This book offers a comprehensive theory of translation. It proposes a critique of the principles that connect the act of translating to literature. It starts off by examining certain ideas, and explores the history of translation in Europe, a cultural continent built on translations. A first part establishes the poetics of translations as ethical and political poles of the relations between identity and otherness, in the transformations of translation. A second part puts the translations to the test of a poetics of texts. The translated texts range from the holy to poetry, to novels, theatre and philosophy.