| Abstract [eng] |
This paper demonstrates how intersemiotic translation functions as a mechanism for generating meaning in the work of the contemporary Latvian poet Artis Ostups. The concept of intersemiotic translation was first introduced by Roman Jakobson and nowadays refers to translation between different sign systems. The paper draws on contemporary Tartu School of translation semiotics, Juri Lotman’s cultural semiotics, Anton Popovič’s model of literary communication, Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis, and the aesthetics of surrealism. To demonstrate the meaning created by the relationship between the translation of different semiotic languages (verbal and photographic) into one another, two works are analysed: the long poem “Three Photographs” and poem “Marcel Lefrancq, Prison Harmonieuse, 1938.” “Three Photographs” consists of childhood photographs of three writers: Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, and Artis Ostups, and of written verbal text. The three main gazes (points of view) in the long poem are those of the photographer, the subject of enunciation interpreting the photographs, and the reader of the long poem. The photographer’s gaze, by transforming the reality of the world into the reality of the photograph, constructs a view and creates an image of the subject according to prevailing cultural norms. The subject of enunciation, who reads and interprets the photographs, sees in them not only the figures depicted but also what falls within the same cultural semiosphere. By viewing the juxtaposed photographs of three different writers, the reader of the long poem is allowed to form the impression that they belong to the same literary canon, the foundation of which is potentially surrealist. In “Marcel Lefrancq, Prison Harmonieuse, 1938”, the photograph functions virtually, with the title specifying the exact photograph by the Belgian surrealist photographer. Based on the opposites at work in psychoanalysis, the concreteness of visual dreams and the abstractness of the free association method that interprets them through words, one can describe the translation that takes place in Ostups’ poem as a written version of Lefrancq’s photograph. The invariants of the photograph (the anticipated observer/subject of enunciation, the severed head, the shoe, the bars) recur in the poem. The variants that appear in the poem (which, according to Freud’s method of dream analysis, arose through associations or hidden meanings) are perceived as a transposition of the photograph into text. The analysis shows that photographs, both physically present and virtually existing, acquire a poetic function and become an integral part of the poetic text. Not only are the meanings of the figures within them translated, but also the cultural memory that “enters” the photograph due to the viewer’s existing knowledge. |
