Sarcouncil Journal of Public Administration and Management

Abstract: When a poem becomes music, a painting becomes a piano suite, or an orchestral work becomes choreography, criticism often defaults to fidelity: what was preserved, lost, or betrayed. This article argues that literal equivalence is impossible across materially different arts and proposes intersemiotic hospitality as a more rigorous evaluative model. Combining translation studies, intermediality, semiotics, performance studies, musicology, and philosophies of hospitality, it analyses four transmedial constellations: Keats's Ode on a Grecian Urn; Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition and Ravel's orchestration; the Mallarmé-Debussy-Nijinsky chain; and the cultural afterlives of Picasso's Guernica. The analysis uses five lenses - source materiality, transformation strategy, medium-specific affordance, acknowledged remainder, and ethical effect - and identifies five principles: attentive reception, non-annexation, material reciprocity, acknowledgment of remainder, and renewed circulation. The principal finding is that persuasive intersemiotic translation creates relational equivalence rather than sameness: it transfers tensions, rhythms, perspectives, affects, or structures while making loss and mediation legible. The article converts these findings into a five-stage model - receive, situate, transform, acknowledge, recirculate - and tests it against appropriation, medium hierarchy, cultural extraction, and automated transformation. It concludes that movement among the arts becomes humanistically valuable when the receiving work gains autonomy without claiming possession of its source, and when translation enlarges rather than replaces the field of relation.