This article grew out of a class the author taught, in 2003, for graduate students of Persian Literature. In the course, the author used classical and modern Persian texts and their English translations. This approach revealed many semantic subtleties, structural oddities, and cultural differences between the Farsi source texts and the English target texts, which pinpointed issues about translations in relation to national literature. In the first part of this article, the author discusses some general points in translation with special reference to contrasting literary works and their English renditions. The author then illustrates how source messages, especially literary works, when passing through another linguistic prism, reveal some new, unwonted aspects of meaning and form that captivate readers and help them find new facets in their interpretation of the text. By means of examples in Farsi and English, it is shown how a juxtaposition of source texts with target texts is an invaluable source of linguistic information and cultural illumination not only to target-language audiences, but to source-language readers as well.