Translating The girls of Balthus

Abstract

What is the point in trying to write something that is irreducible to another form of expression? The question appears at the end of a noteworthy short story by the Brazilian writer Sergio Sant’Anna, which painstakingly describes a series of paintings by the Polish-French artist Balthasar Balthus. These paintings depict young girls in ambiguous poses, between innocence and lusciousness. The present paper investigates translation processes between painting and literature, through the topos of childhood, taken as a borderline zone and a passageway between the domains of silence and of language. To that end, the paper traces an intellectual itinerary that stems from the Freudian theory on aphasia.

Keywords

• tradução
• infância
• afasia
• ekphrasis