The raven flights: intersemiotic translations and legacy for media arts

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to develop some comments and comparisons between Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Raven” (1845) and his essay “Philosophy of Composition” (1846), as part of a semiotic translation of that poem, notably in the movie industry, visual arts, HQ and other productions intermedia, with the theoretical and critical pillars initially based on Poe’s poetry itself. In terms of methodology, inter-semiotic and intermediality translation studies played a major role. Among the findings of this article, there is the genetic potential of the crow to interartistical and inter-semiotic transpositions, which are strongly anchored to the Philosophy of Composition, which was and still is an ode to the meticulous artistic work, and, at the same time, the poetic modern tale and an important pre-media trail, to signal and anticipate some features still felt in the literary, visual, and cinematographic arts today. As of Poe´s legacy to the cinema, the first film directors and producers soon realized the strength of the seventh art to translate into few images larger contexts, as the biographical ones, and they also realized the cinematographic potential in merging real and fictional stories, documenting and aestheticizing reality. Cinema was, then, perceived as a new and strong expression, able to generate new meanings and lead the viewer, which was the way Poe used to refer to narrative and poetic literature.