For more than forty years, I have saved some of the picture books which I read as a child. They are so beautiful, and so memory-rich, that I can’t bear to part with them. I still have the Golden Press edition of The Little Mermaid (1966) by Hans Christian Andersen which I received as a holiday gift when I was seven or eight years old. That edition, printed and bound in Japan, has a 3-D picture on the cover: a yellow mermaid suspended in tropical blue water amongst coral and fish. If I tilt the book up and down, the fish waver back and forth.
I feel that same wonder and delight as I hold a brand new book (April 2008) for younger readers: Side by Side: New Poems Inspired by Art from Around the World edited by Jan Greenberg. Yes, that’s right–a collection of ekphrastic poetry for middle-school and junior high students. Side-by-side on facing pages appear a color reproduction of the artwork, the ekphrastic poem in its original language, and a translation of the poem into English. The artworks range from paintings (oil, murals, etc.) to statues (bronze and sandstone) to photographs to mixed media to coffins to wooden figurines to porcelain discs.
Ms. Greenberg has adopted a sophisticated organizational scheme for her book. She divides the contents into four sections in accordance with some established stances of ekphrasis: description, envoicing, narration, and mediation (what the author calls, respectively, Impressions, Voices, Stories, and Expressions). One poem provides an embodiment of ekphrasis that I have never seen before. The poem “Turner to His Critic” by Grace Nichols dramatizes a refutation by the painter J.M.W. Turner to an art critic who dismissed one of his paintings as “soapsuds and whitewash.” In the poem, the affronted painter tells his critic that, “even the sea can see…/That this work is a masterpiece.”
I have yet to find such a far-ranging, multicultural collection of ekphrastic poetry written for adults. In this book, thirty-three countries on six continents are represented. Biographies of the poets, translators, and artists are also included. Ms. Greenberg’s volume sets a fine example. I hope that eventually, someone else compiles a similar collection for grown-ups. Until that book appears, I will savor this juvenile edition.
Perhaps the origins of ekphrasis are not, after all, in mature classic works like the eighteenth chapter of Homer’s Iliad. Perhaps, instead, ekphrasis is just our adult term for that affection which we had, as children, for the pairing of beautiful words with beautiful images.
