Contrary to what is usually argued in translation studies, this article intends to show that the notions of coherence, contextual analysis and authorial intention are not always suite for the specific need of the critique of translations. We begin by briefly presenting the notion of unity that is at the heart of Antoine Berman’s project of critique of translations, before proceeding to Paul Julian Smith’s seminal critical reading of the same concept in the discourse of most of 20th-century critics of the 16th-century anonymous Spanish picaresque novel La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes, y de sus fortunas y adversidades. We set our own critique of the French translations of the Lazarillo de Tormes on the very margins of this quest for unity in order o put forward a model of analysis of syntactic ambiguities that can account for multiple interpretations and that do not necessarily depend on the need to re-centre the text or reduce it to a coherent whole. To illustrate this, we propose a thorough analysis of th syllepsis (as per Michael Riffaterre) as it appears in certain passages of the Lazarillo de Tormes and its five French translations between 1560 and 1968.