Transfer Operations and Intersemiotic Translation in Alex Robinson’s London by Remo Gramigna

The present paper presents a semiotic analysis of Alex Robinson’s London[1], a short animation inspired by William Blake’s homonym piece of poetry, namely “London”. Animation remediates poetry creating a novel expressive form by means of a heterogeneous range of multimodal semiotic resources. A new world-view arises, parallel to the one envisaged by the source text, although divergent. The aim of this essay is to show and explain the way in which the semiotic resources used by the director Alex Robinson model and shape the discourse and aesthetic of the animation, creating a new, blurred language as well as a novel ‘semiotic reality’. The paper shall focus on the analysis of transfer operations employed in the translation from the source text (Alex Robinson’s London) to the target text (William Blake’s “London”) and it shall consider why and to what extent Robinson’s London is to be considered an intersemiotic translation of Blake’s poem.