In this paper an original text, The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster, and its translation into Spanish are examined. The source text chosen displays a wealth of instances of symbolic names, rhymes, wordplay, idioms, cultural references, colloquialisms and other stylistic features which are hard to transfer to Spanish without a significant loss of information. The author attempts to identify those phenomena and discuss how the translator confronted them, especially the lexical level. The conclusion of the paper is that the assessment of the translation problems posed by this literary work reveals the possibility of achieving an acceptable version at the readership’s level. This kind of study is meant to be useful for the subsequent systematisation of strategies for the translational problems found in any literary text.