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Questioning Poetry’s Uselessness: An Intersemiotic Translation of Poetry is Useless

Summary:

The investigation intends to make an inter-semiotical analysis of the graphic novel Poetry

is Useless by Anders Nielsen. The so called ‘graphic novel’, in lieu of a better name, is, among

other things, a sketchbook-travel diary notebook that registers Nielsen’s creative process as a

cartoonist, poet, and illustrator. As diary it helps us catch glimpses of the artist’s day to day and

usual commonplaces related to religious, political, and literary topics. All of these meditations

are inserted in the form of comic strips, poems, anecdotes and portraits of real people or mythical

animals.

Essentially, seen from a semiotic standpoint, wording is an attempt of bringing forth

matters of another nature into language. This is also the case of poetry. The fact that there is no

definitive wording of reality is confirmed in the constant renewal of human language, new

metaphors and ways of putting into words not only a description of our surrounding reality but

infinite representations of all that the human mind has imagined since the dawn of time. For Eco,

this is the same as an accumulation of lies, of forms that stand for something else i.e. the sign.

The signifier falsifies the signified in so far it abstracts certain aspects of the real object in order

to be communicated. In this representational process the signified is eroded so it can be

effectively translated and communicated through a signifier.

The argument that in wording or translation an idea can lose its authenticity has its roots

in Platonic Idealism. After all, it was Plato who exiled all poets from his utopic republic. It was

his belief that poetry falsified the ideas it intended to represent. For ideas are of another nature,

they belong to a world much superior to the mundanity of ours. In this sense, for Plato, poetry
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was useless. As such, these premises are not unfamiliar to any poet or artist familiarized with art

theory. The supposition of the ineffability of poetic forms is an old debate in literary theory and

criticism. It is also present in translation theory, particularly in the theorization of poetry

translation. And so, it inevitably leads us to ask ourselves: if there is no one triumphant,

authentic and undeniable form, then what's the point?

Based on Plato’s and Eco’s philosophical notions, this investigation aims to pose

questions such as: Is poetry truly useless? How do we understand the concept of uselessness?

What is the lie Nielsen is telling us through these signs? What is the relation between poetry and

translation? What is the role of literary forms such as the metaphor, the simile and the metonymy

in a translator’s or poet’s creative process?

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Questioning Poetry’s Uselessness: An Intersemiotic Translation of Poetry is Useless

“There is no genuine poetry; there is only, after all, and at best, a place for it.”

̶ The Hatred of Poetry, Ben Lerner

The epigraph above conceals the central discussion of this essay, which aims to spark a

conversation between philosophy, semiotics, translation and poetry by asking: What does it mean

to clear a space for the genuine? Mainly, by making an inter-semiotical translation of the graphic

novel Poetry is Useless, the intention of this analysis is to elucidate the ineffable character that

continues to be attributed to poetry, and how artists like Anders Nilsen reflect on this issue. This

so-called ‘graphic novel,’ in lieu of a better name, is, among other things, a sketchbook-travel

diary that registers Nilsen’s creative process as a cartoonist, poet and illustrator. As a diary it

helps us catch glimpses of the artist’s day to day and usual commonplaces related to religious,

political and literary topics. All these meditations are inserted in the form of the comic strip

format, poems, anecdotes and portraits of people or mythical animals. The theoretical framework

behind this paper includes authors and philosophers such as: Plato, Umberto Eco, Thomas

Sebeok and Ben Lerner, whose theories on the sign and thoughts on poetry can help start a

debate on language, authenticity and the intricacies of the process of representation.

The Poem as A Record of Failure

Anders Nilsen is an American writer and cartoonist whose main works include: Big

Questions, Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow, Dogs and Water and Poetry is Useless. All of these

works experiment with the genre of the ‘graphic novel.’ His projects are remarkable and fresh,

their very content and form introduces the reader into a new multimedia literature: integrating

comic strips and drawings, such as landscapes and portraits, and text through storytelling and
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poems. Poetry is Useless is a great example of literary experimentation; it displays its genius

from the onset by presenting itself as a book within a book, compiling and reproducing pages of

many of the author’s sketchbooks. The distinct sign structure that represents this metaliterary

idea is the clearly marked edges of a photocopied pocket notebook which appears in every page,

notable by the agenda watermarks and the frequent appearance of a ribbon bookmark (FIG. 11).

In an interview by Comics Beat Nilsen is asked about the creative process of the book,

specifically he is questioned about the sketchbook format, and he affirms:

On its face it’s a sketchbook collection, but in a way it’s really not. The idea of a

sketchbook collection is that you’re peeking behind the curtain. You’re getting to

see the artist’s pure process, but all the work in here was done with the audience

in mind… There is this sense that you’re getting a peak behind the curtain and

you’re just rummaging through an artist’s actual sketchbook. But they’re always

curated in some way. They’re giving you this slightly false sense of being on the

inside of the process. (Dueben)

Poetry is Useless compiles various notebooks from 2007 to 2014, in its margins the

reader might find notes on important addresses, phone numbers and dates (FIG. 22). The fact that

these sketchbooks served both as an agenda and an artistic canvas changes the whole nature of

the text. Throughout Nilsen’s book the reader will find many erasures and strikethroughs. These

erasures are not only visible by a thick black mark but are also made in white ink. Semiotically

one can interpret these marks as a sign of hesitation, perhaps it could also denote a mistake,

censorship or even a deliberate redaction for publication purposes. The reader might speculate

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See Appendix.
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See Appendix.
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about the fact that the erasure itself is a modern art form for creating poems, which transforms

and multiplies the meanings of an already existent text by erasing a selection of words to produce

a new text. This is not the case of Poetry is Useless. Nilsen confirms the reason for these marks

in another interview by The Comics Journal: “That’s what I mean about seeing an artist’s mind

at work, you’re seeing me make mistakes and back up and start over and it’s like jazz” (Sobel).

These same erasures appear in one of the very first pages of the book, which contains the central

poem to be analyzed in this essay (FIG. 3):

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FIGURE 3
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This is the first poem of Poetry is Useless, it sets a mise en abîme of similes on what love

is, or rather “is like.” The poem is inserted within a comic strip format; each one of the panels

contains what we will refer to as “verses.” The opening verse “LOVE IS LIKE THE OCEAN”

establishes a relation of likeness between love and the ocean. The following verses develop this

simile further by comparing this emotion to a photograph of the ocean, a drawing of a photo of

the ocean, and a written description of the sound of waves. The first four verses fragment into

poetic images that appeal to various senses. Water flows throughout the poem, recognizing love

in: the data on the melting poles, the image of a whale on the shoreline, a rainy beach and,

finally, a water purification plant.

The trouble with similes is their unwholly representation; there always seems to be

something missing in its proposition, just as it happens in translation. "It's like..." enunciates a

resemblance, a sort of commonality. But that's it, the simile can never aspire to be a genuine

representation of the elements it aims to describe. The poem develops a translation of the

translation of the initial translation, a series of attempts at wording a complex human emotion.

"Love is like the ocean," a feeling into a landscape, "or like a photograph of the ocean,"

landscape into photo, photo into drawing of the photo... representing and translating the

representation onto newer representations endlessly. Reading the final verse can help us

understand the whole: if the black anonymous silhouette concludes “…poetry is useless” it is

because this exercise demonstrates the poem is a futile exercise. The emotion the poetic subject

is attempting to represent is unadaptable to language, every image and comparison turns out to

be insufficient, to be lacking its real implications and totality.

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A Theory of the Lie

For Thomas Sebeok, as exposed in his book Signs, every organism has an inherent built-

in semiosic system, this is, the ability to communicate through the conformation of signs by

verbal and nonverbal mechanisms (3). Semiosis is then the capacity of producing and

understanding signs, of generating and interpreting meaning. Primarily, the function of the sign

is to stand for something else, it is the conceptual abstraction of a determinate referent which is

to be communicated (Sebeok 3). The origin of the semiotic field is placed within Ancient

Greece, founded by the physician Hippocrates to study the symptomatology of certain diseases

and medical states. Then, the study of symptoms moved on properly to the study of signs during

Aristotle's time (Sebeok 4). Eventually, St. Augustine would develop a general categorization of

signs, primordially identifying them as either natural or conventional signs; as well as propose an

innate component of interpretative capacity which enables the process of representation (Sebeok

4). Centuries later, Saussure and Peirce generated an interest in the field for the structures of

signs, which is to say the mechanics of their production and interpretation (Sebeok 5).

Saussure defined the sign as a form “made up of something physical (…)-- which he

termed the signifier; and of the image or concept to which the signifier refers—which he called

the signified” (Sebeok 6). The arbitrary relation between the two entails signification. Whereas

Saussure proposes a dichotomic formulation of the structure of signs, Peirce would organize it in

three main concepts: the representamen, parallel to the signifier; the object, an entity located in

the real-world; and the interpretant, the meaning that one derives from the sign (Sebeok 6). For

Peirce the interpretation of the sign requires a process of negotiation by the interpreting sign-

user. Saussure tends to a dichotomic conceptualization whereas Peirce elaborates a triangular

scheme. Both theoretical approaches intend to develop a comprehensive structure of the process
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of signification. Essentially, their purpose is to investigate how meaning is created and

communicated, as well as to enquire on the nature of the linguistic sign and how it influences our

views of the world (Sebeok 8).

On the other hand, in his book A Theory of Semiotics, Umberto Eco defines semiotics as

“the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie” (7). This definition will be

recurrent throughout the text, going so far as to call this study “a theory of the lie.” What Eco

means to say is not exactly that all signs lie, but that the very process of signification generates

an ambiguous gap through which all types of motives and meanings can intervene; thus, the sign

contains the potential for a lie, as it stands for something else which is absent, leaving an open

space where the creativity of the enunciating subject can create all sorts of connections (Eco, 59).

This dynamic adjusts to Pierce’s scheme insofar an object abstracted into a representamen will

be intervened by multiple interpretants.

The concept of the lie is not only pertinent to ethical philosophy or moral ideologies; in

the case of poetics, the concept acquired pivotal relevance ever since Plato conceived his famous

Republic. After all, he banished poets from his ideal city for “lying.” In Plato’s Ion a dialogue is

sustained on the matter of poetic inspiration as opposed to the mastery of poetic technique.

Socrates argues that many of the poets who pretend to be knowledgeable on the topics they

poeticize are in fact only possessed by the divine and not actually experts on the subjects they are

called upon to sing about (Ion 530c). This argument is further developed by Socrates through the

metaphor of a ring chain:

A poet, further, is not a knower, but a kind of transmitter of a divine spark; he or

she is “an airy thing, winged and holy” (534b3–4). The spark is generated by the

god, and is passed down through the poet to the rhapsode and then to the
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audience. In Socrates' unforgettable simile, the relationship of the god to poet to

rhapsode to audience is like a magnetized sequence of rings, each of which sticks

to the next thanks to the power of the divine magnet at the start (535e7–536b4), as

though they were links in a chain (as we might put it). (Griswold)

This process allows the divine message to be transmitted effectively, as there is no actual

intervention by the poet, and he or she is merely an expressive instrument. However, the process

subject to examination in this essay is different on many accounts. Mainly, it is not the matter of

divinity which we aim to discuss, but the matter of reality and its semiotical adaptations.

Essentially, seen from a semiotic standpoint, wording is an attempt of bringing forth matters of

another nature into language. The fact that there is no way to definitively word reality is

confirmed in the continual renewal of human language; there are constantly new metaphors and

ways of putting into words not only a description of our surrounding reality but infinite

representations of all that the human mind has imagined since the dawn of time. For Eco, this is

the same as an accumulation of lies, of forms that stand for something else i.e. the sign. The

signifier falsifies the signified insofar that it abstracts certain aspects of the real object in order to

be communicated. In this representational process the signified is eroded so it can be effectively

translated and communicated through a signifier.

This is also the case of poetry. In this text right now this very complication exists, as the

signifier “poetry” poses many difficulties when we take into account the different ways this art

form was experienced by all of the authors in consideration. Although in the context of this essay

the noun is meant to designate a general concept, it is important to note that philosophers such as

Plato faced a completely different dynamic. In Plato’s Greece, poetry was sung rather than

written, it belonged to a long oral tradition and it served an educational and moral purpose as a
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collective experience. Presently, this art form has suffered all sorts of changes, becoming, in a

sense, evermore conceptual and individual. In our time, poetry is read and massively reproduced,

it has multiplied its form by adapting from verse to prose and other mixed forms.

The argument that in wording, or translating, an idea can lose its authenticity has its roots

in Platonic Idealism. It was Plato’s belief that poetry falsified the ideas it intended to represent.

For ideas are of another nature, they belong to a world much superior to the mundanity of ours.

In this sense, for Plato, poetry was useless. As such, these premises are not unfamiliar to any

poet or artist familiarized with art theory. The supposition of the ineffability of poetic forms is an

old debate in literary theory and criticism. It is also present in translation theory, particularly in

the theorization of poetry translation. And so, it inevitably leads us to ask ourselves: if there is no

one triumphant, authentic and definitive form, then what's the point? Are we then, only left with

lies?

Mira Rosenthal asks herself this very question. Her article “New Poetry in Translation:

Why Poets Translate” explores the idea that there are no definitive translations of poetry. She

begins developing this conception by introducing the reader to the collection of poems Ghazals

of Ghalib of the Indian poet Mirza Ghalib, published in 1971, which compiles different

translations by American poets such as W. S. Merwin, Adrienne Rich, William Stafford and

Mark Strand. These poems are translated from the Urdu language, a Persianized standard register

of the Hindustani language. The ghazal is the basic poetic form of Urdu poetry, resembling that

of occidental amatory poems or odes. Ghazals of Ghalib accumulates diverse approximations of

the same poem by many translators “in favor of creating an intense impression of Ghalib’s mind

and moral universe” (Rosenthal 7). This method also gives us a sense of the translator’s view on

words, poetic form and the relation itself between poetry and translation. By exposing the
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various approaches a translator makes to a given poem, Rosenthal demonstrates the effect that

multiple translations can have on a reader. For, in the process of translation certain elements are

omitted or emphasized in function of the text’s effectiveness; different translations can help the

reader gain a better understanding of the expressive implications of the text, learning from one

translation what is missing from another.

One could argue, like Allen Grossman, that there is an essential difference between the

“virtual poem” and the “actual poem.” The premise of this distinction is that the poem is never

anything other than “a record of failure:”

In an essay on Hart Crane, Grossman develops his notion of a “virtual poem”—

what we might call poetry with capital “P,” the abstract potentiality of the

medium as felt by the poet when called upon to sing—and opposes it to the

“actual poem,” which necessarily betrays that impulse when it joins the world of

representation. (Lerner 9)

It appears one can only conclude that the poet is a tragic figure, doomed to replicate but

the echoes of a song in the distance. If so, then language is the curse and poets as well as non-

poets are forever condemned to the insufficiency of words, to roam the margins that separates the

virtual from the actual by accumulating lie after lie. Does this imply it is useless? Should we then

become mutes and indifferent to the beauty of this art form so as to not commit sacrilege? Not at

all. As Jorge Luis Borges asserts, the definitive text is a notion pertaining to that of exhaustion or

indoctrination (90). In its uselessness, its resistance to uniformity and absoluteness, poetry finds

richness and sophistication. Its genuineness lies in its disposition to endless possibilities, if this

makes it useless, then so be it.

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Appendix

FIGURE 1
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FIGURE 2
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Works Cited

Borges, Jorge Luis. “Las versiones homéricas”. Discusión. Alianza Editorial, 1995.

Dueben, Alex. “Interview: Anders Nilsen Argues that “Poetry is Useless”. ComicsBeat. 27 Oct.

2015. https://www.comicsbeat.com/interview-anders-nilsen-argues-that-poetry-is-

useless/. Accessed: 1 Nov. 2019

Eco, Umberto. A theory of Semiotics. Indiana UP, 1979

Griswold, Charles L., "Plato on Rhetoric and Poetry", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,

Edward N. Zalta (ed.), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2016/entries/plato-rhetoric/.

Lerner, Ben. The Hatred of Poetry. FSG Originals, 2016.

Nilsen, Anders. Poetry is Useless. Drawn & Quarterly, 2015.

Plato. “Ion”. Diálogos I. Translated by J. Calonge Ruiz, E. Lledó Iñigo and C. García Gual.

Gredos, 1985.

Rosenthal, Mira. “New Poetry in Translation: Why Poets Translate”. The American Poetry

Review, Vol. 44, No. 3, pp. 7 -10. Old City Publishing, 2015. Database: JSTOR.

Sebeok, Thomas. Signs: An Introduction to Semiotics. University of Toronto Press, 2001.

Sobel, Marc. “An Interview with Anders Nilsen.” The Comics Journal, 27 May 2015,

www.tcj.com/an-interview-with-anders-nilsen/.