This article aims at exploring the expression and translation of perception in Philippe Jaccottet’s poems, Paysages avec figures absentes (Landscape with absent figures). The issue is to show how the logos can call upon linguistic and semantic forms in order to re-present the sensorial properties of the world. This project meets with many difficulties, among others that of the imperfect but perfectible nature of the world, which, moved by an internal force, never lets itself be completely perceived, thus leading to a permanent conflict between phusis and logos; discourse makes this conflict tangible through a never-ending play of the groundings of enunciation – its ‘instances’ – and the unceasing to-and-fro of statement and uptake.