This article focuses on the creative practice of literary translators and the critical role of their autobiographies as readers, writers and historical subjects. Three examples of the translation of inter-texts in Borges’s Pierre Ménard, Leonardo Padura’s Cuban thriller, Havana Red and Juan Goytisolo’s satire, A Cock-Eyed Comedy, are sites for the examination of the process of a translator’s interpretive moves in what constitutes a re-telling of stories. The article’s narrrative calls for a translation pedagogy that extends beyond the narrow confines of present trends in Translation Studies research.