For both historians and pedagogues of translation, stringent evaluation methodology is an important requirement. Drawing on the theoretical works of Henri Meschonnic, this article attempts to show that it is impossible to evaluate older translations — particularly literary texts — using the rules established by translator-theoreticians who authored works on translation techniques; nor are philological analysis and contrastive linguistics sufficient to assess the adequacy or otherwise of a translated text. The historian of translation is more interested in determining whether the translated work has the same historicity as the original, and whether the translation-recreation invents its own poetics and replaces problems of language with discourse solutions. Merely translating the sense of a text may wipe out its literary value and poetics, which, in the end, would produce a non-text.