The author has edited and translated into English Cixous’s notebooks, in order to study the creative process between the first and the final books. The concision of these notes, taken sometimes in a hurry by Cixous, deprives the translator of the context which normally shapes her choices. That gives her a larger freedom, with all its ‘privileges’ but also its problems. The passage from handwriting to a printed edition erases likewise the characteristic subjectivity of the original text, and is a metaphor for translating itself, which consists also of a kind of depersonalization of the author’s text.