The paper focuses on the alleged untranslatability of the Persians, the Timotheus’ kitharodic nomos published – from an Egyptian papyrus – by Wilamowitz in 1903. The German Scholar was the first to assert that the text was not translatable into any other language: consequently he offered a Greek Paraphrase in place of a ‘real’ translation. Being the redundancy and the repetition one of the most significant stylistic aspects of the Persians, the first section of this essay analyzes and compares modern versions with the aim of highlighting the difficulty, for the translators, to preserve the original repetitions and verbal echoes. In the second section I examine the linguistic oddities pronounced by a non-native speaker (PMG fr. 791, 150-161), and I make reference to some attempts to recreate and to transfer the same mistakes into modern languages.