ABSTRACT
The ‘heresy of paraphrase’, it used to be called, by sage and serious critics; ‘heresy’, because the language and content of a literary work are indivisible, and there is no separable quantum of ‘meaning’ that can be made more accessible by altering the words in which meaning is couched. For foreign students especially, the paraphrase of quite a small part of a poetic text may prove a daunting task, since the crudest essay in reformulation requires a refined linguistic competence that the learner does not always possess. The scope of literary utterances is worth a moment’s consideration. One well known feature of literary texts is that while they may intensively state a case, they also have the inherent power to illuminate a universe of parallels, analogues and variants. The point of the mimetic paraphrase may be to have fun at the expense of the original, that is, it may be frankly parodic, an exercise in literary vandalism.
