第23页 Understanding as translation

The classic is the only total revolutionary: he is the first to burst not into that silent sea- language being rigorously coterminous with man- but into the terra incognita of symbolic expression, of analogy, of allusion, of simile and ironic counterpoint. We have histories of massacre and deception, but none of metaphor. We cannot accurately conceive what it must have been like to be the first to compare the colour of the sea with the dark of the wine or to see autumn in a man's face. Such figures are new mappings of the world, they recognize our habitation in reality. When the pop song moans that there is no new way of saying that I am in love or that her eyes are full of stars, it touches one of the main nerves in Western literature.