Starting with a detailed discussion of different types of en face translations (those printed side by side with their originals), the author suggests that en face translations of verse into prose in particular aim at literalism. The en face format has advantages, but the downside is that it is an end product and that it does not show any trace of the activity of translation. The interlinear format, by contrast, presents translation completely as a process, giving the translation between the lines. The interlinear format draws our attention to the between-ness of any act of translation. In arguing for literalism as an ethical practice, the author distinguishes the kind of interlinear translation he advocates from pedagogic and some ethnographic uses of word-for-word translation. He criticizes Malinowski’s reflections on and practice of word-for-word translation. He insists that an interlinear language does not have to be as patronizingly primitive as that employed by Malinowski; instead, it need only allow certain untranslatable characteristics of the syntax and lexicon of the source to show through in the translation.