The Artionym as a Translation of Image into the Poetics of a Name, or the Principles of Naming

Abstract

This research discusses the process of naming in the sphere of painting in general and an artwork in particular. We have designated the artwork as a ‘creolised text’ consisting of two parts: non-verbal and verbal (artionym). In the process of its creation, a work of art goes a complex way of encoding the artist’s thoughts and feelings into material form, which involves embodiment of the image, the ‘spirit’ of the painting, into the phenomenon of art with the help of canvas and colours. The verbal part of the creolised text, seeming elementary at first, is in fact quite complex, because in the process of evolution the artionym has turned from a simple description of what is depicted into somewhat philosophical discourse, a unique piece of art history discourse, inscribed in the catalogue of world culture. Moreover, in the process of naming, the artionym is adapted from one language into another, since the new foreign-language word must remain adequate to the source, capable of reflecting not only the artist’s intention and the range of feelings conveyed by them, but also of fitting into a different language system with its associative-verbal links and the parameters of museum discourse. After all, even a comparative analysis of basic human emotions (happiness, resentment, joy, love) demonstrates, according to ethnolinguists, a specific ‘heat of passions’: an Englishman smiles at happiness, while a Russian ‘soars on wings’. Thus, in the process of translation we observe a complex transformation of a visual image into a word-text where other linguistic and non-linguistic spheres of cognition of the picture’s meaning are involved. The translation of an artionym should become understandable to a representative of another language and culture and at the same time be as weighty and complementary to the image of the original picture, and here the translator in the process of naming should take into account both linguistic and cultural traditions of the recipient language.