A Comparison between Literary Metaphor and Cinematic Metaphor With examples from Persian Poetry

Since the history of film adaptation in storytellercinema goes back

to its earliest days, many film critiques have compared the adaptations

to their literary sources. Such researches are also conducted in

universities of Iran and in the previous decade, and some critiques

have viewed it in retrospect, that is they considered the potentiality of

a literary work for adaptation. With this approach at hand, we can

study the function of metaphor in the images used in Persian poetry.

Following Aristotle, traditional rhetoric defines metaphor as a word

which is used in place of another word on the basis of similarity. This

definition which emphasizes word, and in greatest extent sentence, is

different from the definitions which are influence of by the platonic

romantic views; since metaphor in such views has a organic relation

with the whole language, and is the generator of an active imagination

which should transfer meaning from an object to another one. With

the expansion of this theory in twentieth century and its detailed

formulation at the hand of structural linguists, metaphor is believed to

be a process which essentially is carried out in language, and not only

transfer meaning but it creates meaning by causing interaction

between two things which lead to the creation of a third thing.

Comparing literary metaphor with cinematic metaphor on the basis of

an Aristotelian view is difficult, because metaphor in this view is

based on word, and word is the building blocks of spoken language

which is essentially different from the audiovisual media of cinema.

But if we consider metaphor in whole and as the basic element of

thought, spoken language and non-spoken language can reestablished

their relations. In this view, the interaction of literary metaphor of

Persian poetry and cinematic metaphors is defined through the process

of "transformation of aesthetic elements" and with "finding

equivalents for stylistic elements" in two medias.