Adjoined Conceptual Domains in the Bilingual Poetry of Pablo Picasso

Picasso started writing poems in April, 1935 during a period of personal crisis. This shift to literature is predicated on an assumed irreducible conflict between new verbal expressions and his established visual composition. Picasso's texts provide a window into the artist's mind that is separate from his own artistic creations -which makes them extremely relevant. This paper investigates two aspects of Picasso's poetry. First, how Picasso used subtle differences between the lexical realization of concepts in French and Spanish: the two languages he used to compose his poems. And Second, how he explored the potential overlap between semantic categories for concepts associated with co-occurring words. When these linguistic phenomena are examined carefully, it becomes clear that the lexical combinations that Picasso implemented in his poems were far from arbitrary. Keywords: Picasso, bilingual, poetry, conceptual domains, semantic categories