How have world literatures, each in their own way or with mutual inspiration, lived, assumed, rejected the linguistic, artistic and cultural models, and what force or liking have they brought throughout the centuries? How have translations, the prime vectors of interliterary relations, used their immense resources to dissimulate, encourage or discourage the constant and perilous questioning of national traditions? The fourteen contributions in this volume offer us a range of answers to these two questions. From France to Japan, from China to the United States, from Brazil to Poland, we see how the multiple mediating strategies of translation have been deployed, all witnessing the tensions which cross the cultures where translation occurs, that these tensions are of cultural, linguistic or literary nature.