Abstract
AbstractWhy is there a long-standing debate about paraphrase in poetry? Everyone agrees that paraphrase can be useful; everyone agrees that paraphrase is no substitute for the poem itself. What is there to disagree about? Perhaps this: whether paraphrase can specify everything that counts as a contribution to the meaning of a poem. There are, we say, two ways to take the question; on one way of taking it, the answer is that paraphrase cannot. Does this entail that there is meaning mysteriously locked in a poem, meaning that cannot be represented in any way other than via the poem itself? If that were so it would have profound implications for poetry’s capacity to convey insight. We suggest reasons for thinking that the entailment does not hold. Throughout, we connect the traditional debate over paraphrase, which has largely been conducted within the fields of philosophy and literary theory, with recent empirically oriented thinking about the communicability of meaning, represented by work in pragmatics. We end with a suggestion about what is to count as belonging to meaning, and what as merely among the things that determine meaning.
Highlights
What is at stake when people debate the heresy of paraphrase? That paraphrase is sometimes useful? No one denies that
It is an idea subject to one of those scope ambiguities loved by philosophers: IPweak: No paraphrase can express everything that belongs to the meaning of the poem; IPstrong: Something that belongs to the meaning of a poem cannot be expressed in any paraphrase
What we have proposed is a pathway to the negative answer which shows some promise; it depends on distinguishing between strong and weak versions of the idea that poetic meaning is not capturable in paraphrase and recognizing that the weaker version is all we need
Summary
We take a paraphrase to be any attempt to convey the meaning or part of the meaning of a poem. Some of the examples given may be understood as straightforward assertions: the paraphraser asserts that, in Aurora Leigh, Aurora and Romney are united at last, that “Great Tom” in At High Table refers to the bell, that Herrick’s poem stresses a clash between the Christian and pagan world views. Paraphrastic utterances are of many kinds, and we do not presume to set general limits on what counts as a contribution to paraphrase Does all this unclarity mean there is no point in having the debate we are embarked on? Treating the paraphrase in this provisional, distanced way is sensible even (perhaps especially) if the paraphrase is your own attempt at saying what the poem means The fact, if it is one, that paraphrase does not rise to the status of acceptable testimony does not show paraphrase to be useless for elucidating the poem’s meaning. As with colors on a dispositional view, the concept of poetic meaning is the concept of something available to a suitably placed interpreter
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