This article investigates to what extent the metaphysical ideas concerning language and its powers can contribute for the discussion about the nature of literary translation. These ideas are present in the archaic Greek tradition of Homer and Hesiod as well as in the biblical book of Genesis, and they are discussed and reevaluated by authors such as Benjamin and Schulz in the 20th century. These ideas, whose origin is in Antiquity, are associated to a vision of language as an original and autonomous dynamism, as a meaning-making power which precedes reality to become the real itself, and are thus diametrically opposed to the linguistic concepts established by de Saussure and Benveniste, which are based on a practical approach to language, and which take the arbitrary character of words for granted. In the essentialist concept of language, typical of the archaic world, as well as in Goethe’s idea of "Verwandtschaft" (affinity), some valuable contributions for the praxis of literary translation might be found.