The author questions “paternal designation” through the paradigm of translation / betrayal. He rereads one of his essays which reconstructs the evolution of a conflictual father-son relationship through translation, an experience that is all the more complex for the author because he feels himself to be in a position of disciple and traitor with regard to person he is translating, Bilge Karasu. The reactivation of the father’s language, Occitan, by the language to be translated, Turkish, interferes with the father-son configuration to the point of opening it up to the experience what is foreign. The circumstances of the father’s death and his involvement in the son’s first essay made the latter’s departure possible. Those of the encounter with a foreign language brought him back to the father’s language which serves as an intermediary between the source language and the target language. The father guides the apprenticeship in writing about oneself and the other by revealing the creativity of this other language to be translated, the silence, into which his own father had withdrawn.