The main purpose of the chapter is to analyse the reconstruction of the hyphenated identities of second- and third-generation writers from the North American continent through the recuperation and preservation of memories of a “recollected” country. By way of example, I will be reflecting upon two Portuguese-American women writers, namely Vaz (1955–) and Neves (1968–), as the case studies. Both authors are descendants of Portuguese immigrants, though they belong to different generations and write in different literary genres. Drawing on Apter’s insights on translation in Translation Zone (2006), and on the notion of untranslatability in Against World Literature (2013), this paper will discuss the concept of Portuguese-American identity as a collage of crystallised ancestral memories, the palimpsestic memory of the intergenerational heritage of Portuguese-Americans. Works like Vaz’s Fado & Other Stories (1997) and Neves’s Capricornucopia (2018) will be analysed in detail.