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In his well known article “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation” (1959/2000: 113-118), Roman Jakobson describes intersemiotic translation as one of the three possible types of translation. According to his classification, unlike intralingual translation, which is related to the signs of one language only, and interlingual translation (translation proper), which occurs between two different languages, intersemiotic translation involves translation between two different media, for example, from the verbal medium into the musical medium, from the verbal medium into the cinematographic medium, and so on. This latter category made it possible for different sign systems to be examined through the prism of Translation Studies, and, particularly in this study, for book illustrations to be seen as a type of translation of the text in the illustrated book. In spite of the apparent simplicity of such conclusions, the conversion of verbal information into other kinds of non-verbal information is a rather complex issue, involving not only the characterization of the laws governing the types of signs under consideration, but also the analysis of both media as source and target works, which they a priori – and necessarily – will imply. Therefore, the establishment of the text as the source work and the pictures as the target work in the illustrated book will be initially discussed.

The text can be regarded as the primary source because it is usually the first work to be created, the pictures being derived from it. It is true that in some cases the opposite can happen: when Dickens started as a novelist, for example, he was first commissioned to supply a story for the existing illustrations by Robert Seymour[1] (Leavis 1994: 436); and in the preface to the first edition of The Pickwick Papers (1837), Dickens describes how the drawings were created: “the interval has been so short between the production of each number in manuscript and its appearance in print, that the greater portion of the Illustrations have been executed by the artist from the author’s mere verbal description of what he intended to write” (Wall 1970: 45). These particular cases, however, do not contradict the fact that the pictures represent the text in visual form; neither do they obscure the very purpose of the illustrated book of placing side by side, within its limits, two different versions of the same story. Illustrations are illustrations exactly because they are linked to a text, otherwise they would be paintings, drawings, or any other type of visual work that could be placed independently in an art gallery. The question of which art was created first does not interfere with the role each plays in the book.

It has also been a common assumption that, because illustrations are often derived from the text, they are a secondary or inferior art (Behrendt 1997: 24). However, similarly to the question of priority, this proves to be more related to the function of the pictures in specific works, during specific periods. The history of the illustrated book is permeated with moments in which illustration achieves a more prominent position when compared to the text, be it in terms of the space the drawings occupy on the page, their relevance in relation to the textual passage they refer to, or even their purpose in the particular work (see Bland 1958 or Harthan 1981). Regardless of these circumstances, illustrations can especially be seen as translations because as a process, the methodologies employed by illustrators are in the majority of cases the same as those adopted by translators to translate a text; and as products, illustrations play a very significant part in the reception of the literary work, so that the visual creation of the drawings is very similar to the verbal creation of the text during translation. I will discuss the reasons why illustration can be translation and certain ways through which the pictures can translate the text.

1. Why are illustrations translations?

Although Jakobson’s brief classification does not provide a proper answer to this question – and it was certainly not intended to do so –, nor is it particularly concerned with book illustration, a first tentative answer should depart from his theory. His claim that artistic works can only be translated by means of “creative transposition” (Jakobson 1959/2000: 118) can be seen as the essence of illustration, as illustration uses the literary text for reference, but it can also be valued independently as art. Jakobson’s ideas were developed in Brazil by poet, translator, and literary theorist Haroldo de Campos (1967/1992).[2] By using Max Bense’s concepts of semantic information, documentary information and aesthetic information (the three types of information transmitted during translation in Bense’s definition), Campos also suggests that translation of creative texts is only possible through aesthetic re-creation.

Campos exemplifies his theory with the Portuguese sentence, “A aranha tece a teia” [the spider weaves the web], which could primarily be taken as documentary information, as it is an empirical sentence, referring to an observable phenomenon (1992: 32). Semantic information would go beyond documentary information, for it would add a new element to the statement, which could not be observed perse. The concept of true or false, for instance, could work as a kind of semantic information in the same sentence – true, in this case (Campos 1992: 32). Finally, Campos defines aesthetic information by quoting the first stanza of “Formas do Nu,”[3] by Brazilian poet, João Cabral de Melo Neto, in which his example sentence is expressed in a different way:

A aranha passa a vida

tecendo cortinados

com o fio que fia

de seu cuspe privado

ibid.

[The spider passes through life
weaving curtains
with the thread it threads
from its private spit]

He argues that while both documentary and semantic information could be rearranged in many different ways in translation (“a aranha faz a teia,” “a teia é elaborada pela aranha,” “a teia é uma secreção da aranha,” etc. [the spider weaves the web, the web is made by the spider, the web is a secretion of the spider]) if the poem were translated into another language, any minimal change in its sequence would disturb its “aesthetic realization” (Campos 1992: 32), for aesthetic information “cannot be coded in any other form than that by which it was transmitted by the artist” (ibid.): it will result in another piece of aesthetic information in the other language, but both “will be connected to each other by a relationship of isomorphy: they will be different in terms of language, but, as isomorphic bodies, they will be crystallized within the same system” (Campos 1992: 34).

These views of recreation can find a fertile ground when applied to illustration. Similarly to translation of poetry, illustration is only possible through the re-creation of the textual elements and values in the pictures. They are different in terms of the sign system, but constitute another construct of the (same) text in the universe of the illustrated book. Especially in canonical novels, which are often illustrated by different artists, illustrations not only re-create the literary and cultural values of the text, but multiply those values into different cultural systems each time the work is illustrated – acting, thus, as refractions/rewritings[4] of the text into different cultures, in a similar way as translations do. Illustrations not only help transmit but also perpetuate cultural elements. Moreover, because illustrations often reflect the artistic conventions of the period in which they are produced (Kallendorf 2001), similarly to translations, they insert the literary work into a certain artistic current, eventually helping establish what that work represents to specific generations of readers.

However, illustration should be defined as intersemiotic translation more in terms of classification rather than in pragmatic terms. Illustration is carried out in such similar ways to verbal translation, that the difference of medium becomes obvious. Evidence of this can be seen in many aspects of the process of illustration. When considering the methodologies of translation, for example, translators and illustrators share common translation procedures in their respective activities. Resources such as addition, omission, explicitation, condensation and others that characterize verbal translation[5] can also be seen in illustration. When Jô de Oliveira does not portray the objects hung on the walls of the rabbit-hole (Carroll 1995: 4), in one of the Brazilian editions of Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865) he is making use of the procedure of omission (cf. Carroll 1997: 17). Conversely, when Eric Kincaid portrays the low hall with doors (Carroll 1995: 5) as having decorated wallpaper (cf. Carroll 1995: 13), in another edition of the book, he is adding information that has not been mentioned in the text. In my analysis of a number of editions of Alice into Brazilian Portuguese, the use of translation procedures proved to be the same for the translation of the text, the poems, the puns and the illustrations in each edition of the book (cf. Pereira 2003; 2007).

What Tymoczko (1999: 41-61) describes as the metonymic nature of translation can also be applied to illustration. According to Tymoczko (1999: 54), translations are always carried out in a metonymic way. Because texts are loaded with textual, linguistic, historical, and cultural values that cannot be wholly reproduced in the translated text, translators have to make choices:

Translators select some elements, some aspects, or some parts of the source text to highlight and preserve; translators prioritize and privilege some parameters and not others; and, thus, translators represent some aspects of the source text partially or fully and others not at all in a translation. (…) [C]ertain aspects or attributes of the source text come to represent the entire source text in translation. By definition, therefore, translation is metonymic: it is a form of representation in which parts or aspects of the source text come to stand for the whole.

Tymoczko 1999: 54-55

This has proved to be true of illustration as well, since texts are never illustrated in their totality but only partially. Similarly to translators, illustrators have to make choices, and select only certain aspects or elements, certain scenes or passages in the text to represent in the pictures, which, in their turn, will represent the text as a whole. By describing the influence of the tradition of the cyclic miniatures on modern literary illustration, David Bland (1958: 25) observes that

[a]lthough there may have been prototype cycles which illustrated every part of all the great epics it was soon found that to illustrate a work like the Odyssey required so many pictures that some selection was advantageous. So the more important scenes were picked out or those which could be more easily illustrated.

Metonymy can be viewed in illustration not only in the relationship of the pictures with the passages to which they refer, but also from the perspective of the pictures themselves, and of how the visual signs are placed in the figure to represent the textual and narrative elements, since they, too, can be portrayed only partially: a character’s arm or leg, representing his/her whole body, for example, a window, representing a house, and so forth. The illustrations by Anne Herbauts to the French translation of Alice in Wonderland published by Casterman in 2002 can be said to be metonymic in this sense. When she depicts only Alice’s legs and shoes upside down in the rabbit-hole, to represent the fall (cf. Carroll 2002: 14); or when only a part of Alice’s legs and shoes are portrayed on a whole page to represent her increase in size (cf. Carroll 2002: 20), the artist is using metonymy as a technique of narrative.

In fact, every constraint influencing translation described by Lefevere (1992a; 1992b) especially those such as patronage, poetics, ideology and the universe of discourse, can also be applied to illustration. Patronage, which Lefevere classifies as the “powers” promoting translation (represented chiefly by editors and/or authors and the interests of the publication) although not visible to the reader, can be one of the most obvious forms of directing illustration, as well as translation. Illustrators are usually commissioned by an editor, who decides the number of illustrations the volume will have, the target audience, the size of the pictures, and other features of the illustrations that must satisfy the commercial requirements of the book. It can also happen that the author may play a part as “patron,” controlling the way the illustrations are created. Perhaps the most famous case of patronage exerted by the author in literary illustration is that of Dickens, who not only would approve or disapprove of every illustration created for his books, but also wanted all the drawings to represent the way he himself pictured every scene in his own mind (see, among others, Cohen 1980; Waugh 1937; Lester 2004).

And poetics, ideology and the universe of discourse eventually govern the procedures adopted to create the pictures and make the book conform to the aims of the publication. These constraints are intimately related to interpretation, since every step an illustrator takes, from the selection of the passages to be portrayed to the size of the pictures, reflects not only his/her views of the world, ideology and moral values, but also his/her aesthetic and stylistic principles and views of art in general. The interpretive quality of illustration makes illustrators visible in every choice they make. Nevertheless, because certain constraints can be more influential than others (e.g., censorship on the part of the author, or the illustrator’s political views affecting the way illustration is carried out), the pictures can be directed to fit in with a certain stylistic and/or ideological trend, placing the book in a specific aesthetic or ideological current. Certain aspects of these constraints in illustration, and of how they affect the pictures as products, are now discussed.

2. How can pictures translate words?

If we are to follow in the same path as in the previous section, we shall reach the conclusion that pictures can translate words in the same way words translate words. Thus, it can also be assumed that there are no predictable steps to prescribe the way illustration is carried out. However, these limitations can be a starting point for a number of insights into illustration if we think that many features of how translations are made can also be applied to illustration, as has been discussed. Thus, I will now suggest three ways through which pictures can translate words:

2.1. By literally reproducing the textual elements in the picture

Literal intersemiotic translation is perhaps the most obvious way through which textual elements can be translated into visual elements. Not intended to bring about the implications of the term and its common opposition to free translation, literal translation can occur in illustration (and it is used here only in this sense) when the textual elements (concrete and abstract referents, colour, dimension, shape, etc.) in an event or passage in the text are fully (or mostly) reproduced in the picture. To exemplify literal translation in illustration, I will examine John Tenniel’s engravings accompanying “You Are Old Father William,” one of the poems in Alice in Wonderland.

Most of the poems in Alice are parodies of popular rhymes and songs, either of Carroll’s time or anterior to it, which were well-known to English children when he wrote the book. “You Are Old Father William” is no exception. It was created after an eighteenth-century traditional poem by Robert Southey’s, entitled “The Old Man’s Comforts and How He Gained Them” (Gardner 1960: 69). In Southey’s original, old wise Father William tells a young man that the secret of his vigour and wisdom is not having forgotten God in the days of his youth (Gardner 1960: 69). In Carroll’s version, which ridicules these values, Father William mocks and scorns the young man, as can be seen below, together with the illustrations:

“You are old, father William,” the young man said,
 “And your hair has become very white;
And yet you incessantly stand on your head –
 Do you think, at your age, it is right?”

Figure 1

Father William standing on his head

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“In my youth,” father William replied to his son,
 “I feared it might injure the brain;
But, now that I’m perfectly sure I have none,
 Why, I do it again and again.”

“You are old,” said the youth, “as I mentioned before,
 And have grown most uncommonly fat;
Yet you turned a back-somersault in at the door –
 Pray what is the reason of that?”

Figure 2

Father William turning a back somersault

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“In my youth,” said the sage, as he shook his grey locks,
 “I kept all my limbs very supple
By the use of this ointment – one shilling the box –
 Allow me to sell you a couple?”

“You are old,” said the youth, “and your jaws are too weak
 For anything tougher than suet;
Yet you finished the goose, with the bones and the beak –
 Pray, how did you manage to do it?”

Figure 3

Father William’s healthy appetite

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“In my youth,” said his father, “I took to the law,
 And argued each case with my wife;
And the muscular strength, which it gave to my jaw,
 Has lasted the rest of my life.”

“You are old,” said the youth, “one would hardly suppose
 That your eye was as steady as ever;
Yet you balanced an eel on the end of your nose –
 What made you so awfully clever?”

Figure 4

Father William balancing an eel

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“I have answered three questions, and that is enough,”
 Said his father. “Don’t give yourself airs!
Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?
 Be off, or I’ll kick you down stairs!”

ibid.: 70-71

Considering the verbal and visual representations, in the top-to-bottom orientation, each picture corresponds to two stanzas of the poem, which in their turn, show alternate instances of the young man’s question and Father William’s reply. Tenniel portrayed the instances of the young man’s statements about Father William, which occur in every other stanza (starting with the first one) and precede each question he asks in the final line of these stanzas. Thus, Tenniel concentrated on the third line in the first stanza, “And yet you incessantly stand on your head” [Fig. 1]; the third line in the third stanza, “Yet you turned a back-somersault in at the door” [Fig. 2]; the third line in the fifth stanza, “Yet you finished the goose, with the bones and the beak” [Fig. 3]; and the third line in the seventh stanza, “Yet you balanced an eel on the end of your nose” [Fig. 4]. As these lines have verbs as a central part [stand (on your head); turned (a back somersault); finished (the goose); and balanced (an eel)] he could respectively cover the first and second stanzas, the third and fourth, the fifth and sixth and the seventh and eighth, as each pair of stanzas deals with the same subject. Besides this, by concentrating on the verbs he could portray action and cause the pictures to perform the sequence of events described textually, giving them a narrative quality.

The position of the characters in the pictures and of the pictures in relation to the poem is also important. In the first edition of the book, the drawings are placed above the poem, on two pages facing each other: two drawings above the first four stanzas and the other two over the final four stanzas, on the next page (cf. ibid.). This arrangement makes the two languages cross over into each other, so that the reader can read the verbal language, vertically, and the visual language, horizontally. As for the position of the characters, Father William being placed always on the right and the young man always on the left, in addition to representing the alternate order of the youth’s question and the old man’s answer, also produces the effect of sequential movement, building the pace of narration as we naturally read from left to right. This positioning is also important in the description of the characters themselves. Thus, not only the physical contrast between the young man’s skinny figure and Father William’s plumpness can be seen at a first glance, but also their personality traits: by being placed on the right (especially if the original layout is observed), Father William can be seen as always ahead of his time (for his wisdom and cleverness); and the young man, conversely, behind in space and time, always at a disadvantage in relation to the old man’s prowess. This is also emphasized by the expression of astonishment (and even disapproval) on his face, recurrent in every picture.

Tenniel mostly illustrated action throughout the book. In his drawings for the early chapters, for instance, he presents all the main events from Alice falling down the rabbit-hole by depicting action scenes: Alice becoming tiny after drinking the liquid in the bottle labelled “drink me” (ibid.: 29-31), her stretching after eating a little cake (with the words “eat me” [ibid.: 36] written on it in currants), her becoming small, again to join the Mouse, and the birds for the mad caucus-race (ibid.: 46) and her receiving her own thimble as a prize from the Dodo (ibid.: 49). Carroll is said to have given instructions to Tenniel on how he would like the drawings for the first edition of the book (Mespoulet 1934: 58-59), and there is evidence that he even sent a picture of Mary Hilton Badcock (a child-friend of his) for the illustrator to use as a model for Alice (Gardner 1960: 25). Tenniel, on the other hand, is more likely not to have accepted any of Carroll’s ideas – at least, this is what some other evidence suggests (ibid.; Mespoulet 1934: 59). However, his drawings provide a faithful description of what Carroll describes textually.

2.2. By emphasizing specific narrative elements

By mostly focusing on action, Tenniel makes use of another translation strategy used in illustration: the specific emphasis on a certain narrative element. By this strategy, one or more elements of textual narrative (character, point of view, action, theme, etc.) direct the visual narration in the drawings. Susan Gannon (1991: 91) describes how N. C. Wyeth’s illustrations for the adventure novels of Robert Louis Stevenson emphasize theme through the covers, the endpapers and the title pages; and how he condenses the plot in each story by arranging the pictures so “as to provide not only a sense of the story’s continuity, its drama and emotional force, but to complement each other aesthetically, offering contrast and comparison in subject matter, colouring and design” (ibid.: 92). I will now discuss certain implications of the emphasis on character in the pictures by E. W. Kemble for the Adventures of HuckleberryFinn (1884) by Mark Twain.

To a great extent, Kemble’s focusing on character is due to Twain’s influence in the creation of the pictures. Twain was not only responsible for the choice of the illustrator but also controlled the whole process of the illustration of the book, by indicating what should be illustrated and approving or disapproving of each drawing sent to him (Twain 2003: 699-721). According to Beverly R. David (1984: 259-68), the author’s main concern was that the issues (of violence, racial persecution, prejudice, sex, crime and death) dealt with in his book would shock his audience. Thus, by inspecting (the creation of) the pictures, he could make sure that these taboo subjects could be seen in a more pleasant way (at least, visually!). His major strategy was to have Kemble emphasize certain elements of the episodes and tone down others so that the aspects that he considered “dangerous” would be diverted from the reader’s attention (ibid.). As a result, in the 174 drawings to the first edition, Kemble concentrates more on the characters, suppressing or omitting information that could portray the passages in a more detailed way.

Figure 5

Col. Grangerford

Col. Grangerford

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Figure 6

Miss Charlotte

Miss Charlotte

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Figure 7

Huck and his father

Huck and his father

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Certainly, illustrations often have characters in the foreground, since, especially in novels, characters act in the sequence of events in the development of plot. What makes Kemble’s engravings emphasize character, thus, is the way they de-emphasize action. The figures are usually drawn in a static position, as if posing for a portrait [Fig. 5 and Fig. 6 (Twain 2000: 413, 416)], or merely performing an action connected to the depicted scene, but with no other “clues” that could give the reader some insight into the passage as a whole [Fig. 7 (Twain 2000: 311)]. This is achieved especially by the omission of background elements and by little suggestion of movement. The episode of Boggs’s death (Twain 2000: 456-7), described in one of Kemble’s pictures analyzed by David (1984: 262-4), can also be used as an example of this strategy. In this drawing [Fig. 8], the two central figures are depicted in an almost paralyzed way, with Colonel Sherburn in a very unusual position for someone who is shooting a gun, and Boggs showing little signs of the impact a bullet might cause when penetrating a person’s body. David points out that the portrayal of Boggs from behind (preventing the view of supposed desperation and terror on his face) and the omission of other elements which make up the passage (such as a crowd and Boggs’s daughter, who arrived just in time to witness the crime) tone down the violence of the scene (ibid.: 263); and the plain account of the caption, “The death of Boggs,” reduces the vividness of the event, causing it to be “stark and unmoving rather than terrifying” (ibid.: 264). In fact, if compared to Berkeley’s illustration of Crusoe killing a cannibal [Figure 9], when he rescues Friday (Defoe n/d: 171), the effect of Kemble’s drawing is far less intense.

Figure 8

The death of Boggs

The death of Boggs

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Figure 9

Crusoe killing a cannibal

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In a 1930 article for the Colophon, “Illustrating Huckleberry Finn,” Kemble describes how he elaborated the characters for the book: “[f]rom the beginning I never depended upon models but preferred to pick my types out of the ether, training my mind to visualize them” (//etext.virginia.edu/twain/colophon.html)[6]. Indeed, as he could only afford to hire one model – a boy named Cort Morris, whom he came across in his neighbourhood and who eventually posed for all the characters (ibid.) – all his characters for the book are drawn more as he imagines them (//etext.virginia.edu/railton/huckfinn/hfillcomp.html)[7]. This has led to a number of controversies, especially as it relates to the images of Huck Finn and Jim.

In terms of Huck, as the protagonist never describes what he himself looks like, Kemble’s creation seems to be almost totally dependable on Cort’s features, as he writes, in another passage of his article for the Colophon, that Cort “was a bit tall for the ideal boy, but I could jam him down a few pegs in my drawing” (etext.virginia.edu/twain/colophon.html). However, Twain was not pleased with Huck’s mouth, which he considered “a trifle more Irishy than necessary” (Webster 1946: 246 quoted in David 1984: 254-5), a complaint which, according to David, may have been caused by Twain’s concern that Huck’s “Irishness” (emphasis added) could restrict the book to a smaller audience (1984: 255). And there are even more controversies about Jim’s image. The author of an article on the main representations of Jim in a hundred years of the publication of Huck Finn in the United States (//etext.lib.virginia.edu/railton/huckfinn/jiminpix.html) points out that preconceived views of Jim are predominant in the illustrations of the book. When considering Kemble’s declarations in the Colophon article, the author argues that:

In what he says there we hear a racism so deeply held and so naive that it is not even faintly aware of itself, especially when he talks about the white boy whom he hired to pose for all the book’s characters, and how much that boy enjoyed impersonating “Jim”: “he would jam his little black wool cap over his head, shoot out his lips and mumble coon talk.”

Kemble is also thought of as showing a prejudiced view of Jim in a set of three new drawings of the character that he created for the 10 December 1899 special issue of the New York World. One of the drawings, showing two whites expressing horror at Jim’s appearance (//etext.virginia.edu/railton/huckfinn/99world1.html), is said not to be based on any actual passage in the story, but a product of Kemble’s imagination, which might have been aroused by the episode when the Duke suggests that Jim could stay on the raft without being tied up (ibid.). David (1884: 253-4) is another author to consider Kemble’s portrayal of Jim. She notices some inconsistencies between the way he is depicted in the early chapters (as a full grown man [Fig. 10]) and later in the book (more resembling a tall boy [Fig. 11]); and she also stresses the fact that Jim does not portray his “hairy arms and breast,” one of his most significant features. It should be mentioned, though, as David concludes (ibid.: 268), that, as a pivotal participant in Twain’s belief in the power of illustrations Kemble made it possible for the author to achieve his goal.

Figure 10

Jim

Jim

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Figure 11

Jim, Huck and Tom

Jim, Huck and Tom

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2.3. By adapting the pictures to a specific ideology or artistic trend

One last strategy to be discussed, that can also be used by illustrators is adaptation. By this strategy (which Vinay and Darbelnet [1958/2000: 84-93] also consider as a translation procedure) the illustrations can be directed to a specific audience, a specific ideology or a specific artistic trend, according to the time when the pictures are produced and the illustrator’s values and ideology. The constraints influencing translation pointed out by Lefevere (1992a; 1992b, see Section 1, above) can be considered one of the main influences in the different directions the pictures can give a certain text. Craig Kallendorf (2001: 133-7) analyzes how the illustrators’ political views, for instance, were responsible for the ways the illustrations for two French editions of the Aeneid were created so as to promote the values of the Ancien Régime in France, and as propaganda against the Napoleon period, which succeeded it. The editions in question are those translated, respectively, by Pierre Perrin, and by the Flemish poet, Victor-Alexandre-Chrétien Leplat, who first published Virgil in his native language, in 1802, and then in French, in 1807-8.

In Perrin’s translation, the illustrations are used to legitimize French governmental authority: they emphasize the group over the individual and privilege the features of the Aeneid which reinforce the principles of the power of the state (ibid.: 134-5). Kallendorf cites a number of examples – such as that in Book IV, in which Dido’s funeral pyre is placed before the city of Carthage; or that in Book V, portraying the athletics before the Trojan assembled army – in which “the engravings situate the individual characters in relation to the social and political units to which they belong, reminding us that individuals have obligations to those who depend on them” (ibid.: 135). In the Leplat’s translation, the illustrations also involve the state power, but, in this case, they are used to criticize the ideals of the French Revolution of 1789. Leplat’s view of the events are given from the perspective of the old order, showing the revolutionaries as fanatical and “opportunists” (ibid.: 136). The engravings reproduce Leplat’s ideology: in the picture quoted by Kallendorf [Fig. 12] there is a representation of the state with all kinds of dangers (hypocrisy, treason, famine, sacrilege, among others) threatening its integrity.

Figure 12

Personification of the French State

Personification of the French State

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Moving from seventeenth and eighteenth-century France into the present, a different type of adaptation is J. E. Seames’s drawings for an online comic version of Hamlet, which inserts Shakespeare’s classic into the cyber-Gothic culture. Seames started the Hamlet project in 2006, together with K. C. Praiswater and William J. Gregory. Seames creates the drawings and adapts the text, Praiswater colours them and adds visual effects, and Gregory does the lettering. The comics can be seen on Seames’s website (www.deadsquirrelcomics.com) and also on Gregory’s website (www.redstarcomics.com), both on comic art. In these drawings, all the characters of Hamlet belong to one of the contemporary youth tribes influenced by Gothic aesthetics: Guildenstern has tattooed arms, Horatio is pierced all over his ears and nose, Hamlet [Fig. 13] has spiked hair and wears earrings, and Ophelia [Fig. 14] has dyed hair and wears Gothic boots (//gallery.deadsquirrelcomics.com/v/hamlet/hamlet_gallery). In Seames’s drawings, adaptation is especially visible through the medium chosen, the form, which includes the portrayal of the characters and the symbolism of the colours. The virtual medium, for example, is the most appropriate medium for inserting the play into alternative culture, and so are the chains, piercings and metal adornments which make up the characters. And the colours, notably the extensive use of black and red, place the drawings in the Gothic genre.

Figure 13

Hamlet

Hamlet

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Figure 14

Ophelia

Ophelia

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Interestingly, in the dialogues the artist maintains the original Elizabethan English in words and phrases such as “nay” ([p. iii] www.deadsquirrelcomics.com/node/80), “get thee to bed” ([p. iv] ibid.:/node/82), “who hath relieved you” ([p. v] ibid.:/node/386), in Scene 1 of Act 1, placing together both old and new “languages.” This can certainly be seen as complementary, but it also can cause the pictures to exert a level of influence on the text. It often happens when classics are adapted that original illustrations are used with new translations so as to give the work a sophisticated and classical quality. In Seames’s comics, conversely, the illustrations are adapted and the text preserves its traditional style. However, by being used by modern characters, the language also acquires a futuristic tone, so that the illustrations modernize the text: the language remains the same, but inserted in a new modern context. In these comics, the illustrations, thus, play the main role in adaptation.

The idea of illustrations as (intersemiotic) translations is not totally new in Translation or Literary Studies. In her study of picture books and illustrated books, Riitta Oittinen (2000: 106) mentions that she finds “many similarities between translation (into words) and illustration (translation into pictures) as forms of interpretation”; and Eleanor Winsor Leach (1982: 175), commenting on Dryden’s “Dedication of the Aeneis,” sees the translator’s remarks on translation as also concerning illustrations:

The statement [that in Dryden’s translation of the Aeneid Vergil would speak such English as he would had he been living in England by the time the translation was made] not only epitomizes those goals of poetic translation which Dryden pursued throughout his career, but it also suggests how closely the art of translation may approach that of illustration, both in its need to convey to the reader a coherent image couched within the understandable contemporary idiom and in its responsibility for preserving fidelity to the text. Both translation and illustration are forms of interpretive imitation.

Indeed, as seen in the above discussion, interpretation is inherent to the activities of translation and illustration. Even if we consider Tenniel’s engravings for “You Are Old Father William” (see section 2.1, above), which give a faithful account of how things took place in the poem, by making choices and presenting the events, the characters and the way action was performed as he views them, Tenniel is interpreting the poem and creating ways for it to be seen as he thinks it should.

Because artists interpret the text when they are creating the pictures, illustration can also be seen as another way to create meaning for this text. Kemble’s images of Jim and Huck in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (see section 2.2), Perrin’s and Leplat’s biased views of the state power in France, as shown in the illustrations for their respective editions of the Aeneid (see section 2.3), and Seames’s virtual Hamlet (see section 2.3) create specific characteristics for these works, and these can all be seen as directing the way the audiences view these works. In many cases, the image of a certain character or scene of a novel, in the view of a particular illustrator, is so powerful, that it becomes a stereotype of this work into a certain literary system. Kemble’s representation of Huck Finn, for instance, with a straw hat, a gun in one hand and a dead hare in the other has become an icon of Twain’s book. It can thus be said that the illustrations manipulate the reader’s responses to a book. Behrendt (1997: 24) claims that an illustrator “intrudes his or her interpretation into an intellectual and aesthetic transaction that would otherwise involve only the literary author and the reader.” This aspect of illustration especially emphasizes the fundamental role of the pictures as the key elements in the reception of the literary work. And this is essentially the role of translation.