The starting point for this article is the Latin dictum ex nihilo nihil fit, famously dramatized by Shakespeare at the beginning of King Lear when the king declares, nothing will come of nothing. Through a discussion of King Lear and the poem “Frost at Midnight” by Coleridge, the essay then examines analogies between the writing of poetry and its translation. Two conceptions of creation are introduced and compared briefly, that of the hero who summons his poetry out of the void, and that under the auspices of Lucretius, whereby the poem is a composing of preexisting materials. Finally, the concept of metaxy is introduced to describe the role of both writer and translator.