Through an unedited comparison between Gadamer and Benjamin, a brief reflection on the hermeneutic practice of translation is proposed here, which assumes, as a driver, the affinity between the figurative act of portraying and the linguistic act of translating. Just as the portrait is representation, interpretation and translation of the expressive sense of a single face, from the side of reality to that of the image, so the translation is representation, interpretation and translation of the expressive sense of a single (...) poetic composition from the side of the original language to that of the hosting language. Both the portrait and the translation have an aesthetic and ethical status: "aesthetic", since they exhibit the true mimetic po- tency of the image and the word; "ethical", since this potency is expressed in the maximum welcoming openness towards the object, whose individual expression, in order to be understood and recreated by the painter and the translator, must first of all be respected, safeguarded, guarded and preserved in its unproducible and irreducible otherness. (shrink)