A Comparison between Literary Metaphor and Cinematic Metaphor With examples from Persian Poetry

Since the history of film adaptation in storytellercinema goes backto its earliest days, many film critiques have compared the adaptationsto their literary sources. Such researches are also conducted inuniversities of Iran and in the previous decade, and some critiqueshave viewed it in retrospect, that is they considered the potentiality ofa literary work for adaptation. With this approach at hand, we canstudy the function of metaphor in the images used in Persian poetry.Following Aristotle, traditional rhetoric defines metaphor as a wordwhich is used in place of another word on the basis of similarity. Thisdefinition which emphasizes word, and in greatest extent sentence, isdifferent from the definitions which are influence of by the platonicromantic views; since metaphor in such views has a organic relationwith the whole language, and is the generator of an active imaginationwhich should transfer meaning from an object to another one. Withthe expansion of this theory in twentieth century and its detailedformulation at the hand of structural linguists, metaphor is believed tobe a process which essentially is carried out in language, and not onlytransfer meaning but it creates meaning by causing interactionbetween two things which lead to the creation of a third thing.Comparing literary metaphor with cinematic metaphor on the basis ofan Aristotelian view is difficult, because metaphor in this view isbased on word, and word is the building blocks of spoken languagewhich is essentially different from the audiovisual media of cinema.But if we consider metaphor in whole and as the basic element ofthought, spoken language and non-spoken language can reestablishedtheir relations. In this view, the interaction of literary metaphor ofPersian poetry and cinematic metaphors is defined through the processof "transformation of aesthetic elements" and with "findingequivalents for stylistic elements" in two medias.