This study is aimed at analyzing the relationships that approximate the original literary text to the translated text, approaching a few poetic conceptions and contemporary theories which emphasize the role of the reader, in this case, the reader-translator, in the production of the 'new' text. If, on one hand, the author of the text is first of all a reader of himself who later on re-writes the text, we have, on the other hand, the translator exercising the same re-writing process with the following difference: the original text belongs to the other, it is written in another language and is therefore at the same time 'strange foreigner'. The reading of himself or of the other (whether foreigner or not) would be the same if the meanings were univocal, stable, equal to all in all times. Once each human being is single and is also mutating, and the language represents what he/she is, inserted in his/her language, these readings will never be identical. Thus, the question is to find out how to read and translate the other and what is in fact translated into the final text: is it an act of interpretation or of understanding? Of perceiving senses or forms?