Arlindo Daibert (1952-1993), a Brazilian artist, created, in the Eighties, the illustrations to the Mario de Andrade’s book Macunaíma: o herói sem nenhum caráter – Brazil s greatest 20th century book of the Brazilian Modernist movement. However, considering the ancient competition between the verbal and the pictorial as the superior way of telling the ‘truth’, and the dialectic of word and image as an implicit form of Platonism, Daibert did not call his work as illustration but as translation. This work considers a range of Arlindo Daibert’s illustration to Macunaíma and his representational strategies. This work also includes an analysis of illustrations whose characteristics will be the integration of both, word and image. In that way, Daibert performed a plural experiment of translation from text into visual art (book’s illustration).