Brown’s interview with James questions conventional understandings of translation as inter-lingual activity. A poet and cultural translator, James has drawn on Bushman hunter-gatherer songs, prayers and stories as transposed into English in the mid-nineteenth century by the linguists W. H. I. Bleek and Lucy C. Lloyd; James’s reworkings give literary charge to the linguistic literalness of Bleek and Lloyd. To refer to Jakobson, James’s versions are intra-lingual translations: English to English transpositions along different discursive and temporal paradigms (literal to poetic; mid-nineteenth- to late twentieth-century English idiom and form). James elaborates on the ethical challenges facing cultural rewriters: the boundaries of authorship and the legitimacy of intervention. What are the dangers of selective representation according to contemporary notions of the ‘aesthetic’? When does reworking become appropriation? On the other hand, what are the consequences of refusing to revise Bleek and Lloyd’s arcane texts, of refusing to grant the Bushmen, indeed any of our ancient precursors, an ‘after-life’?