ABSTRACT
This concluding chapter highlights the themes of the book. Through repetition, erasure, citation, quotation, appropriation, influence, intertextuality, and many other strategies, (un)creative writers create (un)creative originals. These are texts that refer to other texts and, like translations, are created on the basis of palimpsests. In the same way as translation, (un)creative literature is a constant transformation. To translate involves focusing on that minimal difference between things that makes the same thing never exactly the same. As Christopher Mellinger says in his preface to this book, while evoking Benjamin’s metaphor of a person at the edge of a forest calling out into this expansive space and being returned an echo, Vidal ends the volume with the imagery of translation as perpetual movement, for there is no stable, Platonic original underlying the creative act of translation. Creative and ludic translation renders and portrays any (un)original text as a palimpsestic, iterative, complex, and fragmented reality. As a result, translating is a complex and (un)original writing process. It is multidirectional, creative, and open ended, always in movement, and never definitive. And that is what makes translation so fascinating.
