While the first chapter suggested how the texts encountered in co-translation may have triggered a sense of strange recognition in Mansfield and Woolf that echoed in refracted forms in their own poetics, the present chapter moves away from such ‘necessary possibilities’ to focus on translation as a theatricalisation or multiplication of borrowed voices. It picks up on the various masks and disguises which make the boundaries between characters and speakers increasingly porous, with the translator-as-ventriloquist ‘teetering on the verge’ of ‘tidy structures’, enabling words from the page to become patterns in performance (D. Robinson 2001: 11, 132). From this perspective, thematic or referential similarities count less than a sensually alert feel of the text: sounds, sights, echoes and colours as carried by the ‘speakingness’ of living language. Barbara Folkart's call for a poetics of translation as rewriting and reenacting is operative here, despite her insistence on the singularity of the writing subject and the writerly qualities of the text:

Koteliansky's working set-up with his co-translators was a first step in initiating such re-enactments ‘of the already said’. Not that there was anything at all novel in practising translation in partnership. As Reinhold points out, much continental translation practice worked exactly this way; a first translator as native speaker provided a rough translation of the source text, then a second translator ‘polished’ the target text, to ensure grammaticality and readability (Reinhold 2003: 11).