Between word and image : on Jan Bukowski’s book covers as intersemiotic translations

The article is devoted to the art of illustration, understood as the art of translating words into pictures. The subject of the analysis is the work of Jan Bukowski (1873-1943), a leading artist of Young Poland, a pioneer of Polish applied art and an outstanding creator of book graphics. He was revered for his ability to reach the “inner content” of the text resulting from the author’s intention and express it with an equivalent plastic form. The article discusses the theoretical aspects of the word-image relationship and explains the concept of intersemiotic translation. On the basis of this concept, a model is proposed to analyze selected graphic works by Jan Bukowski as intersemiotic translations. The analytical part of the article presents four different types of equivalence that Jan Bukowski used when making his intersemiotic translations, which were designs for the covers of literary works.