Translating paintings into dance: Marie Chouinard's The Garden of Earthly Delights and the challenges posed to a verbal-based concept of translation

Abstract

This paper analyses the transposition of Bosch's painting The Garden of Earthly Delights (1490-1500) into a contemporary dance performance as an instance of intermedial translation and reflects on the challenges posed by plurisemiotic practices to a verbal-based concept of translation. Situating itself on the breach opened by recent reflections on the need to go beyond Eurocentric conceptualisations in Translation Studies, this paper looks at previous attempts to enlarge the scope of translation theory to encompass non-verbal artefacts. It questions the implications of considering Translation Studies alongside intermediality, and how merging the tools offered by these two disciplines could help us better understand and analyse choreographies such as Marie Chouinard's Jérôme Bosch: Le Jardin des Délices (2016), and conversely, how similar dance performances, understood as instances of intermedial translation, could help us understand translation as a situated, embodied, and creative practice.