ABSTRACT

In Pictorialist Poetics: Poetry and the Visual Arts in Nineteenth Century France, David Scott shows how French poetry moves from a classical standard of mimesis based on the four tropes of rhetoric to a silent writing exploiting plastic tensions of composition. Citing Albert Thibaudet Scott notes that in the nineteenth century criticism and poetry strongly resemble the practice of translation. The way reporters view an exposition and put their impressions of it into words becomes something equivalent to the task of rendering the form of one medium into that of another. ‘Correspondances’ holds a prominent niche in the French literary pantheon, in the history of Romanticism and Symbolism, and in the relations of literature and philosophy. Instead of reviewing the wealth of interpretations that the sonnet has sustained, for purposes ought to see how translation, thematized mysteriously in the first four quatrains, returns to the tenth line as if from an unconscious of Catlin’s American landscapes.