Looking back on my translation of Percival Everett’s The Water Cure five years later, for the purpose of the reflexion on “Translating rhythm”, I felt the need at times to offer a new translation of some passages, bringing the translated version closer to the sounds and rhythms of the original. The methodological questions that emerged met the wider ones of the elaboration of meaning as well as of the conception of language and of reading. Translating the unheard of language invented in this novel allowed to sketch a “poetics of translating”, largely depending on the materiality of the literary text, while revealing some of the aims of literary creation.