Translation, especially translating between oneself and another, is an undeveloped paradigm for empathy. The innovations of Herder on translation are acknowledged. The poet and innovative thinker, the translator and empathizer, are each in their own respective ways undertaking “a raid on the inarticulate”—invoking T. S. Eliot’s incisive phrase. Examples are cited from Edgar Allen Poe and Goethe, finessing the myth of the given, not refuting it, witnessing the challenge of finding just the right word or sign for a given experience. The argument is engaged that empathy is something one cannot do alone. Objections are considered. Empathy is exemplified in detail Thomas Mann and in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, which has a significant fictional component in the very idea of relating to, being present with, having a vicarious experience of, another human being from whom one is biologically and socially completely distinct. This is the fictional empathic moment—the Other as oneself, oneself as the Other. When one’s affective, bottom-up, emotional empathy gets blocked, then one translates oneself, one launches oneself imaginatively into empathic interpretation.