The starting point of #La vie mode d'emploi", a French novel by Georges Perec (1978), was a system of formal constraints which for the reader works as a pictorial trompe-l'oeil. The Iberian translations of this novel have adopted different strategies based on the respect/non-respect of the writing strategies of the source text, giving rise to an "oulipian" translation (the catalan one) and 2 "surface" translations (one Portugese and the other Spanish). It may be observed that this novel brings about a reflection on translation accomplished by each translator. These reflections are inscribed within the target texts, wathever the Translator's strategies could have been at the beginning. Most of the usual concepts of Translation Studies (like fidelty, literality, equivalence, translatability, etc) appear to be quite inefficient and ambiguous to analyse this kind of texts, which are based on perception's instabilitiy and on the subversion of reading habits.