The essay analyzes, from a diachronic perspective, the tradition of French translations of neologisms constructed by Dante in his Comedy, especially in Paradise. These words allow the poet to express the inexpressible and give an almost physical consistency to a dynamic of transformation that invests the poet-character and his poetic language. As such, they are essential to Dante’s discourse: any translation that does not reproduce this lexical dynamic is incomplete. The neologisms thus invite translators to explore the limits of their own language, which do not necessarily coincide with those of the original language, from the dual standpoint of the linguistic system and history of the target language. While a certain openness to lexical innovation has been interpreted as exclusive to more recent translators of the poem, the study of a corpus of some forty translations, ranging from the 16th century to the new millennium, shows that this openness is in fact the result of a progressive erosion, within the shared space of retranslation, of the constraints of the lexical norm, as demonstrated by the analysis of the translation strategies deployed to overcome the resistance of the French language to Dante’s creations.