Schmitt's paper reflects on the translation and translatability of literary texts that experiment with form and language. He observes that the discipline of translation studies marginalises literary translation and even rejects a scientific approach to it. The available theories limit themselves to the discussion of text types and text functions, and do not offer tools to tackle experimental literature. To illustrate this problem, the author discusses La disparition by Georges Perec, a novel that explicitly deals with language and its structures.