Empathy is defined in terms of empathic receptivity, understanding, interpretation, and responsiveness. Each has characteristic breakdowns, exemplified by emotional contagion, conformity, projection, and communications lost in translation, which, when overcome, promote progress toward a rigorous and critical empathy. In this argument, a rigorous and critical empathy navigates a path between two absurdities—solipsism and merger with the Other, deploying a paradigm of empathy as translation between self and Other, including the puzzling case of self/Other reversal in the folktale of the prince and the pauper. The distinction “philosophical overlay” (Boylan) is defined and elaborated. The intersection of empathy and mimesis is engaged using Paul Ricœur’s reading of mimesis. The model of empathy as translation of experience between oneself and the Other is elaborated. The speech act of storytelling is the performance corresponding to empathic responsiveness, which does not merely pretend to create a community, it actually does so. Empathic responsiveness opens up into (and can be redescribed as) “rhetorical empathy.” Rhetorical empathy clarified. In empathizing the Other is engaged in-person and in-fiction. The intersection of empathy and mimesis is shown. The dynamic of inner imitation (Lipps) is narratively exemplified.