Copyright by Laura Mareike Sager 2006 - The University of Texas at ...

Supper, a Crucifixion), but produce multiple interconnections and cross-
references. They thus function as “abbreviated reference to a whole pictorial set
of works, which silently refers the reader to the original itself for details and
extensions” (“Verbal” 42).
The most radical re-definition, and most significant one for my purposes,
has been proposed in 2000 by Siglind Bruhn in her book on Musical Ekphrasis
and an article based on the introduction of that book a year later. 28 She expands
Clüver’s definition of ekphrasis to refer to the “representation in one medium of a
real or fictitious text composed in another medium” (Musical 8; “Concert” 559).
Musical ekphrasis can thus transpose either a painting or a literary text, and the
individual studies in her book are in fact devoted to both cases. Bruhn’s re-
definition is particularly relevant since it contends that the “recreating medium
need not always be verbal, but can itself be any of the art forms other than the one
in which the primary ‘text’ is cast” (Musical 7-8). In a footnote, she points out
that Claus Clüver, in his article “On Intersemiotic Transposition” has interpreted
Charles Demuth’s painting I Saw the Figure Five in Gold as intersemiotic
transposition of William Carlos William’s poem “The Great Figure.” 29 Not only
do the third and fourth lines of the poem provide the title of the painting, but the
painting does in fact transpose the poem, including its past tense, into pictorial
language. Wendy Steiner, in Pictures of Romance provides another example of
28 Siglind Bruhn, Musical Ekphrasis: Composers Responding to Poetry and Painting (Hillsdale,
NY: Pendragon Press, 2000) and “A Concert of Paintings: Musical Ekphrasis in the 20th
Century,” Poetics Today 22:3 (2001): 551-605.
29 Claus Clüver, “On Intersemiotic Transposition,” Art and Literature I, ed. Wendy Steiner, spec.
issue of Poetics Today 10.1 (1989): 55-90.
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