Abstract:
This paper examines the problems of commensurability of diverse arts, focussing on the problem of translating a poem into musical form or vice versa. It ca n be misleading to presume a distinction, as Hofstadter did, between a literal and a figural translation, the spirit of one artistic form and its ' letter'. Any relationship of artistic style, with its discipline' (method of analysis and disinterpretation ) requires a rethinking of traditional notions of the autonomy of representational discourse. I propose a notion of embodied imagination or metaphor which allows us to make sense literally of multiple arts and their frames of discourse.