Bibliographic record
Abstract
In his first-century AD Progymnasmata , Theon defines ekphrasis as bringing “what is illustrated vividly before one’s sight.” Today, the term tends to be more narrowly associated with literary descriptions of visual art. Either way, ekphrasis foregrounds a double representation given that “what [it] represents in words must itself be ‘ representational ’ ” (Heffernan, 1993; my italics). The 2021 book Le tournoiement des ombres ( The Swirling of Shadows , 2024) by American visual artist Holley Chirot and Luxembourg poet/gallerist André Simoncini could prima facie be considered a classic case of ekphrasis, with its 29 poems and equal number of engravings. The images, though, depict a dreamlike, enigmatic world of hybrid creatures in constant metamorphosis: half-beasts, half-humans, and sometimes half-objects that weightlessly form or float in chimerical places. Difficult as it is to “represent” a representationality so inherently precarious, the ekphrastic logic is further problematized by Simoncini’s poetic language in which vocables bounce off one another in a swirling storm of paradoxically hyper-precise lexicality. It is an invitation for the reader to engage with a self-reflexive work, reflect on the precarity of intersemiotic interpretations, and participate in a dialogue addressing the very fundaments of signification. A Luxembourg-Italian hybrid living and working in the multilingual microcosm of Luxembourg City, André Simoncini is also a translator by training. Accordingly, his poetic experimentation partly explains his predilection for precarity and defiance of dominant discourses. Grounded in an understanding of translation as a multidisciplinary balancing act, his work encourages its translators to reassess the fundamentals of their craft. This article retraces a practice-based journey—from recognizing the book’s intrinsic complexity to tackling its stylistic and epistemological challenges— with the aim of mining the work’s heuristic potential and expanding the translator’s conceptual toolkit.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.017 | 0.005 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".