The salient moments of Garcilaso el Inca’s life suggest what compelled him to translate Leone Ebreo’s Dialoghi d’ Amore. The bibliographical affinities between these two writers may have been Garcilasco’s greatest motive. Both of them were transplanted from one culture into another, in their case the common culture of the Renaissance in which they found themselves after having abandoned their respective native lands and original cultures and even their original names. In addition both were literary translators, expressing themselves in languages that were not their own, or that they had, forcibly, to make their own. Garcilaso’s translation of the Dialoghi d’ Amore is thus a rendering into Spanish of a work that Leone Ebreo conceived in a language, Italian, that was not his own. In both cases translation becomes an act of appropriation, of forging the cultural identity of each writer’s choice.