The exile was several times read like a possible metaphor of translation, or at least like an experience structurally analogous to translation. Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) and Carles Riba (1893-1959), from the reading of Hölderlin, though they never suspected each other’s thoughts, worked both on a poetic of translation at once common and antagonistic. Benjamin speculated on the possibility of a “pure language” in exile and fractured inside the empirical languages, while Riba worked the noucentista Catalan – as poet and translator – almost like this hypothetical language supposed by Benjamin. The purpose of this article is to measure the common distance between the Benjamin’s pure language (reine Sprache) and Riba’s live language (llengua viva), always from the experience of exile as an anthropological and structural model of translation.