This essay focuses on examples from francophone North African literature as one instance of postcolonial texts which place us at the “threshold of the untranslatable”, where the reading experience itself can be no other but a perpetual translation. The author does not construct an argument against translation of these texts into other languages; many of them already exist in other languages and are read in translation. Rather, her argument is for reading a text, in fact, for reading the world, during the postcolonial period.