This paper investigates the possibility of a European consciousness emerging from a rethinking of the nexus of travel and translation in terms of motion, transit, carrying across and carrying away, and the ability of this consciousness to transform Europe from a monolithic, self-centered locus and idea exported and imposed on the 'other' into a complex cultural space and a site for pluralist encounters. An analysis of works by Christine Brooke-Rose and Diego Marani shows how the joint action of travel and translation can dispel the spectre of the European subject's alleged crisis of symbolization. The paper treats these writers as exemplary instances of what it defines as the 'scribes of a transnational Europe', that is, writers who, by participating in multiple linguistic and geographical European spaces, contribute to the creation of a new European identity modelled upon border crossing. As it visualizes the movement that traverses and connects geographical and verbal sites, border crossing becomes the dynamics through which these writers refashion Europeanness as hybrid and diasporic subjectivity. Practising spatial and cultural transfer, Brooke Rose and Marani sketch an antifoundational middle ground between the absolutist singularity of the national community and the hegemonizing generality of globalization. At the same time, however, their writings also show that the porosity of European geographical, linguistic and conceptual boundaries does not imply radical erasure of borders but rather their redefinition as lines of contact that reshape identity as alterity, marked by a difference within itself.