By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo

 

“IMITATIO” is not plagiarism, or copying verbatim the work of another artist. It is like innovating on the original recipe of a dish like adobo or pinakbet, in the hands of different chefs, creating their own versions and creating their unique signature tastes.

I chanced upon the term while reading a post shared by Mabule Mogale Zachariah Rapola, entitled, “How Bob Dylan used the ancient practice of ‘imitatio’ to craft some of the most original songs of his time”.

In that article, Raphael Falco, in The Conversation writes, “Although the Latin word imitatio would translate to “imitation” in English, it doesn’t mean simply producing a mirror image of something. The term instead describes a practice or a methodology of composing poetry.

The classical author Seneca used bees as a metaphor for writing poetry using imitatio. Just as a bee samples and digests the nectar from a whole field of flowers to produce a new kind of honey – which is part flower and part bee – a poet produces a poem by sampling and digesting the best authors of the past.”

A basic theoretical framework in the creation of art, mimesis, a Greek word meaning “imitation”, can also mean re-presentation rather than copying, a reproduction of an external reality through art forms. Plato believes that mimesis provides “inferior copies of original forms” but Aristotle, in his Poetics, claimed that mimesis is a fundamental human experience and creates and improves objects of reality, necessary in providing a “symbolic order”.

Rousseau and Lessing, sometime in the 17^th and 18^th centuries, emphasized that mimesis is not only about the external reality or nature, but encompasses inner experiences and emotions.

In 1953, an attempt to expound on the history of culture through representational practices in literature was written by Erich Auerbach in a book entitled Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Both Walter Benjamin and Theodore Adorno believed that mimesis “preceded language but is suppressed or distorted by society”. Mimesis, according to the thinkers of the 20^th century, had more to do with “social practices and inter-subjective relationships” rather than reproducing, or imitating, life.

The interaction between reality, inner experiences and emotion is a natural process in the creation of a poem. It ceases therefore to become a representation, but a totally different creation. In the poem, The River, I was inspired by a painting, John Everett Millais’s Ophelia. The painting is an interaction between the painter with Ophelia, a character from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, surrounded by flowers and plants, singing before she drowns in a river, and appears one with the water, in total acceptance of her own death. In The River, I imagined a woman, trying to stay afloat, uncertain how she will take the idea of drowning.

 

The River

Your river flows, quietly
with the coming
of the morning rain
caressing the tiny openings
of my skin, wanting
to drown very deeply
to depths only darkness
knows,
I stay afloat, too afraid
of the madness
flowing, but it is there
flowing still

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