This chapter discusses the phenomenon of Hebrew-Yiddish self-translation, and offers it as a central practice in the formation of modern Jewish literature. Self-translation, that is the writing and rewriting of the same work time and again in different languages by the same author, was crucial to the very ability to write modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature. In the second half of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, self-translation was the practice that allowed Hebrew and Yiddish to grow as robust literary languages. To exemplify this, the chapter discusses a case study; in a close reading of a self-translated work, a novella by Zalman Shneour (1886–1959), this chapter offers a demonstration not only of the history and national settings of self-translation, but also of the unique poetics of self-translation. The novella, A Death (1905–1923), is a prime example of self-translation practices and poetics, a poetics that privileges openness, counterfactuals, instability and indecisiveness. In the ongoing and prolonged writing and rewriting of this novella, I offer that Shneour works as both practitioner and philosopher of self-translation, thematizing in the work of art its modes of composition.