The translator is first and foremost a reader, who fulfils the act of reading through translation. The chapter goes on to question Habermas’s assumption of a necessary distance between the literary text and the reader. The author’s own version of the literariness of text and of the reader’s part in its construction are then explored, as are the differences between writing and speech. The investigation of the reading experience is developed, to further elaborate the nature of readerly participation: ’Reading is a sympathetic supplementation of text’.