This study aims at exploring the phenomenon of psychological transportation in translation from an experimental approach. Firstly, it investigates whether the emotions depicted in source texts may influence the level of transportation experienced by translators. Secondly, it tries to determine whether different levels of transportation in the texts can make a difference in terms of translation performance. Based on previous work about narrative transportation in products of fiction, as well as the phenomenon known as the “paradox of pleasurable sadness”, it departs from the hypothesis that sad texts lead to a higher degree of psychological transportation than happy texts (H1). Taking into account previous theories and empirical results about the benefits of visualization and emotional engagement in translation, it also predicts that highly-transported participants will render higher-quality (H2) and more creative translations (H3) than low-transported participants. For this purpose, a pilot study was conducted consisting of two literary translation tasks with opposing-valence texts (happy vs. sad). Lack of statistically significant differences for this hypothesis suggests that some adjustments in the methodology would be needed to achieve conclusive results; however, it is believed that further research on the impact of transportation in translation quality and creativity is still worthwhile.