Clothing Death: Harry Clarke’s Designs for Edgar Allan Poe’s Dead Brides, from Word to Image

Abstract

This article considers how the famous Irish stained glass artist and book illustrator Harry Clarke “translated” the works of Edgar Allan Poe from literature to image with particular attention to the attire worn by the dead brides in Poe’s tales “Ligeia” and “Morella.” The article takes as its point of departure the theories on the translation of poetry set out by Walter Benjamin in his famous essay “The Task of the Translator” (1921), where he argued that more than revealing what the original is about, the translator should reveal “its manner of meaning,” and that in the translation journey, the translator’s own language would be broadened and deepened by its contact with the translated one. The article explains how the work of Clarke on Poe can be understood as such a translation, claiming that in addition to enriching his own visual language, Clarke enriched the source text as well, by adding to it a crucial lexicon absent from the original, in the form of the dress of the dead brides of the tales, and that of their lovers, which are a central element of Clarke’s images, and unique among those of other visual translators of Edgar Allan Poe.