This chapter focuses on different ways in which temporal metaphors can be used to rethink the process of translation, the relationship of source and target text, and the role of the translator. In the West, time has been mainly defined in spatial terms, as an arrow that positions the past behind and the future before us. This restrictive view of time is intimately linked to the transference metaphor of translation based on the notion of a straightforward irreversible movement across an intermediate gap. There are, however, other possible ways of conceiving time. Walter Benjamin’s concept of the presence of the now, Henri Bergson’s duration, Homi Bhabha’s third space as a time lag, and Michel Serres’s topological view of time try to break away from unilateral linearity revealing the profoundly unstable and multilayered nature of time and the fundamental inappropriateness of understanding the temporal as a straight line rushing ahead. These theoretical insights can be applied to translation revealing, among other things, that source and target are not binary opposites.