Transmuting the painterly sign

Abstract

According to renowned linguist and semiotician Roman Jakobson, translation can be divided into three general categories: intralingual translation, interlingual translation, and intersemiotic translation/transmutation. Unlike the first two categories, intersemiotic transmutation lacks the usual isomorphism that exist between a source and its target, but that should not deter us from discovering an underlying universal process of two-step interpretation that is involved in transmuting painting as a nonverbal sign into art criticism which is mostly verbal. Put simply, painting as a special form of human communication relies heavily on iconicity between “representamen” and its “object,” but this is only the first step on our way toward the hidden meaning of a visual text. To achieve the latter goal, we also need – often, but not always, through indexical reasoning – to make connections between a painting and its sociohistorical context in the manner of logical abduction as proposed by Charles Sanders Peirce rather than structural differentiation as advocated by Ferdinand de Saussure. Compared with iconic correspondences, indexical relations are far more arbitrary and therefore extremely difficult to reconstruct.