From painting to novel: Claude Simon’s Triptych

ABSTRACT

The concept of transposition from one artistic medium to another is situated at the intersection of several different disciplines such as adaptation studies, translation studies, intermedia studies, and comparative literature. An example of a less common transposition, painting-to-novel intermedia translation, is examined in Claude Simon’s novel Triptych. The role of intermedia translation in this Nouveau Roman novel is described through the hermeneutical and dialogical lenses, two approaches already fruitfully applied in translation studies. This article argues that, first, the transfer of painting to novel in Triptych is an example of intermedia translation and that it may be studied by using translation studies approaches; second, that only by recognizing the use of intermedia translation in Simon’s work one is able to fully understand his artistic practice; and third, that, in turn, translation studies can benefit from expanding its traditional scope by taking into account non-interlingual transfers such as intermedia translation.

KEYWORDS:

• Intermedia translation
• Claude Simon
• Nouveau Roman
• Triptych
• Francis Bacon

Introduction

The history of studying interrelations between the arts is indeed very rich. It goes back to ancient Greece and Rome where a rhetorical exercise of describing a work of art was called ekphrasis, i.e. “a speech that brings the subject matter vividly before the eyes” (Webb 2009, 1). In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the ability of one art to represent the other stimulated a long chain of critical reflection (for an overview, see Lee 1940) culminating in Gotthold Lessing’s influential discussion of the fundamental differences between poetry and painting, entitled Laocoon or the Limits of Poetry and Painting in 1766.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the practice of transfers between arts became very popular, especially in the context of Modernist and avant-garde art. Not only were different artists well acquainted with each other’s creativity but were also influenced by practices and aesthetic principles of other arts (see Sweet 2003; Goddard 2012). With the advent of the filmic medium and, consequently, the field of adaptation studies, the openness toward other arts and the different channels they use to convey meaning continued into the second half of the twentieth century. In France, two important movements, the Nouveau Roman and the Nouvelle Vague, were boldly probing into other aesthetic practices and questioning the limits of different arts from the 1950s well into the 1970s seventies and 1980s.

Before the twentieth century, the study of transpositions between different arts was mostly in the domain of comparative literature and as such generally limited to discussions about ontological differences and similarities between literature and visual arts. The situation gradually changed when this topic became the subject of research in several different disciplines such as adaptation, translation, or intermedia studies. What all those disciplines have in common is the interest in transfers across different borders, whether it be between languages, cultures or media. Despite that common ground, the phenomenon of transposition from one art form to another still lacks an inclusive theoretical framework, especially in the case of image-text relations, which have usually been left out of the more theoretically rigorous discourses. It is argued that this type of transposition between different arts can be explained in the same way that translation studies explains shifts between different languages.

This article will first try to provide a working definition of transfers across different arts and media. Next, two methodological approaches to studying intermedia translation – a hermeneutical and a dialogical – will be introduced. These approaches have already been successfully applied to translation studies research; for example, Lawrence Venuti (2012) used hermeneutics in researching Jerome’s translations, while Amith Kumar (2015) applied dialogical lens to the study of translations of Indian literature. The main part will examine an example of intermedia translation in a novel written by the Nobel prize winner Claude Simon who is known to have had a profound interest in visual arts, especially painting. He made it an integral part of his artistic practice, which will be briefly examined in the context of the Nouveau Roman movement. The case study of this article is Simon’s novel Triptych (Triptyque, 1973; English translation 1976), which is said to be generated by several different paintings by three different artists, but due to space limitations I will concentrate on only one source painter, Francis Bacon. An excerpt from the book will be analysed and discussed further on.

The aim of this article is to show that, first, intermedia translation can be theorized through the approaches that have proven valuable for studying “translation proper” or interlingual translation, particularly the hermeneutical and dialogical approach. Second, it is argued that one can better understand Simon’s novel by recognizing the use of intermedia translation. Finally, it is shown that translation studies can benefit from broadening its perspective and taking into account other, non-linguistic translational practices.

Terminology and definitions

Adaptation (e.g. Hutcheon 2006), remediation (e.g. Rajewsky 2005), intersemiotic (e.g. Jakobson 1959), intermedia (e.g. Elleström 2021) or interarts (e.g. Clüver 2007) translation … The field of research dealing with transfers between different arts is conceptually and terminologically messy. In some cases, the concepts overlap; however, in general, the use of specific terminology depends on the discipline. As Irina O. Rajewsky (2005, 45) observes, the current state of proliferation of different conceptions of this specific subject phenomenon may be rewarding, but it also leads to vagueness and misunderstanding, which means that it is important to define one’s particular understanding of the concept precisely before embarking on any kind of research in this field.

Throughout this article, I will mostly use the term “intermedia translation”. The concept of “intermediality” has been used with increasing frequency over the past few decades and has offered new critical perspectives and methodological developments to help us understand very different phenomena in both traditional and less conventional forms of communication, such as arts and multimedia (see Glaser 2009; Clüver 2019). The use of the term “medium” (which can denote a specific art form, some other channel of communication, or the material out of which these art forms are constituted [Glaser 2009, 20–21]) allows us to bypass the distinction between art and non-art or low art, as well as to distinguish more accurately between “media products” (e.g. a specific work of art) and “qualified media” (such as painting, music, television programs and other “general” media which are mostly historically predisposed) (see Elleström 2021). Nevertheless, it is important to underline that the term “medium” within intermedia studies still mostly denotes a work of art (Clüver 2007, 20). Here, the term “intermedia” can be synonymous with “intersemiotic” and “interarts”. The latter term used to be current in the so-called “interarts studies”, which changed its name to “intermedia studies” a few decades ago and has since already been institutionalized (see Clüver 2007). Interarts studies was one of the first fields to focus more rigorously on the transfers between literature and painting, whereas adaptation studies was mostly limited to novel-to-film exchanges (in this regard, Hutcheon [2006] and Krebs [2012] are notable exceptions).

However, it is important to note that there exist several different types of media relations. In fact, Claus Clüver (2007, 32) distinguishes between three types: (1) general relations among the media, (2) the combination (fusion) of media, and (3) transformations from one medium to another, and the latter will be the subject of this article. According to Lars Elleström (2021, 79–80), that kind of transformation or transmediation “generally involves the idea that different media products (belonging to the same or dissimilar media types) may trigger the same or similar cognitive import”, and that this cognitive import “can be transferred among similar or different kinds of media”. Given the cross-modal capacities of the brain, transfers over media borders are, to some extent, possible, common, and indeed productive (82–83).

Drawing on the contributions of different fields (especially adaptation, translation, and intermedia studies), the concept of intermedia translation in this article refers both to the process of transposition and the final product (see Hutcheon 2006, 7; Glaser 2009, 20), and can include more than one source or target text, where the term “text” refers to different semiotic systems and does not necessarily denote only linguistic texts.

Finally, the choice of the term “translation” comes from the recognition of various contributions and insights from translation studies, which was the field that has rigorously theorized interlingual and intercultural exchanges. With the advent of multimedia in the last few decades, the scope of translation studies research has gradually started to include other kinds of various non-linguistic transfers (see Gambier and Gottlieb 2001). Nevertheless, some researchers (e.g. Bassnett and Johnston 2019) argue that there is still much to be done. If anything, translation studies is “an increasingly open discipline that […] both offers and traffics in key concepts rooted in the discourse of difference, simultaneity, contingency, mobility and hospitality” (181) and should as such extend the scope of its enquiry and insights to other adjacent fields.

In that sense, “translation” can be used as a hypernym for all kinds of different transfers, interlingual or intermedia. Nevertheless, since this article deals with intermediality, the term will mostly denote transpositions between the medium of painting and the medium of literature.

Theoretical and methodological framework

Hermeneutical approach

The linguist Roman Jakobson was one of the first to acknowledge “intersemiotic translation” (or “an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems” [1959, 233]) as a part of translation studies and at the same time underlined the role of translator as interpreter of the message (233–234). This thought resonates heavily in the branch of philosophy called philosophical hermeneutics that refers to the theory and practice of comprehension (one of its main thinkers being Martin Heidegger’s disciple Hans-Georg Gadamer). As Radegundis Stolze (2017, 31) put it, hermeneutics does not, however, explain how we understand, or what we understand, but rather asks about the conditions of understanding and the personal act of comprehension. Considering that translation studies is mainly concerned with all kinds of texts (linguistic and non-linguistic), the hermeneutical approach turns out to be relevant for this area of research. Since the pioneering writings of the Protestant scholar Friedrich Schleiermacher in the nineteenth century, many contemporary researchers have underlined the value of the hermeneutical model for the practice of translation (Steiner 1975; Venuti 2012; Stolze 2010, 2017; Stefanink and Bălăcescu 2017). For Stolze, the relevance of the hermeneutical method for translation lies in the fact that it shifts the focus from translation to translator as an individual human being “having gathered their own culture and an awareness of the other culture or scientific domain” (2010, 144). Translation is thus “a deeply subjective phenomenon” (Stolze 2017, 31), and hermeneutics helps translators to be aware of their own historical context, engagement with the text, and their process of understanding. This, on the other hand, allows for a more conscious way of approaching the practice of translation, which, in that sense, is viewed as a dynamic and dialectical process; it has an effect on the person translating/reading, it enlarges their horizons, and makes them grow as a person (31).

Lawrence Venuti introduced the notion of “interpretant”, taken from the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce, to the translational theory. The interpretant “mediates between the source language and culture, on the one hand, and the translating language and culture, on the other, a method of choosing the source text and transforming it into the translation” (Venuti 2007, 31). The interpretants can be either formal (semantic correspondence, concepts of syntax, style etc.) or thematic (specific values, codes, ideologies and political positions). The translator’s application of interpretants is responsible for the recontextualisation of the source text because it replaces its intertextual relations with a receiving intertext (Venuti 2012, 497). Venuti was one of the first to apply the same methodology to the study of film adaptation in his seminal article “Adaptation, Translation, Critique” (2007). He argued that adaptation studies lacks rigorous methodology, and so adaptations have either been evaluated on the basis of their “fidelity” to the literary source, or (reversing the hierarchy) viewed primarily from an intertextual perspective without any critical reflection on the role of their prior materials. Venuti’s contribution has also underlined the role of the critic who, just like the reader, applies his or her own interpretants and fixes the meaning of an adaptation (or translation).

When there is a shift from one medium to another, the role of interpretation seems even more crucial. That is also one of the reasons why the hermeneutical approach was chosen in this research to study image-to-text transposition.

Dialogical approach

The hermeneutical approach to the study of intermedia translation, however, could be complemented by Bahktinian dialogism. Even though dialogism is considered to be one of his key concepts, Mikhail Bakhtin never once used this exact term, but, according to Michael Holquist (2002, 14), the term aptly describes different ways Bakhtin was reflecting on the notion of dialogue. With the use of the term “dialogism” we seem to suggest that things do not exist in themselves; they only obtain meaning in relation to other things. Even though Bakhtin developed the concepts of dialogism and polyphony mostly in relation to literature, the notion can be applied to the entire social world. In his seminal work Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, first published in 1929, he wrote: “I cannot manage without another, I cannot become myself without another; I must find myself in another by finding another in myself (in mutual reflection and mutual acceptance)” (1999, 287). Since dialogism recognizes plurality of perspectives and voices, it has already proven to be especially relevant for translation research. Kumar (2015, 18–19) argued that even though Bakhtin never wrote about translation, it is certainly appropriate to apply his principles to translation and cultural encounters since they are inevitably connected with the study of the self/other dynamics. In his opinion, the Bakhtinian approach is an innovative proposition for understanding translation, because the translator’s involves “entering a dialogic space, where the target text emerges from dialogue with both source language/culture and target language/culture” (9). Translator as a participant in the translation helps to make the text internally dialogized. Bakhtin’s notion of “active understanding” (as developed in the 1941 essay “Discourse in the Novel”) is where dialogism and hermeneutics meet and enrich each other:

Thus an active understanding, one that assimilates the word under consideration into a new conceptual system, that of the one striving to understand, establishes a series of complex interrelationships, consonances, and dissonances with the word and enriches it with new elements. […] [I]t is in this way, after all, that various different points of view, conceptual horizons, systems for providing expressive accents, various social “languages” come to interact with one another. (2008, 282)

As David Shepherd notes, this suggests that the meaning of a text changes as it is read in a new socially and historically situated context (1989, 99).

The understanding of Bakhtinian dialogism can similarly be extended and applied to the study of intermedia translation. In opposition to interlingual translation, it is possible and even quite common that the audience of intermedia translation is familiar with both source and target texts. The dialogical approach thus enables both the audience and the translator to appreciate the active interplay between artwork and its prior materials. Knowing that the product of intermedia translation shares borders with its source text(s) helps to explain the pleasure that the audience derives from this interrelationship, and those “shared borders also generate reading through similarities and differences (or similarities within differences) along those borders” (Cutchins 2014, 59). Similarly, in adaptation studies, Linda Hutcheon discussed “pleasure of replication” in relation to adaptations (2006, 114).

In the same manner as hermeneutics, the Bakhtinian approach eschews value judgments by focusing on dialogical interactions and on different ways these relationships actively generate meanings.

In the next sections, these two approaches are applied to the work of Claude Simon.

Claude Simon and the Nouveau Roman

French novelist and 1985 Nobel Laureate in literature, Claude Simon, was born in 1913 in Tananarive on the isle of Madagascar and died in 2005 in Paris. He grew up in Perpignan with his mother’s family, studied in Paris, Oxford and Cambridge, and travelled extensively. While his early novels were more or less traditional, he was soon associated with the Nouveau Roman movement with the publication of his two novels, Le Vent (1957) and L’Herbe (1958).

A group of writers, among them the authors such as Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor, and Marguerite Duras, under the name “the Nouveau Roman” appeared in the 1950s, stemming from the aesthetics of Modernist writers. Like many of the previous quarrels between the Ancients and the Moderns, it called into question the traditional prose modes and instead sought avenues of new fictional explorations. Their radical departure from the conventions of the nineteenth century realist novel consisted of rejecting traditional psychology, hero, plot, and omniscient narrator, which, according to the partisans of the movement, all create an illusion of order and significance (see Dugast-Portes 2001). Instead, the authors sought new ways to express the discontinuity and fragmentariness of the human experience, as well as the nature of the literary work itself in the so-called new novel.

According to the members of this movement, the concept of novel did not always suffice to convey the whole experience, and the authors began transgressing its borders and experimenting with other art forms, especially cinema and painting. It was certainly not uncommon for novelists to collaborate with artists from different fields or to engage in other arts, especially visual. The authors of the Nouveau Roman have, as stated by André Gardies, “a predilection for image – the eye has become the most important fiction organ” (1972, 190).¹ Indeed, the visual played an important role in the artistic practice of the Nouveau Roman; Alain Robbe-Grillet was himself a director and screenwriter, as was Marguerite Duras, while Claude Simon and Michel Butor were both very much interested in painting.

Although Simon adhered strongly to the Nouveau Roman movement and its aesthetics at the beginning of his artistic career, his novels have, in fact, more in common with his Modernist predecessors. Some of his reflections on art and its role reveal fundamental differences with his colleagues pertaining to the current of the Nouveau Roman. He gradually grew apart with some of them, especially Jean Ricardou, the “theoretician of the movement”. Despite Simon’s preoccupation with the technical aspects of his work, his goal was never, as he stated in one of his interviews, to completely sever the referential relationship between art and reality (Simon 1990). Simon was also always open about his lifelong interest in visual arts. Although he abandoned his early ambitions to become a painter (“Painting is what I love most in the world. I am a failed painter” [1969, 180]), he had among his friends and acquaintances numerous artists (his fifteen-year correspondence with painter Jean Dubuffet was published in 1994), published two volumes of photographs, and visual arts clearly played an important role in his own novelistic work.

Triptych

Triptych is Simon’s fourteenth novel and was published at Éditions de Minuit in 1973, the “house editor” of most of the Nouveau Roman authors. It is considered, along with some of his other works (like Femmes [1965], Les Corps Conducteurs [1971], or Orion Aveugle [1979]) a “visual novel”, that is, generated or stimulated by a series of paintings. It is argued in this article that Triptych is more than just “inspired” by paintings, but that the relationship between the novel and its prior materials is important for its understanding. Of all Simon’s texts owing their origins to works of visual art, Triptych has suffered the greatest critical neglect (Duffy 1998, 113). With the notable exception of Jean Duffy (1998) and Brigitte Ferrato-Combe (1998), no critic has seriously addressed the role of the pictorial stimuli in the novel.

Because I will be concentrating on intermedia translation, this article does not deal with Simon’s ekphrastic descriptions of works of art that can also be found in his work (such as various gravures, portraits, and other works of visual art) or points of similarity between him and other painters. Rather, I will be examining how art is used as a generator of internal composition, or, as Simon himself called it in a debate with Jean Alter (1972, 100–101), “a first excitant” (fr. “un excitant premier”). The author refused to use the word “model” since it implies the notion of mimetic copying. His goal was to achieve the same internal logic that can be found in painting, but by solely textual means (100–101). In the following sections, this technique of intermedia translation will be presented in more detail.

The composition of the novel

As in many of Simon’s works, the plot itself is not as important as its structural composition, therefore the novel is somewhat hard to summarize. Its title refers to the formal organization of Triptych, denoting three different, yet intertwined series happening in different settings: the rustic series about a child who drowns by accident, the suburban series about a failed wedding night, and the resort series about a mother who wants to help her son involved in a drug trafficking affair. Thematically, the series mostly have nothing in common but still remain connected by the reoccurrence of specific motifs (sexual act, film reel, camera, bodies of water, etc.), words (for example, the French word bassin, basin, is used fifteen times but changes its meaning depending on the context), or the use of colours and shapes (for example, the image of the man from the resort series, dressed in black and standing on a gaudy red hotel carpet, resembles the red black-dotted ladybug from the rustic series). The analogies, nevertheless, help to create the illusion of simultaneity of all three parts, which is a characteristic Simon attributed not only to pictorial art in general, but especially to religious triptychs, where the three wings represent three different scenes from the life of a saint but at the same time retain a certain unity (of theme and colour) and can be viewed simultaneously (Simon 1969; cited in Ferrato-Combe 1998, 110). For Simon, this pictorial unity also stems from the use of the same colours and geometrical shapes, which continually refer the viewer from one scene to another, something he consciously worked on while writing Triptych, as he stated at the Cerisy colloquium (Ricardou 1975).

The excitants

Even though paintings by Jean Dubuffet, Paul Delvaux, and Francis Bacon, which triggered the internal composition of each series, are not explicitly mentioned anywhere in the novel, Simon talked about the three painters and his novel on multiple occasions: in his interviews (e.g. Simon 1977, 53) or in his correspondence (Dubuffet and Simon 1994 cited in Duffy 1998, 115). Triptych is, in this regard, an intermedia translation with multiple source “texts”: the main stimulant (or excitant) behind the rustic series is Dubuffet’s The Rich Fruits of Error (Les Riches Fruits de l’Erreur, 1963), Delvaux’s The Mirage (Le Mirage, 1967) and Small Train Station at Night (Petit Train Gare au Nuit, 1959) shaped the suburban series, while Bacon’s triptych Three Studies for a Crucifixion (1962; image available at https://www.francis-bacon.com/artworks/paintings/three-studies-crucifixion) and Lying Figure (1969; image available at https://www.francis-bacon.com/artworks/paintings/lying-figure-6) played a major role in the construction of the resort part. At the same time, the triptych gave the novel its tripartite structure and the title (between 1944 and 1986, Bacon painted 28 known triptychs). Still, Simon adds in an interview with Claud Duverlie that “it is a bit unfair to Dubuffet, Delvaux, and Bacon to speak of one or two paintings, since the whole of their work has impressed me” (1977, 53).

Analysis

In this section, some illustrative examples of Simon’s intermedia translation taken from the beginning of the novel (pages 23–25 in the 1976 English translation) will be analysed and contextualized through the use of the chosen methodological approaches.

The resort series opens with a scene of a “pink-tinged naked body of a woman […] sprawled out on a rumpled bed, absolutely motionless except for the left hand and arm, which stir languidly from time to time” (Simon 1976, 23). She is lying in a hotel room, and the almost-three-pages long excerpt is a meticulous description of the lying body with a sudden change of scenery on page 25 when the novel jumps back to the rural series. This motif is transposed from the two source paintings Simon mentioned on several occasions, namely Bacon’s Three Studies for a Crucifixion (its central panel) and Lying Figure, where, in two instances, we see a shapeless (or “disarticulated, inanimate” [24]) body of a woman lying on a bed in an empty hotel room. There seems to be a formal correspondence especially with certain elements such as shapes, materials, patterns and colours, to which Simon pays very specific attention and transposes them from the visual medium of painting to descriptions in the verbal code (“mattress of a yellowish-brown color”, “the breasts with a light green shadow falling across them”, “the flabby flesh forming a contrast with the color and contours of the body”, “wrinkled sheet […] with narrow parallel stripes”, “dark rectangular patches” [24], etc.). Right from the beginning it seems that the two source paintings merged into one single verbal representation. In both cases, the woman’s body is painted in the same manner; it is flabby, “disarticulated” and “inanimate”, but the colour of the mattress in Simon’s description is taken from Lying figure as well as the position of the woman’s legs and the colour of her breasts with a light green shadow falling across them. In Venuti’s terminology (2007, 2012), this type of relation between source and target text would be an example of the application of a “formal interpretant”. Indeed, Bacon was known for his use of intensively vibrant colours of the bodies, which contrasted strongly with the simple, flat-colour backgrounds, especially in the two paintings mentioned.

Through his descriptive style and narrative use of perspective Simon is equally interested in spatial configurations, especially with human bodies and the space they occupy. In that sense, he does not enter into dialogue only with the two mentioned paintings, but, intertextually speaking, with Bacon’s work, which Simon knew and admired, in general. Bacon’s preoccupation with bodies painted in empty spaces such as cages, boxes, arenas or empty hotel rooms (e.g. Study for a Portrait VII [1953], Study for the Nurse from the Battleship Potemkin [1957] or Study of Red Pope [1962]) goes back to the beginnings of his creative career. In Bacon’s art (and especially in the two paintings mentioned) there is a strong contrast created by a vividly painted figure against a monochrome background which enhances the human form; this is a discreet part of a composition, changing the dynamic of the painting where, following Francesco Manacorda (2016), observing becomes almost “a voyeuristic act”. The notion of voyeurism is very much present in Triptych as well; it seems as if the eye of an anonymous narrator or even a film camera were observing the lying woman from a certain viewpoint in the room: one of her legs is in the vertical plane, the engravings on the wall stand out against the monotone background, from an angle we can see the cleft that separates the buttocks, while the depression of the navel is invisible in the foreshortened perspective (Simon 1976, 24). It is interesting to note here that voyeurism resonates in the works of other Nouveau Roman authors. Just like in Simon’s Triptych, Robbe-Grillet’s novels The Voyeur (Le Voyeur, 1955) and Jealousy (La Jalousie, 1957) seem to underline the Nouveau Roman aesthetics of describing only what can be perceived with the naked eye (as if it was, like a movie camera, only mechanically tracing the world around itself), while the temporal aspect of the scene is somehow omitted. Here, Simon’s own interpretative choices appear to be in accordance with the Nouveau Roman aesthetics.

Some critics – such as Ferrato-Combe (1998) and Duffy (1998) – saw Simon’s propensity for vivid, visually oriented descriptions not only in his admiration for visual arts or his allegiance to the Nouveau Roman aesthetics, but also in his interest in the role of embodied sensorial (especially visual) perception (see Panche 2015). Simon claimed in an interview that human beings can only experience the world through their own fragmentary perception:

It is absolutely impossible to know the external world, whether objects or other people, other than through the images it projects into us: visual images, like this blue stain that projects onto my retina, the pink stain of your dress, or emotional images. All we can write about is not the exterior world but its projection in us. (1969, 182)

In Simon’s work, description is generally the means through which the process of artistic defamiliarization (the term used by the Russian Formalist scholar Viktor Shklovsky whose works Simon knew and read; see Simon 1990) takes place; it does not contribute to the action in any relevant way but instead it prolongs the perception and conveys the visual impact (Duffy 1998, 20–21).

Both Simon and Bacon seem to be preoccupied not only with living bodies occupying space, but more specifically with the human and animal flesh. With his amorphous, shapeless nudes in various shades of pink, according to critics, Bacon is believed to have tried to capture its materiality; “paint becomes flesh in its color, texture, material density and fluidity – a vehicle that serves desire” (Hunter 1990, 37), and he could give it “a kind of creamy resonance, a fulfilled soft firmness, for which both Ingres and Courbet had also been searching” (Russell 1993, 75). In the excerpt from Triptych, the sensorial characteristics of human flesh are conveyed through vivid descriptions of different parts of the body, their colour, texture, shape, and position in space to create embodied sensorial experience:

[T]he dark reddish-brown cleft separating the buttocks, the two horizontal folds between the buttocks and the tops of the thighs, the perineum where a delicate fuzz of blond hairs begins, becoming gradually thicker on each side of the slit of the lilac-colored vulva which gapes open, baring a bright pink line. Beyond the rounded pubis the flesh of the belly rises in a gentle curve, dipping down in the middle to form the depression of the navel. (Simon 1976, 24)

There are, of course, instances where Simon shifts from the prior materials as far as formal correspondence is concerned. The descriptions of the intimate parts of the lying woman above could be said to be a translational explicitation of Bacon’s work since this exact motive does not appear in any of the two paintings, even though the woman depicted there is naked. The reason for this interpretative shift probably has to do with the strong emphasis on sexuality in general, which is one of the more prominent elements not only in Triptych, where the sexual act plays a major role in urban and rustic series, but also in Simon’s other novels. In Triptych and in Simon’s work in general, sexual intercourse and death are often juxtaposed, as some critics observed (Duffy and Duncan 2006, 1442). Later in the novel, for example, a little girl drowns by accident while her ignorant mother is spending time with her lover in a barn. Or, the woman lying on the bed is alive, but death is already written on her ageing wrinkled face.

After the description of the lying woman’s body, the scene suddenly changes, the reader is faced with a rabbit carcass that is skinned by the old woman in black:

[T]he old woman […] has now pulled the rabbit skin halfway down the body. Armed once again with her knife, she detaches the delicate bluish membrane attaching the skin to the flesh and the muscles. Half of the rabbit’s body is now bared, so that the pink muscles of the thighs, the hindquarters, and the belly are visible, as in an anatomical plate. (Simon 1976, 25)

The resemblance between the lying woman and the rabbit is only one example of rapid jump cuts from one series to another in Triptych. Simon often underlined the importance of associations and analogies in his work. At the Cerisy symposium in 1972, he talked about the role of analogies in the internal composition of a text and quoted Jacques Lacan, saying that “the word is not only a sign but a tangle of significations” (Simon 1972, 73), because each word carries an infinite number of meanings which cannot really be fixed since they always refer to other signs. In Triptych, a small gesture, specific colour, shape, or hidden analogy in scenery suffices to transport the reader spatially to another series, just as while observing a painting, one can move their gaze freely from one part to another. In this regard, the damp, nude and shapeless pinkish body of a woman lying on a hotel bed resembles the carcass of the rabbit being skinned in the rustic series based on a mere analogy, creating the illusion that there is a certain simultaneity between the two scenes. The cuts between different series are sharp and sometimes unexpected, but nevertheless contain some inner logic which the reader gradually becomes accustomed to. Simon saw the same role analogy played in visual arts, especially triptychs (Duffy and Duncan 2006, 1425). The same could be said for Three Studies for a Crucifixion, where the panels are loosely connected, but the same shade of orange and red is used on all three of them. With its vibrant shades of red (indicated on the woman’s body and in the room itself) and sultry, heavy atmosphere, emanating the feeling of anxiety, Three Studies for a Crucifixion was more likely the inspiration behind Simon’s precise descriptions of human and rabbit flesh. There is, again, a potential intertextual dialogue going on between Triptych and the rest of Bacon’s work. Similarly, the painter was known to seek inspiration from animal carcasses (for example, Figure with Meat, 1954) from butcher shop windows. In his canvases, the animal and human forms become almost blurred; his wild dogs “appear like prowlers in the Soho gutters” (Hoare 2022). In fact, Bacon was said to have retained a strong awareness of “the animal in man” and of “the raw, uncivilized impulses that govern human conduct” (Peppiatt 2009, 94).

Some critics (e.g. Ferrato-Combe 1998) observed that through his descriptions, Simon creates the bodily feelings of discomfort, sultriness and dampness without directly referring to the inner world of his protagonists. According to Ferrato-Combe, Simon’s descriptions “fairly faithfully translate the impression one experiences in front of these beds painted by Bacon” (1998, 215). The feeling of anxiety she describes probably comes from the fact that most of Bacon’s figures were confined to closed, almost claustrophobic spaces such as cages and rooms. Even Simon himself drew attention to the mixed feelings of anxiety and excitement experienced while observing some of Bacon’s nudes. When asked about the painter in an interview with Jo Van Apeldoorn, Simon offered his own personal understanding of his source texts: “Bacon’s painting fascinates me. […] What is exciting about him is the anxiety that comes out of all these […] stories, precisely” (1979, 104).

Discussion

According to Simon’s public statements and interviews (e.g. Simon 1972, 1977, 1979), it seems that the novelist’s aim in Triptych was to translate the visual medium of painting and its pictorial simultaneity into the verbal code through neutral, “camera-like” narration. Simon’s highly detailed, fragmentary, periphrastic descriptions, associative “spatial” structure, and lack of action offer a way to compensate for the inability of language as a generally symbolic sign system to account for the complete experience of visual perception. Among others, Bacon’s work was the means by which Simon achieved this goal. The paintings were “generators” for some of his novels in the same sense as a woman, an apple, or a landscape can serve as a model for pictorial representation (see Ferrato-Combe 1998, 17). “I usually start from images”, claimed the author himself (Simon cited in Ferrato-Combe 1998, 193).

The hermeneutical and dialogical approaches, already successfully used for the study of translation, may thus offer us a means to better understand intermedia translation. In turn, we can fully appreciate Simon’s novelistic practice through the lens of intermedia translation, especially in his novel Triptych.

First, interpretative translation choices bring forward the awareness that translators are of flesh-and-blood with their own subjective experience, horizons of expectations, and worldview. The fact that Claude Simon was, on the one hand, an admirer of visual art, and, on the other, a member of the Nouveau Roman movement, offers us one possible answer to the question why he opted for intermedia translation or why he chose certain translational strategies over others. Although the importance of social factors that influence the process of intermedia translation process is not the main focus of this article, it is nevertheless vital to underline to what extent Simon’s adhesion to the Nouveau Roman literary movement might have played a role in his translational decisions. According to Hanna Meretoja (2014, 13), the Second World War was a decisive experience that created “a need for new forms of literary expressions” and offered new ways to interpret reality and the human condition. It also questioned the possibility of the narrative itself, which resonated with the thinking of philosophers such as Roland Barthes, Maurice Blanchot, and Georges Bataille – many of whom were among the first supporters of the new literary movement.

Simon interpreted and then translated the source paintings to the novel in accordance with his own understanding, beliefs and aesthetic practices, many of which he shared with other Nouveau Roman authors. He paid special attention to various visual elements of the paintings (colours, bodies, shapes, patterns, etc.), emphasized the feeling of anxiety emanating from a lying body enclosed in a hotel room, and further elaborated the motives of flesh, voyeurism, and sexuality – the latter not explicitly present in the two mentioned paintings by Bacon.

Conceptualizing intermedia or interlingual translation in the light of hermeneutics makes translators and their interventions visible (see Venuti 2008), and the focus switches from translation as an end result to translation as a process and the creative work it entails. Madeleine Campbell and Ricarda Vidal (2019, 2–3) write about the visibility of the “translator’s gaze” or the “intense looking of the translator, which includes the full immersion of the translator in the text, with eyes, ears, skin, nose, limbs and heart”. Similarly, África Vidal Claramonte (2022, 32) coined the term “artistranslator gaze” and discussed the importance of taking into account different “ways of seeing” as a means of constructing the world when discussing intermedia (and interlingual) translation. Thus, through this interpretative labour, translation – interlingual and intersemiotic – can be seen as a creative act (see Stolze 2010, 144).

On the other hand, comparing translational work with artistic work does not imply that the terms “translation” and “artwork” can always be used interchangeably; it is only a means of enriching our understanding of translational phenomena. Even though categories are never watertight, in my opinion, the broader term translation may be used when it implies an intended relationship between the source and the target texts, be it interlingual or intersemiotic. Simon’s novel was not just inspired by Bacon. The author referred to Bacon’s paintings directly in various paratexts (interviews, correspondence, colloquia, title of the novel) and claimed they “generated” the structure of the novel. Simon’s readers might enjoy Triptych without being familiar with Bacon, but acknowledging that there is a connection to prior materials will change their horizon of expectation and enrich not only the reading of the novel, but also the “reading” of Bacon’s paintings. That is why it is fruitful to understand Simon’s intermedial practice in the sense of translation practice.

The dialogical approach can further complement our understanding of intermedia translation. While reading Simon’s highly experimental “visual novel” with almost no plot, readers necessarily experience some sort of strangeness when they are confronted with a novel whose structure and motives are said to be transposed from a visual medium. Translation (whether interlingual or intersemiotic) always arises out of a “dialogic tension” between source and target texts (Kumar 2015, 17). In a similar sense, George Steiner (also cited by Kumar) writes about “resistance and affinity” in good (interlingual) translation: “Good translation, on the contrary, can be defined as that in which the dialectic of impenetrability and ingress, of intractable alienness and felt “at-homeness’ remains unresolved, but expressive” (1975, 393). The dialogical approach allows us to see that Simon’s intermedia translation is neither an ideal representation of Bacon’s work (because, in some cases, he clearly shifts from the source paintings) nor a completely rewritten artwork that has little in common with the original, but an artwork always in constant dialogue not only with its source paintings, but also with the medium of painting itself. Long, meticulous, and vivid descriptions, where the temporal aspect seems to be omitted, bear the mark of Steiner’s “alienness” and refer the reader back to the source texts and the medium of painting. Recognizing the dialogical relationship between Triptych and Bacon’s work is not crucial, but it can definitely uncover many additional layers of meaning and help the reader fully appreciate Simon’s novel.

Conclusion

This article attempted to offer a possible approach to the study of intermedia translation illustrated by the example taken from Claude Simon’s novel Triptych, which was, according to its author, generated by two paintings by Francis Bacon. Due to the different modular characteristics of the two media, complete equivalence with Bacon’s work could not be achieved nor was it planned because intermedia (and every other) translation is an inherently hermeneutical, dialogical and therefore creative process. If translation is understood as one of the “major shaping elements in the process of transmission of ideas, texts and cultural practices” (Bassnett and Johnston 2019, 183), the phenomena such as intermedia translation can, indeed, be defined as translation. That also means that translation studies needs to expand its traditional boundaries and also rethink its relationship with adjacent disciplines to allow for other, non-lingual transfers. By doing so, translation studies can learn more about the objects of its research through collaborative work and engaging in interdisciplinary dialogue since the insights from other fields are all pivotal for a more complex understanding of culture, re-writing and text production (see Raw 2012; Krebs 2014; van Doorslaer and Raw 2016). Although translation studies has moved away from equivalence as the main criterion, translation is, nevertheless, sometimes still understood as being “more faithful” to the original compared to its “freer” versions such as adaptation (see van Doorslaer and Raw 2016). Readers still expect translations to be “accurate” and “correct” monological (in opposition to dialogical) products without taking into account that a translation is only one possible interpretation of the source text by the translator with his/her own subjectivity and that its meaning is preconditioned by all kinds of contexts: cultural, medial, and linguistic. Borderline cases like intermedia translation force us to rethink the concept of translation and, as Edwin Gentzler argues, can tell us more about its nature than the central paradigm (2017, 2). Because of the change in medium, the role of author/translator’s interpretation of prior materials and the dialogical relationship between source and target texts become even more prominent.

New objects called “translations” will continue to emerge and will change the shape and value of the already existing ones, which means that it will become more and more difficult to define translation and the situations in which it occurs (Nergaard and Arduini 2011, 11–12). Studying intermedia translation can in fact reveal how permeable the borders between media, cultures, languages and artworks actually are.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Slovenian Research Agency (research core funding No. P6-0239, and research project “History of Slovene Literary Translation” No. J6-2584).

Notes on contributors

Zarja Vršič

Zarja Vršič is a Junior Researcher, Assistant Professor and PhD student at the Department of Translation Studies, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. Her MA at the Department of Comparative Literature focused on the interconnection between the sculptor Alberto Giacometti and poet Jacques Dupin. She is also the author of academic articles on French literature. Her current research and doctoral thesis focus on the role of intermedia translation in the French Nouveau Roman.

Notes

1 Unless otherwise noted, all translations from French are the author’s.