In this paper, the author analyses fiction by Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, and Dezso Kosztolányi in terms of a Nietzschian 'will to power’ or, in this case, an author’s will to construct and control meaning, and a translator’s will to construct and control meaning. She focuses on the use of architectural metaphors, especially the theme of translation or reproduction as it occurs in fiction, to raise questions about definitions of translations, to illustrate the potential tensions between author and translator. Her analysis destabilizes essentialist notions of language and translation. Instead, she suggests that every translation (and every act of creation) deconstructs and decanonizes an earlier creation, stealing or appropriating that creation in a kind of power struggle with the object the translation intends to represent. She calls this the dark side of translation, one perhaps more closely aligned with crime and thieves.