Many representatives of the hermeneutic tradition, including Umberto Eco, Paul Ricoeur and George Steiner, believe that a literary text is incomplete without the collaboration of the reader, and expect this reader to respect the text’s internal coherence. In this context, it seems obvious that a translator is first and foremost a reader, yet this apparently simple observation has many implications. This paper will first show how the literary nature of a text influences the act of reading and of translating it, and then focus on the tension involved in reading a poem for the purpose of translating it. Five models of the poetry translation process will be compared: those of Robert De Beaugrande, Andrei Banta&scedil;, Francis R. Jones, Christopher Millis and Robert Bly. These scholars adopt a hermeneutic approach insofar as they base the translation process on a close reading of the source poem, yet seek to counterbalance its effects by including a necessary stage of revision, minimizing the translator’s subjective intervention. The analysis of these models will show what part the act of reading really plays within the process of translating a poem.