This article takes as its starting-point the loss of authorship associated with both literary translation and literary censorship. More specifically, the case of the celebrated post-war German writer Günter Eich is used to explore how the conventional notion of authorship – or, to use Michel Foucault's term, the 'author-function' – is surrendered within the censorship context of the National Socialist radio system. Forsaking original creativity in order to meet the professional demands of the radio industry and the cultural-political requirements of National Socialism, Eich was prolific between 1933 and 1940 in producing lightweight entertainment programming, often re-writing well-known literary or historical source material. The selection of material for these 'translations' reveals much about the mechanisms of censorship in the Third Reich: texts came to conform to the regime's norms not only through top-down intervention, but also through the pragmatic anticipation of those norms, as well as coincidence with pre-existing aesthetic traditions. In Eich's case, the loss of authorship associated with this translated/censored output has far-reaching implications. The clash between this output and the notion of authorship associated with Eich after 1945 – as an elite author and a moral authority – continues to pose considerable difficulties for Eich scholars, manifested most obviously in the relative neglect of this output and in the over-zealous search for resistance within it. Indeed, it is not political or moral concerns with the Nazi regime which explain the crisis widely identified by critics in Eich's work in the mid-to-late 1930s, but rather the damage done to his self-image as an author by the surrender of his author-function in this translated/ censored output.