Translation, like every cultural practice, involves the creation of values, linguistic and literary, religious and political, commercial and educational, as the particular case may be. What makes translation unique is that the value-creating process takes the form of an inscribed interpretation of a foreign-language text, whose own values inevitably undergo diminution and revision to accommodate those that appeal to domestic cultural constituencies. Translation is an inscription of the foreign text with intelligibilities and interests that are fundamentally domestic, even when the translator maintains a strict semantic equivalence with the foreign text and incorporates aspects of the foreign-language cultural context where that text first emerged. Retranslations constitute a special case because the values they create are likely to be doubly domestic, determined not only by the domestic values which the translator inscribes in the foreign text, but also by the values inscribed in a previous version. Of course, retranslations may be inspired primarily by the foreign text and produced without any awareness of a preexisting translation. The cases that are considered in this article, however, posses this crucial awareness and justify themselves by establishing their differences from one or more previous versions.