Transfer: From the Visual to the Textual in Elena Guroʼs Work

The focus of this essay is on the role literary etudes and miniature sketches play in Guroʼs work as a whole. I shall ask how the representation of the world around her mediates a distinctive transfer of visual images into verbal images. How does Guroʼs visual, and aural attentiveness, as manifested in the fragmentariness of the narration itself, reflect the sensibility of her narrative persona, “a female flaneur”, who is a modern woman strolling along city streets? A whole taxonomy of sights and discordant sounds forms a “picture” of the city street and the city itself. An arsenal of visual signs that Guroʼs persona observes signals a transfer from the acoustic to the visual. Guroʼs work, moreover, provides numerous examples of the transfer of “painterly” devices to poetry, an important factor in the poetics of the prose poem. Her painterʼs/writerʼs eye envisions for her reader a unique consciousness of scene, while helping us to translate and interpret the “text” of the city and nature, their metaphors and representations.