Matthijs Bakker structures his essay round what he sees as the fundamentals of Raymond van den Broeck’s oeuvre: the empirical approach to translation, the interpretation of a translation as a meta-text and thirdly the idea of untranslatability. Reflecting on the antagonist aspects of those interests, he comments on a translation experiment published in Filter involving the poem Eventail by Mallarmé. In doing this, Bakker wants to suggest the following points: (1) certain descriptive and comparative operations closely resemble translating operations, which results in (2) a crucial methodological issue, which can be phrased in terms of meta-textuality; (3) the definition of the translating aspect of different types of meta-texts require a theoretical concept of translatability; (4) the theory of empirical research on existing translations cannot dispose of this matter as a result of the competence-performance dichotomy.