In this article Ton Naaijkens wants to illustrate the idea that the historiography of thinking about translation cannot be but distorted when translation reviews and certain aspects of translation discourse, which are seemingly not related to translation, are discarded. The circumstances in which translations did not occur are also influential to the translation discourse. The historical period in Dutch literary history treated in this article coincides with Willem Kloos’s literary career, i.e. 1859-1938.