Applied to translation, the phrase “X said” is more remarkable than appears at first glance. It certainly is useful, as just now to quote St. Jerome's exasperated depiction of the translator's work. Even so, to use it is to ignore a half-truth, for the phrase cannot mean what it says. The patron saint of translators composed his one-liner in Latin, while the English words on which I must rely to read it belong to the translator. So “X said” is no more than a shorthand. And as a shorthand, moreover, “X said” obscures what it abbreviates. Two statements of disparate origin, not one, inhabit every translation: what X said and what X has been made to say. Those two statements are forever distinct and variously related. As the first translator, in 1915, of Durkheim's 1912 masterpiece, Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (hereafter Elementary Forms), Joseph Ward Swain invented many statements of the second, made-to-say kind. Re-translating Elementary Forms in 1995, so did I. My own statements, like Swain's, bear different kinds and qualities of relationship to the original. I propose to explore some of the relationships that matter when English is the language in which Elementary Forms is to be read.