Literary ekphrasis

Mais do que tratar de um autor ou de uma obra, este livro ocupa-se de um
conceito, de uma ideia que perpassa autores, obras, gêneros e artes. Tem por objetivo considerar diacronicamente práticas imagéticas verbais e não verbais, ou seja, representações discursivas e iconográficas, ocorridas na Antiguidade clássica, atestando por conseguinte as possíveis homologias entre estas – quando e se existentes. Logo, pictura loquens (pintura que fala) refere-se à prática discursiva que oferece aos olhos da mente visualidades, pintura imaterial. E poesis tacens (poesia silente) opera a prática plástico-pictórica cuja principal característica é ser muda, mas sem nunca deixar de flertar com o discurso, já que podemos observá-la de acordo com as categorias poéticas, assim como fizeram Simônides, Aristóteles, Horácio, Cícero, Quintiliano, Plutarco, os Filóstratos, Calístrato, entre outros.

The notion of interart translation is one that has hereto received very little academic attention. This may stem from the inherent danger of essentialising artistic qualities and assuming the presence of equivalences of particular themes and motifs within and across art forms/mediums that may be latent in this term. Here emerges the importance of ekphrasis as a middle ground or a stepping stone through which interart translation can function. Ekphrasis basically denotes the vivid description of a piece of visual art, real or imaginary, in a form of writing, thus the transformation of the visual into the verbal. But when can an ekphrasis abandon the confines of this description and become an independent translation of this work of art? This study aims to explore the possibilities, dimensions and limitations of translating sculpture to poetry- through the analysis of texts translating the Giza Sphinx sculpture into poems. The hypothesis here is that ekphrasis is the route through which interart translation can be conducted, in the case of translating sculpture to poetry, a point not touched upon in academic research. The lack of any comprehensive study on interart translation, and in particular the translation of sculpture to poetry, engenders a great deal of possibilities and challenges in achieving this task. Theorists over the years have been aware of the importance of the term ekphrasis. They have redefined and reformulated it in ways that are put to use in this study’s exploration of the possibility of interart translation: a notion that is only approached at a distance and with great trepidation in studies of ekphrasis. In the analysed examples, it is shown how the writers, in their verbal/ekphrastic representations/translations of the sculpture, make up for the silence and the static nature of this work of visual art, enabling it to transcend its boundaries is diverse ways. The various filters applied by the writers, including cultural and ideological ones, shape the renditions/translation of the sculpture in aesthetically diverse ways. This analysis paves the way for further studies on the nature of interart translation and suggests the possibility of tracing this process in more theoretically rigourous ways.

Evliyâ Çelebi, who wrote accounts of his travels that lasted over forty years
(from the Aegean to the Sea of Azov, from the northern Black Sea steppe
to the upper Nile), was an enlightened Ottoman saraylı, a courtier as his
name çelebi indicates. Seyahatnâme (The Book of Travels), a ten-volume,
first-person
narrative, is one of the few accounts of the seventeenth-century
Ottoman world and its periphery from the perspective of a Muslim intellectual.
Robert Dankoff states, “The Book of Travels is a unique geographical,
social, cultural, and linguistic record of the places and peoples the author
encountered, and an invaluable source for many aspects of life in his time.”
Therefore, the work has been significant for a plethora of scholars from different
disciplines, such as historians, geographers, musicians, linguists, and
folklorists.

The subject of emotions in the scholarship on Cervantes is not new. The groundbreaking work done by Cervantistas such as Ruth El Saffar, (Critical and Quixotic ), Teresa Scott Soufas (Melancholy) and Steven Hutchinson (Cervantine) highlighted it as a path for further research, particularly in relation to Cervantine fictional characters:
Emotion is no doubt configured in many ways within the text, the most obvious of these being the representation of emotion in the characters. Characters respond to each other, and we respond to them, but not always in predictable ways […] Such diversity of response was always anticipated, of course, as when the friend in the Prologue to Part I of Don Quixote takes into account a variety of different temperaments and advises the authorial figure. (Hutchinson, “Affective” 78)
Such an outlook proved to be specially fruitful when reading Don Quixote because it allowed the development of important scholarship that later would address the question on how the production of knowledge at the time would impact Cervantes’s takes on states of mind and emotions.  Moreover, the scholarship of the last ten years on the subject of states of minds in Don Quixote have shown the need to incorporate a cognitive approach to the study of Cervantes’s texts. As a result, cognitive literary studies to study Don Quixote is no longer a new but a fertile field. 
Nonetheless, when reading the cave of Montesinos episode in Don Quixote, little attention has been paid to Don Quixote’s use of emotive language, in spite of the fact that in order to tell Sancho and Basilio’s cousin what happened to him inside of the cave, Don Quixote uses a language that is both emotive and therefore ekphrastic.  This language can be identified as an ekphrasis, since in its original meaning, ekphrasis is a rethorical device, one that applies to the description of an object of visual art, as well as to any literary or visual description that brings in vivid detail the experience of a person, a place, or a thing to an audience (Welsh “Ekphrasis”).  And that is exactly what Don Quixote does in his recounting of the events after leaving the cave when after having been brought to the surface by Sancho and the cousin and requested to describe what he saw inside, he exclaims, “ Dios os lo perdone, amigos, que me habéis quitado de la más sabrosa y agradable vida y vista que ningún humano ha visto ni pasado” (552).
This essay studies Don Quixote’s ekphrastic speech to describe his experience in the cave to point out its role as a “metafictional discourse of the narrative,” one that “serves to distance the reader from the fictive world in order to create a sense of aesthetic detachment from the text” (Williamsen 109), a cervantine feature that Amy Williamsen was the first to identify and analyse as the key element to distinguish Cervantes’s Persiles from the early modern Romance tradition in her study of the novel. The aim of this essay is to show how this metafictional feature, when is applied to this episode, allows the reader to understand Don Quixote’s narrative about “El palacio de cristal” and “el corazón de Durandarte” as one of displaced objects that Cervantes selects from literary tradition, in order to reshape and reinsert them—and in the process, to demystify two of that tradition’s richest topoi—to engage issues of poetics, emotions and language in the Quixote’s distinctive discursive space.