The research aims to analyze the ethical-political effects of choices made by me for the translation of the historical novel The Exiles, by Christina Baker Kline (2020). It focuses on the tension between the perpetuation of a historical domination and the possibility of social reparation, based on the theory of invisibility and on the definitions of domesticating and foreignizing translation, by Lawrence Venuti, on the concept of habitus, by Pierre Bourdieu, and theoretical positions on historical reliability by Anthony Pym. Adopting the microtextual approach proposed by Lambert and Van Gorp as a research methodology, the work articulates some linguistic, cultural and ideological conflicts faced in this particular instance of literary translation and how such translation choices point to different directions of reception in the target language.