After a brief survey of the linguistic data concerning grammatical gender, this article explores the problems related to the expression of gender and sex in the translation of literary texts. First the author looks at the influence of gender on the imagination. Then, taking a short story by Ruth Rendell as an example, he shows how the obligation to express the sex of protagonists in French can make it difficult to maintain suspense in a detective novel. Whereas English can keep a certain ambiguity ("the lover" can be either male or female), French is obliged to specify. Finally, the translation of a poem by Erin Mouré provides other examples of difficulties which arise translating from English into a language such as French, in which nouns have gender.