This chapter investigates issues of collaborative self-translation in its relation to power in the case of Kozovoï, a Russian poet and translator of French poetry in the context of the Soviet cultural underground of the 1970s and 1980s. Building on the sociological framework provided by Casanova and Sapiro, Kozovoï’s difficulty to impose his innovative Russian verse on his French translation collaborators and the French literary market in general is examined. His collaboratively translated selected poems richly illustrated by Henri Michaux, an avant-garde poet and artist (Hors de la Colline, 1984) had high symbolic value and in this regard could have been a springboard for his career. However, Kozovoï’s vehement view of poetry (“the liberating word won by blood”) got in the way of his literary success in France. Despite overcoming many political, cultural and material constraints, Kozovoï was not able to translate his own existential catastrophe into French or into the context of French literary culture.