Could the Aristotelian notion of ethos help improve our understanding of both literary heterolingualism and its afterlife in translation? This paper proposes a first investigation into this question through an analysis of the three French versions of the novel Hijo de Hombre by the Paraguayan Augusto Roa Bastos (1917-2005). The original’s heterolingualism will be seen not only as a set of linguistic forms, but also as a discursive strategy. The complex stratification of source and target texts is shown to be a striking illustration of Roa Bastos’s “poetics of variation”. The reenunciation by each translator’s narrator negotiates the relation to alterity from a new specific viewpoint. [Source: abstract in book]