Unstill lives: Titles of paintings in translation

In this onomastic study I consider art titles as attached to mobile assets, therefore constituting highly unstable source and target texts. As titles can issue from the artist or other decentralized sources, they may have both referential and semantic purposes or origins, change over their histories, and circulate with alternate, informal, and former titles, complicating their identities and functions. Inaccuracies and datedness are phenomena that attend painting titles, but whether they are changed depends powerfully on the current norms and sensibilities. The multivalence of titles also plays havoc on how they transform and diverge in translation. This article presents an exploratory survey of a corpus of works from French, Spanish, and Italian that present challenges or exhibit translation multiples, and analyzes cases in which translation adds an unstable element due to hermeneutic polysemy, creating or breaking chains of signification within themselves and with other works. Equivocal titles of works by René Magritte, Francisco de Goya, Paul Gauguin, and others are studied in this way. Finally, two cases of non-translated titles in Latin are given to reveal how, through ambiguities and lacunae, they too generate debated translational readings that affect reception.