The Polyglot Lantern Series:
Translating Metaphors

Becoming bi-lingual at an early age, I associated meaning with pictures rather than words. I have always been fascinated by the process of visual thought that creates and understands metaphors, as I am fascinated by “translation”. As a child I translated in the narrow sense of the word, when I translated the mail from English to Polish for my parents upon our immigration to the United States. Later I became an interpreter for the New York City Criminal Court System.

Eventually I began translating songs that I wrote and performed, using English, Polish, French, and Spanish. Here, however, the meter and rhyme of the new language often demanded new metaphors. Images again became the intermediary bearers of meaning, as they are when we explain something to someone who doesn’t understand a clinical, academic explanation: we resort to metaphor, to image.

Following the train of thought from translation to interpretation, I realized that in a post-modern culture we need to be able to understand and communicate by interpreting metaphor directly into another metaphor. For example: these two proverbs, a Dutch and an American one, have equivalent meanings: “the nobler the tree, the more pliant the twig” and “the bravest soldiers are the most civil to prisoners”.

I believe that in a pluralistic world we are challenged with the ability to see commonality across the various “languages”, be they quotes from pop-culture or literature, religious mythologies, or the jargon of various sciences. In a fractured world, re-establishing connection with the Other depends on harnessing these bits of juxtaposed meaning in bite-size tools, like quotations, that can take place in a conversation.

In the Polyglot lantern series, quotations in different “languages” surround a central light. Like the Rosetta Stone, these lanterns use different “languages” to get at the same meaning. The lantern panels may bear quotes from philosophers, historians, songwriters, novelists, scientists, fictional characters, advertising, etc. Quotations are chosen that express things in different ways, yet these texts can be taken to address the same core meaning or can be understood in terms of each other. Sometimes the quotations address the same subject and tackle that meaning simultaneously, each speaking in the language of their specialty, or they can do it consecutively like people in a conversation, where each inspires the next to go a step further into the subject or draw comparisons with another subject. The light in the center of these lanterns represents the common meaning, or the space of communion at the center of their interaction and understanding. Words themselves, however, don't actually “touch” the meaning: the meaning happens in the mind of the person who understands it, and this meaning is multi-sensory, drawing upon emotions and memories of the individual.

The lantern called Hermeneutical Spiral is named after a method of interpreting spiritual scripture where one breakthrough in understanding leads to a new way of understanding another old text we may be already familiar with, but now we understand it on a new level. This could theoretically lead to deeper and deeper understanding as one progresses around the lantern, or begins a spiritual text over again, or continues studying in another spiritual tradition and recognizes parallels which broaden or illuminate each other.

The arts translate and communicate in a full-bodied language. This language draws upon the web-like neural networks that simultaneously activate different areas of the brain – fusing images, emotion, memory, language, and the senses.

For me, creativity is a functional tool of communication as well as an aesthetic celebration of our innate ability to make connections and interpret across boundaries of language, culture, disciplines of study, and artistic media.

Alexandra Olenka Gadzik
Music and inter-media arts
www.Olenka.com