Intersemiotic translation as a cognitive artifact – from Webern’s serialism to concrete poetry

Abstract

ABSTRACT As a projective augmented intelligence technique, intersemiotic translation works as a predictive tool, anticipating surprising patterns of semiotic events and processes, keeping under control the emergence of new patterns. At the same time, it works as a generative model, providing new, unexpected, data in the target system, and affording competing results which allow the system to generate candidate instances. As a metasemiotic tool, intersemiotic translation creates a metalevel semiotic process, a sign-action which stands for the action of a sign. We explore these ideas taking advantage of one example of intersemiotic translations to verbal poetry – from Webern musical serialism to Poetamenos by Augusto de Campos. Poetamenos is an intersemiotic translation of Webern's music. Some properties translated from Webernian serialism were the abstraction of the musical line, the fragmentation of the melody between low, medium and high registers, attention to proportional durations and the exchange of elements, in addition to temporal symmetries. According to our approach, Poetamenos reveals: (i) a dialectical understanding of the sound-silence tension through the fragmentation, dispersion and accumulation of letters, syllables and lexical structures; (ii) the formal and methodological rigor developed by Webern; (iii) the effects of Webernian serialism in the 1950s, through Hans-Joachim Koellreutter.