Because literature consists of conventional symbols, there exists in literature the problem of translation, which does not exist in the other arts. When one seeks to make a work of literature available to a wider audience than that composed of only the native speakers of the language in which the work was written, the process of translation must be resorted to, and, in this process, a great deal of the work’s original character is lost.
In a poem there are (1) the sounds, (2) the dictionary meanings of the words, and (3) the connotations of the words—the manifold associations that they evoke (sensory, intellectual, and emotional) in the minds of readers. The sounds are the least important of the three, and many a great poem as sheer sound is hardly even pleasing. The finding of like dictionary meanings is usually a simple matter, and when there is a word that has no rough equivalent in the other language, it may be simply retained in the original language (for example, the German word Weltanschauung, meaning something like “world outlook,” is often retained in English translations of German works). As for the associations that hover about a word, they may vary from language to language, so that if a work is translated rather literally, the associative values of the words are lost. Thus, “My God!” is a much stronger expletive in English than “Mon Dieu” is in French, so that if the French expression is translated into the English one, it is, though literally correct, quite unfaithful to the weaker emotive force of the French expression. Words can often be found in the second language that have a roughly equivalent associative value to the original one, but these will usually not provide a literal translation; thus, the translator is faced with the dilemma of being able to provide a literal-meaning translation or a translation that renders the spirit or “feel” of the original but not both. The question of correspondence to actuality
The arts also differ from one another, according to their mediums, in whether the items in the medium correspond to items in the world. Objects with colours and shapes are represented on canvas, and objects with colours and shapes also exist in the outside world. Even when a painting is nonrepresentational, it consists of colours and shapes, which are items in the outside world (even though certain individual colours and shapes in the painting may not exist in the outside world). But the case with music is different: though the visual arts may (to varying degrees) convey the sights of nature, music generally does not convey the actual sounds of nature. Even when a work of music attempts to represent the sound of an iron foundry or the clattering of horses’ hooves, it really does not sound like these things: musical instruments emit tones, and in nature are found largely noises, and between the two there is an enormous auditory difference. Some rhythms of nature can be duplicated by musical instruments but hardly the sounds themselves.
The medium of literature, words, is indeed human-created, but of course this feature is far from unique to literature. Words were devised and employed in countless situations of daily life before they were ever embodied in literature, so in literature, as in visual art, a medium is being employed that existed before the art itself. Art as imitation (representation)
The view that “art is imitation” is at least as old as the Greek philosopher Plato (c. 428–c. 347 bce), and, although not widely held today, its long and distinguished history is evidence of its continuing hold on human beings as an account of the distinctive function of art. A terminological point, however, is in order here: in the interests of clarity, artists should be spoken of as representing in their work the persons and things and scenes of the world but as imitating the work of other artists. Thus, “In this painting the artist represents a barn and some wheat fields, and the artist’s style is imitative of Vincent van Gogh.” This distinction will be employed here, with the result that these traditional theories of art will be spoken of as theories of representation rather than of imitation.
PlatoPlato, marble portrait bust, from an original of the 4th century bce; in the Capitoline Museums, Rome.G. Dagli Orti—DeA Picture Library/Learning Pictures
At some period in the history of art, aestheticians and critics wrote as if nature should be recorded by the artist with photographic fidelity. The invention of photography (which can do this better than any painter) could plausibly be said to have relieved the artist of any such responsibility. Still, art can represent reality: the representation of a house in a painting may not look exactly like a house—it cannot, since the real house is three-dimensional and the painting is two-dimensional—but it looks enough like one to enable everyone unhesitatingly to identify it as a house.
A distinction should be made between depiction and portrayal. A painting may be said to depict a house if it looks more like a house than like anything else. Thus, most persons unhesitatingly classify this as a woman, that as a tree, and so on; only when the painter has distorted or abstracted so much that a thing looks somewhat like a wolf and also somewhat like a bobcat do they hesitate in saying what the object represented is. A picture may depict a rather short man in a French general’s uniform of the early 19th century, but it may in addition portray Napoleon. It portrays Napoleon if (1) the artist intended it to represent Napoleon (for example, if the title of the painting is Napoleon) and (2) the painting does look like Napoleon to some degree at least—at any rate it contains no important characteristics known to be incompatible with those of Napoleon. Clearly, if it is a painting that depicts a tree in someone’s yard, it cannot be considered a portrait of Napoleon, no matter how much the artist intended it to be one. Depiction subjects can ordinarily be recognized at once with a little knowledge of the world and the names of the things in it. Portrayal subjects require knowledge of whomever the artist intended to portray; even when that seems obvious, as in the case of Napoleon (who would be instantly recognized, unlike the portrait of a private in his army), the viewer would have to be told, by the title or otherwise, that not only does the painting depict a man in a French general’s uniform but that it was intended by the artist to be a portrait of this particular man. Otherwise, how would the viewer know that it did not actually portray his double or his stand-in? The word represent, as used in connection with art, can mean either “depict” or “portray.” Analysis of representation
Representation always involves a certain degree of abstraction—that is, the taking away of one characteristic or more of the original. Even a fairly realistic painting of a person, for example, lacks some features that characterize actual persons: a painting is two-dimensional, whereas every actual person is three-dimensional; the surface of a painting is paint, but not so the person; actual persons have very numerous pores and other marks on their faces that are lacking (in whole or in part) in a painting, and so on. The depiction of a person in a painting is usually sufficient to enable human viewers to recognize the figure as a person—though it is apparently not sufficient for most animals, who see only a coloured canvas where people see on the coloured canvas a representation. When the degree of abstraction is so great that it is no longer possible to recognize this shape as a human shape or as the shape of any identifiable object, the painting is then spoken of as non-representational. (In popular parlance such paintings are called abstract, but this is misleading, for abstraction is a matter of degree, and, as has just been shown, all depictions are necessarily abstract—that is, abstracted from reality to some degree.) The actual object with all its millions of qualities is at one end of the spectrum, and the painting so abstracted that a depiction subject is unrecognizable is at the other end; between the two extremes lie all the possible degrees of abstraction.