From William Carlos Williams’ Poem to My Oil Painting: An Intersemiotic Translation

better frame my translation choices, I aimed to touch upon the poem’s historical context before explaining the specific decisions I made during the translation. Just as historians must evaluate events within their original context rather than judging them by today’s standards, the translator, whose primary goal should be to convey emotion, must also master the period’s feelings and culture. By sharing this historical context, I aimed to help you see the poem through the same lens I used while translating it onto the canvas.

1923, the year this poem was born, was a year of wreckage. In the shadow of the First World War, the human spirit was lost in chaos and gloom. Old truths were shattered; faith in an orderly world had collapsed. Everything became more minimalist and focused on the essence. There was no longer any room for the unnecessary, neither in life nor in poetry.

This is why, as I read the line “glazed with rainwater”, the image of a sunny garden never crossed my mind. There was no light after the rain. Instead, I saw a desolate, misty forest, swamped with melancholy. My canvas, therefore, is not a place of warmth or a cheerful backyard; rather, a landscape of isolation, reflecting the same gloom that once haunted the era in which Williams wrote. At this point, my purpose was to translate this gloomy vision onto the canvas through my paints, capturing the mood of my mind as closely as I could.

With this vision in place, I had to decide on a translation strategy: the specific oil painting technique that would best express this gloom. In Europe, the interwar period was a holistic Modernist Era in which traditional molds were broken across all disciplines, ranging from philosophy to architecture, from painting to literature. At the same time, the impasto technique in oil painting reached its peak during this modernist movement. For this reason, I decided to translate modernist poetry into oil painting by employing the technique that modernism itself brought to the forefront: impasto.

Visualizing the poem's opening, “So much depends upon”, was one of my greatest challenges. I had to ask what exactly almost everything depends on. The next line gives us the answer: the red wheelbarrow. In my translation, the focus had to stay there. To convey this sense of “dependence” and “importance,” I used perspective to manipulate the sense of scale, rendering the house and forest as small, vague details in the distance. This deliberate choice makes the background recede, drawing all the focus onto the red wheelbarrow and the chickens in the foreground.

Then I found myself asking how to translate this red wheelbarrow. What did it truly represent? To me, it represents a grand cycle of life within a small tool. For a farmer, a wheelbarrow is more than a tool; it is the meaning of life that is at the centre of his very existence. It might carry wood to heat a house, water to ease thirst, and it becomes a child’s favorite toy. In short, what turns those wheels is not just the load, but life itself. From a broader perspective, the wheelbarrow is a symbol of a nation’s resistance and a concrete sign of financial freedom. For a society that grows its own food and grinds its own grain, this simple tool is the greatest weapon. Those wheels, turning in every village, are a reaction to dominance by others. As long as that wheel turns, we know there is still trust in the land and hope for the future. Because where there is production, there is hope; and where there is hope, there is a future. So, I painted the wheelbarrow in a vibrant red to make it pop against the misty background. By filling it with fresh grass instead of leaving it empty, I visualized the immense responsibility this small tool carries. In a world that feels misty and desolate, the red wheelbarrow is no longer just a tool; it has become a central figure, bearing the weight of survival and the continuity of life.

Translating the linguistic sign “glazed with rainwater” was my other greatest challenge. How could I evoke the sensation of wetness to anyone looking at the painting? To create that sensation of wetness on the red wheelbarrow, I used the palette knife not as a brush, but as a reflector of light. By applying white highlights over the vibrant red, I aimed to convey the feeling that a surface’s wetness still glistens after the rain.

In essence, with this translation, I aimed to recreate Williams’s poetic world using palette knife and impasto layers. This painting is not just an image of a poem. It is my interpretation to translate the soul and atmosphere of his verbal signs into a non-verbal system.