Literary translations are related to their respective source texts by many elements. And although specific norms may be discovered which systematically limit the number of imaginable relations between source and target texts, empirically speaking there is no single universally accepted norm governing literary translations throughout history. Lamping challenges the assumption that the notion of a systemic structure (as defined by Luhmann) or, the classic concept of structure (as employed by de Saussure and Piaget) are applicable to literary translations at all. The author examines several cases of auto-translation – twentieth-century authors (mainly German) translating their own poetry – as extreme yet symptomatic paradigms. Having failed to discover a single structural law or superior norm governing all transformations possible in literary translations, he draws on Derrida’s notion of a de-centralized structure, i.e. a structure without an organizing focal point, to account for the diversity of translational phenomena.