[en] Paul Claes is a notorious Flemish translator, most famous for his translations of classic and modernist texts; but he is also a novelist and a poet, a critic and a scholar. This article examines how translation and writing interconnects in Claes's translations and pastiche of Edward FitzGerald's (free) translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Because of a cultural difference in legal status and representation, translating and writing are often considered to be strictly separate activities, establishing a hierarchical distinction between 'creative' and 'derivative' modes. If intertextual criticism has debunked this distinction, the heterolingual aspect of intertextuality has only recently been brought to attention. This article attempts to cast a light on how the difference between translating and writing is undermined and/or reified in Claes's reappropriation of FitzGerald's and Chajjaam's poems at a poetical, paratextual and textual level; it thus tackles the genetic relationships between the various texts but also their position and presentation within the cultural field as published objects.
