A dialogue between swans

This paper seeks to establish a dialogue between the imagery of the swan in Piotr Ilich Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake and Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan. The interpretative analysis looks at the symbolism of the bird and its colours from the perspective of the transformation from a binary view of Good vs Evil, present in the ballet, to a hermaphrodite perspective of the swan proposed by the film, which highlights the process of its metamorphosis. Based on a post-structuralist conception, the works are analysed as translations which, while maintaining the link with their predecessor, operate transformations resulting from the act of reading and interpretation by the translating subject. Starting from the fairy tale The Stolen Veil by the German Johann Musaeus, which is configured as the anteriority of the works in question, the research analyses the traces and transformations that occur in the intersemiotic translation process, addressing the presence of archetypes, according to the reflections of C.G. Jung. By presenting a mosaic between fairy tale, ballet and film, we problematise structuralist concepts, Platonic metaphysical perspectives and essentialist theories that govern the comparative relationship between the works.