medium of a ballad stanza, with 'aweary' echoing happier forms like 'a-maying': this piece of subsemiotic texture could give rise to any number of interpretive conclusions.

If, having given your imagination over to exploring the ambiguities of the lines of verse, you then turn back to the Millais, you might well find that it is the painting that now seems to give the quicker ticket to meaning and shows you more straightforwardly what her weariness is like. But when you give your imagination once again to the painting, the illusion of straightforwardness will disappear. What appears to be a conceptual opposition between the 'visual' and the 'verbal' is sometimes no more than a rhetorical contrast between a compl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Illustrations
• PART I: INTRODUCTION
• PART II: THE VERBAL AND THE VISUAL: ALLUSION, REITERATION, TEXTUALITY AND PAINT
• PART III: TRANSLATIONS: CROSSING PLACES
• PART IV: COPIES, COMMODITIES AND RECOLLECTIONS
• Works Cited
• Index