Starting from the premise that intertextuality is but a category of the 'lexicultural,' i.e. the halo of meaning that surrounds words denoting 'cultural' realities and is immediately perceptible to a native speaker but more foreign to a non-native speaker, this paper examines different instances of intertextuality in James Thurber's fables and stories. These range from the distorted allusions to famous quotations of American historical figures to reformulations of time-honoured proverbs and sayings to the more discreet and diffuse building-up of atmospheres which evoke universally-known fictional worlds. Translating all of these varieties of intertextuality is shown to mean striving to reproduce the effect of the intertextual play rather than simply translating or transposing its form, as its potency strictly depends on the latency of the intertext.