What kind of writing is a translation? What literary temporalities and geographies are hidden in the hidden voice of the translator? A fiction about translation is that it is without fiction and without a narrative temporality of its own. Yet as Erin Moure remarks: ‘like the future anterior of the phrase ‘I died’, all translation appears as a monster in time itself’. Because there is no such thing as a translation ‘in general’, and only kinds of translations, translation can be understood as a relational and situated critical approach to texts: perhaps the work of translation is not to stabilise a work in its afterlife, but to write it as it is read, to embody it across time and space.