This chapter is a declaration of the author’s translational assumptions: rhythm is a force that resists the signified; translation promotes sense-making rather than the gathering of meaning, the relational and the associative rather than the intelligible; back-translation is indispensable to translational exchange and dialecticity; translation operates most fruitfully in the ST’s invisible; the text is not the ST but the totality of its possibilities. A translation of Rilke’s sonnet to Orpheus 1, 5 exemplifies this notion of totality. And the translational involvement of the performing body is illustrated in a translation of the first stanza of Verlaine’s ’En sourdine’. In conclusion, the chapter revisits distinctions between vocative and accusative perspectives, sense and meaning.

The translator is first and foremost a reader, who fulfils the act of reading through translation. The chapter goes on to question Habermas’s assumption of a necessary distance between the literary text and the reader. The author’s own version of the literariness of text and of the reader’s part in its construction are then explored, as are the differences between writing and speech. The investigation of the reading experience is developed, to further elaborate the nature of readerly participation: ’Reading is a sympathetic supplementation of text’.