A successful translator sued a plagiarist for the uncanny simi-larity of some five lines in the latter’s recent edition of the com-plete poems of Rimbaud, the previous addition of which hav-ing earned the translator much of his reputation and present livelihood. The translator resented not only the plagiarism, he said before the court, but the velocity at which the plagiarist had rushed out his edition, a mere four years after his own, which was against all protocol in the industry. Even the titles — Rim-baud: The Complete Works and TheComplete Poems of Rim-baud — were unnervingly similar. The plagiarist argued that the five lines in question were comparably short, inconsequential lines, which had been translated much the same over the years, possessing no ambiguous terms and having not the slightest ca-pacity for artistic interpretation, citing even older additions in which the lines were also identical. Further, during the presen-tation of expert analysis, the translator had been found to have lifted several lines, lines brimming with intimation and difficult pronouns, from an earlier edition by Fowlie, lines that were approached altogether differently by the plagiarist. The judge swiftly dismissed the charges after remarking on the special breed of hypocrite that the translator exemplified, and his edi-tion was pulled from shelves shortly thereafter. But, being the nature of human memory, it is the other man who is still known as the plagiarist.