Through an examination of translation’s connotations in different episteme, this essay raises questions about the field of translation theories and practices after modernity. As repetition within a logic of relations, translation has been variously considered as a play of similarities within difference or of differences within similarity. Confusion, production, interpretation, dispersion, and transfusion are possible effects of intralinguistic transfer posited in divergent conceptualizations of language as semiosis. In modernity, the stacked world of Babel became horizontal as Europe invented itself in spatial relation to other continents. In the twentieth century, the labyrinth became the figure for thinking these relations as infinite doubling and regress. How will translation signify in the twenty-first century under the pressures of the electronic web linking the globe and the project of European unification? Translation poetics poses the question of (in)finitude.