“Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind”: Reading Vladyslav Yerko’s Illustrations to Shakespearein Ukrainian

Abstract

The article comments on the intersemiotic translation of Shakespeare’s works in Vladyslav Yerko’s conceptual illustrations to Hamlet (2008), Romeo and Juliet (2016), and King Lear (2021), translated by Yurii Andrukhovych and published by the Ukrainian house A-BA-BA-HA-LA-MA-HA. The paper investigates the way in which Yerko’s richly symbolic visual narratives engage in dialogue with Ukrainian culture and history. Situated within a broader tradition of Shakespearean illustration, Yerko’s work exemplifies illustration as metatext. His imagery blends Renaissance allegory, surreal detail, and postmodern irony, reflecting influences ranging from Albín Brunovský’s art to Kozintsev’s cinematic Hamlet. The article demonstrates how Yerko’s visual interpretations, paired with Yurii Andrukhovych’s witty and provocative Ukrainian translations, create a multilayered conversation between Shakespeare’s England and contemporary Ukraine. By highlighting the dialogical nature of illustration as a form of adaptation and translation, the study contributes to ongoing discussions about the global afterlives of Shakespeare in new cultural contexts. Yerko’s illustrations reveal how visual arts reimagine the Shakespeare’s works as both Ukrainian and universal, reaffirming the vitality of printed books as sites of cross-cultural exchange, aesthetic reflection, metatextual play and deep reading.