When a reader picks up a book, the essence of the text has been translated into the visual space of the cover. Using Umberto Eco's bestseller The Name of the Rose as a case study, this is the first study of book cover design as a form of intersemiotic translation based on the purposeful selection of visual signs to represent verbal signs. As an act of translation, the cover of a book ought to be an `equivalent representation' of the text. But in the absence of any established interpretive criteria, how can equivalence between the visual and the verbal be determined and interpreted? Re-Covered Rose tackles this question in an original and creative way, laying the foundation for a new research trend in Translation Studies.
Marco Sonzogni is Senior Lecturer in Italian, School of Languages and Cultures, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. A widely published academic and an award-winning editor, poet and literary translator, he is the Director of the New Zealand Centre for Literary Translation/Te Tumu Whakawhiti Tuhinga.