As Davis’ responses to her translated texts have shown, there is a porous border between authorship and translation in her work, with connections appearing between her translations and her writing. Davis goes further in some of her stories: her ‘Stories from Flaubert’ and ‘Marie Curie, So Honorable Woman’ use translation as a form of composition. This chapter focuses on other instances in Davis’ stories where she has used a discernible source text as a basis for her own work. ‘The Walk’ (Davis 2007a: 72–82), for example, cites different translations from Proust's Du côté de chez Swann to demonstrate different characters’ perceptions of an event, while ‘Kafka Cooks Dinner’ (Davis 2007a: 9–18) is a pastiche of Kafka's style. ‘Southward Bound, Reading Worstward Ho’ (Davis 2007a: 68–71) combines citation and pastiche in a way that allows it to comment on Beckett's Worstward Ho (1999) while at the same time recounting its own narrative. The citational nature of all of these stories means that they recontextualise material from elsewhere, creating moments in the text which are doubly coded, pointing the reader to another text while also forming part of Davis’ story. This process is similar to what happens with translations, where the target text is both a new text and a representation of the source text.

This sort of double coding is often associated with postmodern art, which Linda Hutcheon (1988: 4) characterises by its rewriting and revising of past art forms. Certainly, in postmodern American fiction – the literary context for Davis’ work – there is much rewriting of other texts. Christian Moraru dedicates his book Rewriting (2001) to the rewritings in prose authors such as E. L. Doctorow, Robert Coover, Paul Auster, Kathy Acker and others. In poetry, too, there is no shortage of writers using elements of others’ work in their own work, as Marjorie Perloff has explored in her Unoriginal Genius (2010). But the use of others’ texts is not limited to postmodernism, or contemporary literature: Gérard Genette's Palimpsestes (1992) covers examples from the ancient Greeks onward. Davis is not alone or unique in her use of other writers’ material as the basis for her own.