Ékphrasis. Il silenzio dell’immagine e l’intraducibile

The article develops Benjamin's thesis that the "essential core" of translation, stripped of all that is communication, is the untranslatable. This thesis is related to that particular type of translation - the intersemiotic translation (Jakobson) - represented by ékphrasis, a term that indicates the verbal description of an image, in particular of a work of visual art. The limit of the ékphrasis is that at the apex of the exactness and poetic capacity of language it collides with what remains untranslatable, the silent presence of the work, the experience of its aesthetic availability, of which words eventually attest its very absence. The article concludes by examining that particular ékphrasis of Vermeer's View of Delft which appears in the Proustian episode of Bergotte's death. Proust invents an imaginary detail - a petit pan de mur jaune - to show us the invisible, the untranslatable of the image, while evoking the secret motive of each translation, namely the resistance of survival against death.