Children’s literature is often translated, especially since children are less apt than adults to read in a foreign language, and since some countries—particularly Anglo-Saxon countries—have a tradition of children’s books that is richer than in others. This paper examines Kipling’s Stalky & Co. stories (1899), in particular through its two radically different translations: Paul Bettelheim and Rodolphe Thomas’s 1903 translation, the one still used in the 1985 Folio Junior edition, and Joseph Dobrinski’s, published in 1992 in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. In Kipling’s text the abundance of all kinds of intertexts, which can be connected with the interdiscursivity and the multilingualism of the stories, suggests a parallelism between intertextuality and the act of translating, and even lends itself to translation. However the copresence of the intertexts is in turn inclusive and exclusive, like the three main characters’ attitude towards their peers and their teachers. Intertextual references can either unite or ostracize the other characters in the diegesis or the young readers outside it. Such ambivalence becomes even more acute in the translations: the translator can be either inclusive or exclusive of the child readership, depending on how he manages—or does not manage—to get round the difficulty in translating intertextuality, a difficulty which is even greater when the book is directed towards children, whose referential system is necessarily more limited than an adult’s.