In the Wikipedia we read that: "Ekphrasis or ecphrasis is the graphic, often dramatic, description of a visual work of art. In ancient times it referred to a  description of any thing, person, or experience. The word comes from the Greek ek and phrasis, 'out' and 'speak' respectively, verb ekphrazein, to proclaim or call an inanimate object by name. - Ekphrasis has been considered generally to be a rhetorical device in which one medium of art tries to relate to another medium by defining and describing its essence and form, and in doing so, relate more directly to the audience, through its illuminative liveliness. - In this way, a painting may represent a sculpture, and vice versa; a poem portray a picture; a sculpture depict a heroine of a novel; in fact, given the right circumstances, any art may describe any other art, especially if a rhetorical element, standing for the sentiments of the artist when she/he created her/his work, is present." Perhaps the translation of a complex sentence or poem could be dealt with by applying an "ekphrastic perspective" to it, instead of a "literal translation." The distance in this case lies on how to relate two languages (and not only when "one medium of art tries to relate to another medium"), that is, the distance between what, in his essay on translation, VN named as "the Russian and the English series of words," for example. 

It seems to me that his evaluation while describing Pushkin's most famous poem, was already an expression of his applying an ekphrastic device to it, as in his example of "the central word in Housman’s 'What are those blue remembered hills?'  [   ] in Russian “vspom-neev-she-yesyah,” a horrible straggly thing, all humps and horns, which cannot fuse into any inner connection with 'blue,' as it does so smoothly in English, because the Russian sense of blueness belongs to a different series than the Russian 'remember' does."