Through the study of a few passages dealing with the issue of identity, this article presents a critique of the French translations of the sixteenth-century anonymous Spanish picaresque novel Lazarillo de Tormes, n order to prose a model of analysis of syntactic ambiguities that can allow for multiple and often contradictory interpretations. This model begins by questioning some key notions at the heart of Antoine Berman' critique of translations, suggesting that it is useful to take into account Paul Julian Smith's critical reading of the concept of unity in the writings of 'serious' twentieth-century critics of the Lazarillo an Michael Riffaterre's analysis of the trope know as syllepsis.