This article takes off from Borges's fable of a recension of Don Quixote corresponding word for word to the original. The total imitation is also the most original recreation conceivable: the author of the new version must have utterly steeped himself in the original, yet his recension takes place in radically different conditions of being. This extreme instance of translation suggests how translation itself is the most extreme of a phased range of redactions traced by a work in course of composition, transmission and reception. Every work thereby becomes the site of an ongoing intertextual process involving works before and after itself. This article uses translation as the symbol or epitome of this whole range of textual transactions.