ABSTRACT
The literary theorist Stanley Fish thinks there is only interpretation. Thus he writes, in a highly readable book 'Interpretation' is not the art of construing, but the art of constructing. There has been no shortage of people willing to take up the challenge of translation or of writing about work in a non-linguistic medium. The translator of poetry may well aim to do more than provide a literal or word-for-word translation, and instead provide a rendering which will afford the reader an experience equivalent to that offered by the original to the reader. There have been art critics who have thought that it is their task in interpreting a painting to a reader that they should offer the reader an experience analogous or comparable to the experience the critic had looking at the painting. In philosophical terms, what Fish is doing is collapsing the real object into the object of knowledge.
