The object of this essay is to move from the apparent untranslatability of English nonsense texts to their total translatability. The essay starts with the impossibility of translating nonsense, due to its sheer lack of meaning, and the interdiction of such translation due to the fact that the genre has acquired the status of a national myth in England (you have to be English to understand nonsense). It envisages the possibility of not translating a text that is always already translated, being made up of meaningless pseudo-words, and of transposing the nonsensical effect in another culture. It then looks at the numerous translations of English nonsense into French or Italian, and concludes on the total translatability of this apparently untranslatable type of text. The contradiction between the point of departure and the conclusion is explained with reference to a theory of nonsense as a genre that embodies the contradiction between verbal chaos and verbal constraints, between the need for meaning and the refusal of meaning, between the two types of games Roger Caillois calls ludus and paidia.