To prepare students for the rigorous tasks of the unseen written commentary and the oral commentary on an extract from a studied text, the author has had to explore new ways of engaging students in attending to the subtleties of language. Inspired by a classroom mishap regarding translations of Elie Wiesel's "Night," the author uses multiple text translations to engage students in discussions of connotation, diction, syntax, and other important features of literary language. He closes with suggestions for translations of other texts.