https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5566-5574
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ABSTRACT
The myth of Daedalus and Icarus has been the subject of numerous literary texts as well as artworks in the Western tradition. The Turkish poet Nazmi Ağıl’s two ekphrastic poems ‘Bruegel: The Landscape as Icarus Falls’ and ‘Auden’s Icarus’ are retellings of the myth with reference to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, and W. H. Auden’s ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’. If ekphrasis is the representation of a work of art in literature, then Ağıl’s poems are re-representations of both verbal and visual frames by critiquing Auden’s interpretation from the mouth of a storyteller Kamil in the former poem and Daedalus in the latter. Ağıl’s aim in alluding to the Western sources is to highlight political issues in Turkey. This paper, then, argues how Ağıl’s poems complicate the reading process by playing with verbal and visual frames.
Disclosure statement
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Notes
1 Jorge Luis Borges, “Parable of Cervantes and the Quixote,” The Aleph (London: Penguin, 2000), 166.
2 Apart from being a poet, Nazmi Ağıl is an academic at the Department of Comparative Literature at Koç University, İstanbul, Turkey and has translated Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knights, Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, Pope’s ‘Rape of the Lock,’ and some poems by Wordsworth including ‘The Prelude’ into Turkish.
3 From now on, in this article the English titles of the poems will be used for convenience.
4 Here we refer to Mieke Bal and Joanne Morra’s discussion on the intertwined relationship between translation and visual studies in their “Editorial: Acts of Translation” in Journal of Visual Culture 6.1 (2007): 5–11. They assert that translation has become ‘a crucial trope, idea, concept, metaphor or mode of interpretation within discussions of international visual and cultural practices’ (5). In the same issue of the journal, Gary Shapiro, referring to Foucault, Derrida and Lyotard, discusses how ekphrasis is actually a form of translation. Gary Shapiro, “The Absent Image: Ekphrasis and the ‘Infinite Relation’ of Translation,” Journal of Visual Culture 6.1 (2007): 13–24. According to Shapiro, in the long history of ekphrasis, the aim was first to translate the inaccessible image to the audience due to the scarcity of museums and exhibitions (15).
In line with Bal and Morra’s argument that translation is used in a metaphorical sense to suggest all forms of interpretation in ekphrasis, Roman Jakobson talks about three types of translation, namely ‘intralingual,’ ‘interlingual’ and intersemiotic translation (233). Roman Jakobson, “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation,” On Translatio, ed. Reuben A. Brower (Cambridge, Massachussetts: Harvard UP, 1959), 232–39. The first of these types of translation in Jakobson’s category, which means translating verbal signs to other types of signs in the same language (233) is beyond the scope of this essay. However, interlingual one defined by Jakobson as ‘an interpretation of verbal signs by means of some other language’ (233) and intersemiotic translation, ‘an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems,’ (233) such as music or painting are used in this essay. Claus Clüver, referring to Jakobson’s classification claims, ‘In both interlingual and intersemiotic translation, the meaning ascribed to the source text, whether poem or painting, is the result of an interpretation’ (61). Claus Clüver, “On Intersemiotic Transposition,” Poetics Today 10.1 (Spring, 1989): 55–90. Clüver adds that ‘contemporary theory has expanded the concept of translation to include, in the proper context, even the descriptive analysis of a painting by a critic or art historian’ (62). Within this context, we use the word ‘translation’ to suggest not only an interart/intersemiotic transference between verbal and visual arts but also an intertextual and intercultural communication between poems in discussion. Moreover, our position as readers or translators between the texts and the audience forms another layer of this discussion. Since Ağıl’s poems are written in Turkish we provide their translations for the English speaking readers in the appendix, but taking into interlingual translation into consideration is beyond the scope of this essay.
5 James A. W. Heffernan, Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), 3.
6 Quoted in Henryk Markiewicz and Uliana Gabara, “Ut Pictura Poesis … a History of the Topos and the Problem,” New Literary History 18.3 (1987): 535.
7 Horace, Ars Poetica, in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, eds. et. al. Vincent.B. Leitch (New York and London: Norton, 2001), 132.
8 Leonardo Da Vinci, Leonardo on Painting, ed. M. Kemp, trans. M. Kemp and M. Walker (New Haven: Yale Nota Bene, 2001), 20–1.
9 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön, trans. E. A. McCormick (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 78.
10 Jaś Elsner, Roman Eyes: Visuality and Subjectivity in Art and Text (Princeton University Press, 2007), 68.
11 W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory. (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994), 157.
12 Nazmi Ağıl, Ekphrasis: Turkey and the West (İstanbul: Simurg, 2017), 34.
13 Nazmi Ağıl, “Ekphrasis in Turkish Poetry: A Paragonal Approach,” Journal of Turkish Literature 9 (2012): 48. For more information about ekprasis in Turkish literature see also Nazmi Ağıl’s book Ekphrasis: Turkey and the West.
14 The title of Ağıl’s collection highlights the muted nature of paintings discussed within the framework of ekphrasis, and yet the variety of icons suggest a festivity.
15 Uğur Kömeçoğlu, ‘The Publicness and Sociabilities of the Ottoman Coffeehouse,’ Javnost – The Public 12.2 (2005): 9.
16 All the references to Ağıl’s two poems will be from Özkan Çakırlar’s translation in the appendix, and line numbers to the translated version will be used. The original poem ‘Auden’ın Ikarus’u is published in Nazmi Ağıl,’ Yağmura Bunca Düşkün: Toplu Şiirler (İstanbul: Yapı Kredi, 2014), 440–1 and ‘Bruegel: İkarus Düşerken Manzara,’ in the same book on pages 437–9.
17 Ovid, The Metamorphoses, trans. Horace Gregory (New York: Signet Classic, 2001), 220.
18 Shadi Bartsch and Jaś Elsner, ‘Eight Ways of Looking at an Ekphrasis,’ Classical Philology 102.1 (2007): ii.
19 Auden, W. H. “Musée des Beaux Arts.” The Collected Poetry of W. H. Auden (Random House, 1945, 3.
20 The military coup in September 12, 1980 was an outcome of social, economic and political instabilities in Turkey in the late 1970s. Daily life of people was terrorized through mass murder, tension between religious sects, sensational assassinations committed one after another, exploding bombs and endless street fights. Due to the economic crisis that had been going on for years, people were struggling with poverty. They were forced to accept and yield to the consequences of military action. Until today, a full report of what happened after the September 12 coup has not been prepared partially due to a lack of written accounts related to unlawfulness and violence. Nevertheless, some of the facts are: 650 thousand people were detained; 1 million 683 thousand people were investigated; 230 thousand people were tried in 210 thousand cases; 517 people were sentenced to death; 50 of those who were given death penalty were executed; 388 thousand people were not given passports; and 171 people died from torture; a total of 299 people died in prison suspiciously. (Information about the coup is translated from the following internet source https://www.imo.org.tr/resimler/ekutuphane/pdf/16651_10_12.pdf)
21 The bold lines are Ağıl’s own translation printed in his book Ekphrasis: Turkey and the West, 123.
22 This coined word combining labyrinth and intrigue is created by the translator to reflect the word play in the original Turkish version of the poem.