Getting the Picture

The Ekphrastic Principle in Twentieth-Century Spanish Poetry

Bibliographic Data

ID9867402
AuthorsSylvia R Sherno, Margaret Persin, Margaret H Persin
Year1999
Volume82
Issue4
Pages771
Publication date1999-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueHispania (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0018-2133 • E-ISSN: 2153-6414
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/346350
OpenAlexW2322439115
LanguageEN
Citations received5

Getting the Picture. The Ekphrastic Principle in Twentieth-Century Spanish Poetry. By Margaret H. Persin. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP. London: Associated UP, 1997. 257 pages. Ekphrasis once meant giving voice to the mute art (79) but in her groundbreaking study Margaret Persin demonstrates how twentiethcentury poetry uses ekphrasis as a strategy to overcome ... a deficiency in the power of its discourse (134). For Persin herself, an ekphrastic poetic is one: makes reference to a visual work of art, whether real or imagined, canonized or uncanonized, and thus allows that art object, in the object of (artistic) desire, to `speak for itself' within the problematically ruptured framework of the poetic text (18). Indeed, Persin demonstrates that ekphrastic texts negotiate a complex web of voids and gaps, as signs try to mesh with systems, Self with Other, sender with receiver, and creator with created. In her chronologically-arranged analysis-from Manuel Machado's 1901 portrait of Felipe IV to Jenaro Talens' 1985 juxtaposition of poetry and photography in La mirada extranjera-Persin selects poems that grapple with various arts. In his portrait poem Felipe IV, Machado conflated two of Velazquez' paintings, Persin argues, and his verbal descriptions never totally grasp the art object, which always remains exterior to them. His seemingly innocent descriptions, therefore, reveal the truthful fraudulence and fraudulent truth of all representation (52). Persin next turns her gaze on Alberti and his awe of Picasso. She argues that we admire Alberti's simultaneous success and failure in making visible Picasso's art in and through the medium of language (65). Her impressive readings show how Alberti in words matches the multiperspectivalism of Picasso's canvases. She ingeniously compares Almejo todo, escobo, aljofifo, limono to Picasso's Bull's Head-made from discarded handlebars and bicycle seat (79). Moreover, she discusses here and elsewhere how ekphrastic poems problematize the concept of the frame (85). Persin next turns her attention to Gloria Fuertes and Carmen Martin Gaite. Persin argues that these are liminal poets who parody the patriarchal mode and allow the female gaze and voice to make themselves known. She offers an elaborate and fascinating reflection on two of Fuertes' poems, and on Martin Gaite's Todo es un cuento roto en Nueva Yorkwhich ends up in Edward Hopper's Hotel Room, and which manifests Martin Gaite's self-possessed view of her Self as potential Other, free of the ruled impositions of patriarchy (102)

Art · Literature · Poetry · Philosophy · Visual Culture and Art Theory

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