Langue des oiseaux

To translate bird songs is a complex and paradoxical issue. Ornithologists, poets, artists have used a lot of tricks for this purpose: onomatopoeia, mimologism, musical notation, musical composition, imitation, sonogram, esoteric interpretation, that lie midway between transcription and interpretation. All these techniques recall the translation between the arts. Is the border between species comparable with the frontiers that exist between the arts? Switching from one medium to another, translating a poem into a symphony or a painting into a sculpture: do not these gestures belong to an interspecies communication? This article proposes a survey of the different modes of translating bird songs as an allegory of relationships between mediums.