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Authors
Advisor(s)
Abstract(s)
The intertwining of languages, such as writing and visual expression, can enrich
our understanding of the translation process and also its limits and obscure areas – the
untranslatable. Visual art can therefore become a fruitful resource for an inquiry into
translation. Accordingly, an artist like Cy Twombly, one of the most literary visual artists,
can provide clues about the enigmas of translation or at least attempt to uncover them in
the form of images. Twombly includes words and phrases in his paintings with various
degrees of legibility from a great diversity of writers, along with spots and scribbles that
are not part of any code. All of this reveals a way of evoking texts and stories covering a
wide range of different cultural groups although predominantly classic.
The poet Octavio Paz recognized in Twombly the attributes of a “universal translator”.
It is also this path that we will explore and put to test in Twombly’s work but just to a
certain extent, in which the search for universality becomes a myth, impossibility, or
incomprehension. As Ricoeur says in his study on translation “we know that no universal
language can be able to reconstruct its undefined diversity” (Ricouer 2005, 45).
Twombly’s poetic dimension is probably not universal from the point of view of
a perfect language but through the vagueness of the writing in his paintings, which
leaves room for imagination and challenges the translation process. “Poetry, and not just
poetry, but nature - seasons, vegetation - all of this is transformed, translated into image”
(Paz 1995, 182).
Description
Keywords
Writing Twombly, Cy (1928-2011) Image Translator Visual arts
Citation
Monteiro, L. (2022, spring). Figuring out the untranslatable: traces of Twombly. Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, 45(1), 131-139. http://jcla.in/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/JCLA-45.1-Spring-2022_Luis-Monteiro.pdf