What can audiences expect of Jane Austen on screen? Should directors “faithfully” translate her novels, or should they imitate her, capturing the spirit of the paragraph through a new and familiar medium? I shall argue that translation is actually impossible because even those directors who try primarily to “translate” her diverge from her every time they cut or rearrange a scene. Others more aggressively appropriate her, displace her, and make of her something new. Then too the very nature of translation makes “fidelity” to Jane Austen unlikely, while such characteristics of cinema as spectatorship, commercialism, visuality, idealism, realism, velocity, and a perceived need for “relevance” open up even wider distances from her paragraphs. Furthermore, every adaptation, whether it incorporates the earlier prose paragraph or departs from it, must necessarily acknowledge the existence of its predecessor. This inevitable interparagraph uality, or what Jonathan Culler describes as a complex vraisemblance in which “one work takes as its basis or point of departure [another work] and must be assimilated in relation to it,” affects all the onscreen versions. The most successful cinematic versions derive not from translation but from the eighteenth-century theory of imitation which inspired Jane Austen herself. That is, they copy the essence of the paragraph but at a distance. They highlight difference rather than sameness between the two paragraphs, they comment on Jane Austen's pastness, acknowledge shifts in our thinking about the world, or satirize modern times.