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

instances of ekphrasis will play a central role for the plot or a characterization in a
narrative text or film, or constitute the main subject of a poem.
There are few examples of this type of ekphrasis in poetry, since most
poetic ekphrases go beyond description. If it occurs in poetry, it is likely to
represent only part of the poem, which then moves into the third or fourth
category of ekphrasis. This is the case for example, in Günter Kunert’s “Wenn die
Vernunft schläft, kommen die Ungeheuer hervor,” a poem on Goya’s Capricho
plate 43, The Sleep of Reason brings forth monsters. 62 It starts out as a depictive
ekphrasis in its first eight lines, describing the position in which the man sits at
the table, and how he is surrounded and attacked by “hawks” “bats” and “owls”
who intrude from the background of the etching. However, in the next stanza, the
poem moves into a dramatic ekphrasis, which continues throughout the rest of the
poem.
Examples of depictive ekphrasis abound in prose works. Mario Vargas
Llosa’s Gauguin novel El Paraíso en la otra esquina (The Way to Paradise, 2003)
contains several instances of it. 63 At the end of the novel and shortly before his
death on a remote Tahitian island, Gauguin reflects on the paintings he has done
in the past couple of years, describing his personal favorite, La hermana de
caridad:
Una monjita de la misión católica contrastaba su figura arrebujada en
tocas, hábitos y velos, símbolo del terror al cuerpo, a la libertad, a la
desnudez, al estado de Naturaleza, con ese mahu semidesnudo que exhibía
62 Günter Kunert, “Zu Radierungen von Goya,” Tagwerke, Gedichte, Lieder, Balladen (Halle:
Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 1961) 85-88.
63 Mario Vargas Llosa, El Paraiso en la otra esquina (Bogota, Colombia: Alfaguara, 2003). The
Way to Paradise, trans. Natasha Wimmer (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003).
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