Intersemiotic Grammatical Translation of Visual – Verbal Ekphrasis

Relying on the functional approach, Halliday's Functional Linguistics and the Visual Grammar of Kress and Leeuwan (2006), the present study examines two ekphrasis: William Carlos Williams' verbal efrasis from " Landscape with the Fall of Icarus " and visual ekphrasis of Mehdi Zamni from a poem by Ali Akbar Rashidi entitled "Habit". In the first ekphrasis, there was a reversal from visual (painting) to verbal (poem), and in another from verbal (poem) to painting (visual).
At the interactional layer, painting expresses the inattention of represented participants to the fall and drowning of Icarus through a nontransitive gaze; That is, through the non-interactional perspective of the represented participants (farmer, shepherd, man on the shore, the inhabitants of the ship) that no vector has connected them to each other and to the side which Icarus is sinking. There is no exchange of views between the represented participants, otherwise there should have been a commotion. The relationship between farmer, the shepherd, and the man on the shore is non-transitive so that everyone is doing his own job, in connected with his own particular subject matter (the farmer looks to the miner, the shepherd to nature, and the man on the shore is bent over the water on the beach). In fact, their figure in the painting is merely representational; something is represented for information and thinking.
Painter has located the place the Icarus is sinking in the background of the image and has minimized the Icarus foot so that the viewer hardly can see it, and perhaps only with the help of the title. Nontransitive perspective is dominant in both interactional layers (represented participants' interaction with each other and the viewer's interaction with the represented participants). Since the represented participants do not look at each other and to the place which Icarus is drowning, the beach space can be read according as this: Everyone was doing their own job. Lack of interaction is expressed in the verbal text with the mental process, with adjective "unnoticed". Therefore, what the image represents in the form of an interactional layer is expressed by the verbal text in the ideational metafunction and mental process.
In the verbal text, the constraint of time, the relative clause, and the constraint of quality are the three structural elements that have made interctional representation in the verses "when Icarus fell", "a splash quite unnoticed this was Icarus drowning" and "unsignificantly off the coast there were". These elements have indicated the fall of Icarus, its insignificance, his drowning, and the ignorance of others. The painting indicates the concept of falling through the layer of title, otherwise no one might attend to the side of Icarus just through his eyes (vector of looking). Also the painting has indicated the insignificance of Icarus' drowning through placing Icarus in the background. Thus, the visual text to represent verbal words "insignificance" and "inattention" the elements of composition (perspective and background); In other words, it represents insignificance by placing Icarus's sinking in the background and inattention through the represented participants not looking at each other and not looking at Icarus's sinking.
The comparative analysis showed that the verbal text can generalize different elements within the verbal text because it has the capacity for generalization and abstract expression; another words, verbal syntax causes less representational elements to be reflected in the text. For example, it expresses different objects as water, rocks, ships, water space, etc. only by the word "beach", at the same time, the verbal text provides more detailed details than the visual text at interactional layer.
The present study showed that ekphrasis occurs in two forms (visual-verbal and verbal-visual), and in each of them, part of the meaning is represented in target text (ekphrastic text) and part remains in the source text. In the painting "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus", there are many representational elements that are not reflected in the verbal text (ekphrastic text). In this way, what is represented in the image through representational layer, in the verbal text it is done in the form of ideational and interpersonal metafunction.
This result shows that what is represented in each ekphrasis is a metafunctional translation. Thus, metafunctions and layers of meaning, despite being tools of analysis, should not be considered as stereotypes, because all three metafunctions can do representation and make meaning, and at the level upper than the clause, logical metafunction also makes representation in both verbal and visual representations. Logical meaning in the image is obtained by adding the meaning of different layers.
Examining Mehdi Zamani's Ekphrasis entitled "Habit", the informative structure is changed, as what is "given" in the verbal text appears "new" or the "canon" in the painting and vis versa.  For example, sparrow is an adjective in the verbal text and represents "I am a sparrow" but in the painting, the sparrow is represented as an actor which represents the concept of "the sparrow is waiting". In the verbal text (poem) the sparrow is at the beginning of the clause (theme) and represents the mental process but in the painting it represents an interactional meaning.