The Ovide moralisé is an extraordinary text which translates, amplifies and moralizes Ovid's Metamorphoses. Whereas Latin is the language of learning in the early Middle Ages, the rise in demand for translations of Latin works into the vernacular to be held in libraries of the French-speaking aristocracy in the fourteenth century implicitly presents French as the idiom of Christian wisdom and virtue. By translating a pre-Christian text, the Ovide moralisé participates in this cultural interest in translation, but also explores more explicitly the ethical stakes of translation by transforming Ovid's metamorphoses into revelations of Christian truth. In this essay, I propose to read the dialogue between French and Latin, as it is played out in the exchange between the Ovide moralisé and the Metamorphoses, in the light of Jacques Derrida's reflections on translation in his article ‘Des tours de Babel’, which is itself, in part, a reading of Maurice de Gandillac's translation of Walter Benjamin's essay ‘Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers’ [The Task of the Translator].