El proceso del desarrollo económico local en Bolivia

Figural and literal, we said. It is for sure possible to conceive literature as the result of a special way of using language. Everybody can declare their love, but only a poet can write a sonnet at the same time. Literature seems to be a way of telling something by means of figural resources and not di- rectly: “In the middle of the path of our life” (Dante) would just be an elabo- rate manner of saying “at the age of 35”.

Likewise, we can say that to describe life as the “following a wall with sharp pieces of glass on it” is literary, while to tell our existential destiny as the sequence of birth, growth, struggle and death is just philosophical or perhaps sadly realistic. As it is often specified, if the first expression is liter- ary, the second is literally. Therefore, we would have a state of affairs (the fact that life is so and so) and then several descriptions which try to fit the structure of this state of affairs. One of those descriptions would grasp the fact as it is, so that the corresponding sentence should work as the basic meaning of all the other statements. Another description is that of the wall just quoted. If this remark were correct, then all the figural sentences related to a basic descriptive statement whichever would be reducible to this latter, with no loss of semantic power. Expressions should be reducible, just as it happens in mathematics with and , which, in what is called their “normal form”, are indeed nothing but x – 1 = 0. Tempt- ing, of course, but wrong. In literature it is impossible to reduce a sentence to an alleged “normal form”, because literary language is incommensurable to the ordinary systems of signs. “Life is suffering” is not the same of saying that life is “following a wall with sharp pieces of glass on it”.

Again, the famous verse composed by Gertrude Stein “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” is not the same of saying “a rose is a rose” (just once), or worse: “a rose is a flower”, even despite the reminder of the law of identity, stated by the author herself. There is something more, in literary expression, than the alleged basic meaning of the words used. Within literature nothing is additional, and there are no accidental repetitions or unproductive embel- lishments; thus whatever is said must be taken into account and must have a role in the general task of expression.

Actually, the sentence “following a wall with sharp pieces of glass on it” is not as literary as the original sequence of words used by Montale. The so-called synonymous expressions lay on a line without a clear discrete

articulation, a line, however, whose extremes are not equivalent at all.23 This is the reason why we need the original arrangement of signs in the proper cultural context to be sure that we can feel the poetry:24

E andando nel sole che abbaglia sentire con triste meraviglia com’è tutta la vita e il suo travaglio in questo seguitare una muraglia che ha in cima cocci aguzzi di bottiglia. (Montale 1990: 30)

Literariness involves figurativeness, but literariness is not equivalent to the figural use of the signs. Some kind of rhetoric elaboration of the message is a necessary condition for having a piece of literature, but it is not a suffi- cient condition too. If we deal with Montale’s image, we can express a similar sense through a different arrangements of signs, we can also try to explicate what is at issue in those verses, but it is not a priori true that we will lose the aesthetic halo of the passage. This halo, in fact, emerges from the structure of the speech with all its centripetal and centrifugal links. No word is ever innocent and standard, even if it is possible to define some ba- sic meanings of our linguistic tools.

Therefore, it is not a fault of the paraphrase as such that makes us lose the essence of literature in expressing the meaning of a text in certain other words. We can destroy the figurative pattern of a literary text and save the literariness of the text at the same time. Indeed, a special case of paraphrase is translation, and I think that we may grasp the essence of a foreign literary text through its (good) translations. But if we paraphrase a literary text with the only intent of making its meaning more transparent, putting between brackets any formal peculiarity, then the text ceases being what it is and

23

The same happens in mathematics, for example with 3,14 and .

24

As it seems possible to derive from the studies on synesthesia carried out by Ramachandran (2003) and developed by Cytowick and Eagleman (2009), to understand a figurative speech is most likely a neuropsychological matter. To feel the poetry, on the contrary, is a much more complex task, which involves skills of cultural as well as linguis- tic type: the essence of literature implies the recognition of a figurative language at work, but is not limited to this simple thing. The intertextual echoes of literature (see Corti 1997: 15-32) are something that occurs in a discursive horizon in which the aesthetic dimension of the text is something that makes system with the background knowledge of the speakers and with the tradition of those complex statements that a culture considers eminent. In con- clusion, it is only because the linguistic heritage is largely the sediment of the evolution of literature that the text in the original linguistic form usually warrants the production of lit- erary harmonics more easily than that in translation.

becomes something else: a more or less complex statement that is related to the literary text at stake, but which at the same time is radically different from it.