This chapter takes the reader through empathy’s receptivity, understanding, interpretation, and responsiveness, in examples corresponding to each. Empathy and radical empathy are exemplified in detailed vignettes from Tolstoy, Conan Doyle, Vernon Lee (Violet Paget), Mann, and Bulgakov. With two words “Blue Roses,” Tennessee Williams’ Glass Menagerie captures empathic responsiveness. Misfirings and failures of empathy are exemplified in emotional contagion, conformity, projection, and getting lost in translation in the literary examples. Empathy is distinguished from intuition in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Master Flea, which provides an example of an empathy-like technology that shows the limitations of empathy. From the perspective of the omniscient narrator, the realist novel is a “miracle of empathy.” Precisely because minds are not transparent, empathic translation, understood as perspective taking, is required. Boris Uspensky developed an entire poetics based on the dynamics of perspective taking in literature, and it is on the work of Uspensky that we shall rely here. This dynamic perspective shifting would not make sense in literature without the empathic ability to take a walk in the Other’s shoes (the folk definition of empathy).