Does a work's meaning change across translations and cultures?

According to Rick Sorensen, a work's core meaning surprisingly survives translation, culture, and time, though nuances in translation and cultural context matter for deeper understanding.

Who is Rick Sorensen?

Rick Sorensen is an artist, author, and creator of 'Art The Church's Response,' with decades of experience exploring meaning through biblical, historical, and aesthetic lenses.

What is the main debate discussed in this episode?

The episode challenges the popular idea that creator meaning is irrelevant and that everyone's interpretation is equally valid, arguing instead that artist intentions are crucial evidence for understanding artworks.

What examples does Rick use to support his argument?

Rick uses examples from Shakespeare's language nuances, Bach's music, Chinese art principles, and Bhutanese handmade paper to demonstrate that original meaning and intent persist in artworks.

The Hidden Power of a Work’s Intent: What Truly Travels from Maker to Audience

<h1>The Hidden Power of a Work’s Intent: What Travels from Maker to Audience?</h1>Guest: Rick Sorenson Host: Ali Alhajji Podcast: Reading the WorldIntroductionAli Alhajji: Welcome to Reading the World. I’m Ali Alhajji. This is a podcast about literature, language, culture, translation, and the humanities as ways of reading the world more carefully.Today’s conversation asks how a made thing means. Not how to become more creative, but what actually travels from the person who makes a work to the person standing before it. When someone paints, writes, composes, or carves, how much of what they intend survives the crossing to an audience? What happens to that meaning when culture, psychology, faith, and translation come between the maker and the reader?The claim on the table is a strong one: a work carries an intended meaning that is at least partly recoverable. Meaning is neither entirely fixed nor infinitely open, and some interpretations may simply be wrong. My guest makes that claim from the maker’s chair rather than the scholar’s, and today we are going to test how far it holds.Rick Sorenson is an artist and author based in Boise, Idaho. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Montserrat College of Art in Beverly, Massachusetts. In 2023, he published Art: The Church’s Response, which examines creativity and the arts through biblical, historical, and aesthetic lenses.For about thirteen years, Rick ran Far East Art Imports, introducing handmade Bhutanese paper to the American market. That work earned him the name “the Bhutan Paper Guy” within the paper trade. He also writes The Creative Perspective, where he considers how a maker’s intention travels to an audience and where interpretation succeeds or goes wrong.From years of teaching drawing to adults, Rick has also come to argue that fear, more than lack of talent, often blocks creativity. What makes him a genuine interlocutor for this show is that he does not hold his position only by instinct. He engages the argument directly, distinguishes explicit from implicit meaning, and challenges the view that the work’s creator is irrelevant.Rick, welcome.Rick Sorenson: Thank you very much. I’m excited to be here.Does a Work Still Carry Its Maker’s Intention?Ali: Let’s begin with your central claim. You argue against the idea that a work’s creator is unimportant and that an audience cannot determine the artist’s meaning. What, in your view, does a completed work still carry from the person who made it?Rick: We can think of three broad ways people interpret meaning. First, we may recognize the artist’s intention in the work. Second, we may impose our own ideas on what the artist has done. Third, we may recognize the artist’s intention while also bringing additional associations of our own.I think the third is the most common. We naturally want to know what a maker intended, whether we are looking at visual art, listening to music, reading a book, or watching a film. But even when we recognize that intention, other ideas arise from our own experience. Those associations can deepen our response, but they can also confuse it.My concern is that, in much contemporary Western thought, the maker’s intention is disregarded and the audience’s interpretation becomes primary.Ali: This brings us to Roland Barthes and “The Death of the Author.” How do you understand that position, and where do you disagree with it?Rick: I encountered that argument in art school, so I am familiar with the influence of postmodernism on how we think about interpretation. The emphasis often falls on the reader’s prejudices, biases, and responses, while the maker’s intention is set aside.I use “artist” broadly here to include writers, composers, filmmakers, and other makers. The basic point is that the maker produced the work to which we are responding. Without the maker, there would be no work to discuss. The work exists because someone presented something to an audience, and that act of presentation carries intention.Ali: But how can we recover intention when a large historical distance separates us from the maker? How can we speak of Shakespeare’s intention, for example, from our position centuries later?Rick: Shakespeare is a useful example because his plays have been interpreted and performed repeatedly from his own time to ours. The meanings of words and phrases have changed, and some passages require research or explanation. But we can still grasp the general action and emotional force.I once watched a documentary about ordinary people preparing a Shakespeare play in London. The director had to explain what certain phrases meant in Shakespeare’s time so that the performers could understand what they were saying. The language required mediation, but the central meaning remained accessible.Take the betrayal of Julius Caesar. We may need historical and linguistic context, but we can still understand and experience betrayal. At the very least, the general meaning survives.Ali: So your thesis is that meaning partly survives the crossing.Rick: Yes. A modern adaptation may change the language, but it can still carry the central meaning. The meaning is not necessarily altered in a significant way.Artists may leave aspects of a work open so that viewers can add their own interpretations. But the work is not completely open. There is still an intention being presented, even if that intention is to evoke a feeling rather than communicate a proposition.Music offers another example. We can hear Bach or Beethoven centuries later and still respond emotionally to what they put into the music.Ali: But do we really feel what Bach’s first audience felt? We cannot unlearn everything that has happened since.Rick: We cannot know with certainty, but the work itself gives us many clues about how to receive it. We also have historical accounts of how audiences responded to major works. We can compare those responses with our own. They may not be identical, but in many cases they broadly align.What Does a Material Carry Across Cultures?Ali: You trained as an artist and later spent about thirteen years importing handmade Bhutanese paper to the United States. What did handling that paper—its making, texture, and origin—teach you about how much of a material’s meaning survives when it is lifted out of the place it came from?Rick: I began importing the paper almost by accident. After graduating from Montserrat, I travelled through Asia with my father. Bhutan was one of the countries we visited. Near the end of the tour, we went to a small handmade-paper workshop operating from a converted home.I saw the entire production process, and a shipment was being prepared for export to England. When I handled the paper, I noticed its distinctive silky quality. My father asked who might want it, and I said, “Just about every artist I know.” He replied, “Why don’t you import it?” That question started the business.Art school had not trained me to be a businessman, much less an international businessman, so I had to learn everything from the ground up. But I understood artists and how they experience materials. Paper is not neutral. Its texture, durability, and archival quality affect what artists can make and how long a work can survive.Many Western papers are acidic and deteriorate relatively quickly. Artists therefore became increasingly concerned with archival materials. The Bhutanese paper offered not only a distinctive tactile experience but also longevity. Bringing it to American artists carried part of its material history into a new context, even though the cultural setting had changed.Art, Faith, and the Problem of TranslationAli: Your book, Art: The Church’s Response, began with a friend’s suggestion. Setting the faith frame aside for a moment, what question were you trying to answer when you began writing it?Rick: Once I took the suggestion seriously, I asked what a Christian audience would want to know about art. The central question became: What does the Bible say about creativity and the arts?I began examining biblical passages connected to art and creativity, including the Hebrew and Greek terms behind English translations. For example, Genesis opens with God creating the heavens and the earth. Looking more closely at the underlying language led me to think of creation not only as an event but also as a process.English does not always preserve the nuances available in another language. That realization shaped the book. I wanted to examine original terms and present ideas in ways that might challenge readers’ assumptions.Ali: That raises a translation question. If English cannot always carry the full nuance of another language, is meaning inevitably lost, or is it recoverable?Rick: I think it is recoverable, at least in general. A translation can communicate the central idea, while learning the nuances of the original language may deepen or expand our understanding.I recently watched a discussion comparing several English translations of Dostoevsky. One example concerned a Russian word that one translation rendered as “closet.” For an American reader, a closet suggests a small space for clothing. But the Russian appeared to mean something closer to a small room. The basic idea of an enclosed space survived, but “closet” introduced an association that may not have belonged there.Idioms create the same problem. A translation may preserve the general intention while losing part of the original texture. Recovering that texture enlarges our understanding.Ali: Arabic-to-English translation presents similar difficulties. Consider Laylat al-Qadr, often translated literally as “the Night of Power.” An English reader may not understand its significance during Ramadan or its association with the revelation of the Qur’an. A translator might add explanatory material within the text or place it in a footnote. Which would you prefer?Rick: I would be comfortable with a footnote that provides the necessary context.This reminds me of studying Chinese art theory. One early principle of Chinese painting is often translated through ideas such as spirit, resonance, life, and vitality. A brief English equivalent may communicate part of the meaning, but the combined concept is much richer.Encountering that idea changed how I viewed art. I began to think that strong works possess a vitality to which we respond, even when we struggle to explain it. Weak works do not have the same life. When we listen to Bach or Beethoven, for example, we may be responding to the vitality placed into the work.For the maker, the task is to put that life into the work. That vitality is part of what allows a work to endure and continue touching audiences.Explicit Meaning, Implied Meaning, and Creative FearAli: You distinguish between explicit meaning—what the maker intentionally places in the work—and implicit or associated meanings brought by the audience. Can you illustrate that distinction through your own work?Rick: Explicit meaning is the general idea or theme that a work presents. The first Star Wars film, for example, is broadly about the triumph of good over evil. That theme appears across many stories.In my own book, the explicit meaning is expressed through what I directly write. The implicit meaning comes through the implications and connections that point readers toward the larger argument.One example begins with the creation narrative in Genesis. A few verses after God creates the world, God says, “Let us make humankind in our image.” My argument is that if God is presented as creator, then creativity forms part of what human beings inherit from that image. We are makers.Human civilization begins in imagination. The objects, systems, and environments around us first existed as ideas before people brought them into reality.Yet many people insist that they are not creative. An artist may simply introduce himself as an artist, and the other person immediately replies, “I’m not creative. I can’t even draw a stick figure.” The artist did not ask, but the person feels compelled to make that declaration.I think people often feel that they should be creative, yet believe they are not. The statement becomes a defence or an excuse.Ali: If creativity belongs to everyone, what blocks it?Rick: Primarily fear. People are afraid of failing, producing something imperfect, or exposing themselves through the attempt. Overcoming that fear requires accepting that failure is part of learning. Skills develop over time; they do not have to appear fully formed.Ali: Where does talent fit? We have discussed fear, skill, and practice, but what about natural ability?Rick: Talent exists, but talent is only as useful as the discipline applied to it. Talent may take you part of the way. Discipline carries you further.Can the Audience Be Wrong?Ali: Let’s steelman the position you reject. What does the view that the creator is unimportant get right? What must your own position reckon with?Rick: We can compare interpretation with an ordinary conversation. If I am speaking and you hear only your own biases, then either I have failed to communicate clearly or you have failed to listen. Meaning does not depend solely on the speaker, but it does not depend solely on the listener either.A maker can communicate poorly. A viewer can also refuse to attend to what the work is actually doing. Both possibilities matter.Ali: Elaine Scarry argues that beauty is not merely a report of the viewer’s pleasure. It makes a demand on the viewer’s attention and calls us to look again at what the object actually is. You have used the word “weight.” Is weight a demand that the work makes on your attention, or merely a feeling you have?Rick: I have recently begun thinking about writing a book on beauty, so this question interests me.We have spoken about a good work possessing vitality. “Weight” may be another word for that quality. The weight of a work makes us stop and consider it. It asks us to look harder, think more deeply, or see something afresh.We are responding to something in the work, not merely reporting a private reaction. Beauty is difficult to define because it combines something tangible with something metaphysical or spiritual. When we call something beautiful, the word may be shorthand for an experience we cannot fully describe.So yes, I think weight belongs partly to the work. It is one way the work asks for our attention.Idea, Expression, and JudgementAli: What does your work help us read more carefully about the world?Rick: It can help us pay better attention.I think a work has two closely connected parts. The first is the idea: what the work is about. The second is the expression: how that idea has been given form.When idea and expression come together successfully, we recognize that the work is good. We see this in film, literature, visual art, and music. The expression seems right for the idea.When the expression fails, we often say, “That was a great idea, but they did not pull it off.” People recognize this distinction intuitively. The idea may have potential, but the execution does not fulfil it.Translation can be understood in similar terms. A translator gives new expression to an existing idea. When we know both languages, we can often judge whether that expression carries the original meaning successfully. Even when we do not know both languages, we may still receive the central idea through the translation.Ali: But who decides that the expression is inadequate: you or the audience?Rick: Think about how you decide that a film failed to fulfil its premise. You identify the underlying idea and then recognize that the expression did not meet its potential. That judgement may be intuitive, but the work itself supplies the clues.If we know how to read the work, we can see those clues within it. Interpretation is not simply arbitrary.Ali: That opens another set of questions about reading methodology—how we learn to read the clues a work provides. We will have to leave that for another conversation. Before we close, is there anything you would like to add?Rick: Only that people identify the ideas behind works more naturally than they sometimes admit. Even someone who claims that we can never know what a work means may leave a film saying, “They didn’t pull it off.” Their lived experience may not match their intellectual position. To say that the expression failed already assumes that the work presented an idea that could be recognized.ClosingAli: Many thanks to Rick Sorenson for this conversation about how a made work means, and about the distance between recovering what a maker intended and projecting our own histories, wounds, and cultures onto what we see.What I hope this episode leaves us with is not a settled answer but a sharper question. The next time you stand before a painting, listen to a song, or read a poem—something you did not make and may not fully understand—how do you read it? Where does the maker’s intention still press upon you? Where does your own history press back? And where does cultural distance quietly decide what you are even able to see?Thank you for listening to Reading the World. I’m Ali Alhajji. Until next time, keep reading carefully.

The Hidden Power of a Work’s Intent: What Truly Travels from Maker to Audience

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