In the descriptive section of this paper, the author tries to accomplish two movements: the first toward translational difference, the second toward similarity. The corpus to be described consists of Jean Genet’s novel Querelle de Brest and translations of that novel into English, German and Dutch. The aspect the author wants to examine in particular is the manner in which thematic chains are built up in the novel and its translations. A useful tool for the analysis of thematic relations is the concept of isotopy, which - as one does not fail to notice - is not unrelated to the notion of similarity.