Over the last years, the translation of humour has been subject to criticism, especially regarding the issues connected with the audiovisual world (dubbing and subtitling). In the case of literary translation of humour, this has certainly aroused even less interest. This consists of two elements: on one side, the literary translation and, on the other, the translation of humour. Both represent the core of the old debate on the concepts of translatability and untranslatability. Starting from it and bringing to the table practical examples, such as, among others, Eduardo Mendoza, Santiago Lorenzo and Enrique Jardiel Poncela, this paper is intended to offer a translation method that aims to overcome the idea that pragmatic equivalence is to be preferred to semantic and stylish equivalence of humour literary texts. This study aims to analyze the translation of the cultural elements in a text, the metaphor as the basis of incongruous or absurd speech, the literacy of semantic interpretation of phonological units, etc….
