There may be several translations of a book --i.e. once you accept, against Nabokov, that there may be one. This implements a surprising application of the open-closed principle of software.
An other domain of application could be the myth (see Tournier or Barthes). Nobody owns the "original", yet the various authors are not indiscriminated!
The book offers many variations on the theme of creation under constraints. Translation is seen as some kind of constraint. So is poetry. Some other kinds, some very sophisticated, are explored (e.g. Perec).
p 323
In his book [Mental Spaces], [Gilles] Fauconnier points out in hundreds of brilliant examples how we often refer to people or things by means of clearly incorrect linguistic pointers, and yet such "errors" somehow increase, not decrease, the efficiency of human communication.
p 325
[A] mental mixing of two situations, whether purely in one's mind or expressed via language, is what I started calling a frame blend.
p 335
Robert Forward's ceaseless frame-blending seems inconsistent, but I hope to have convinced you that such inconsistency is in fact an art --is the art-- of good translation.
p 441
Does being you feel exactly to you like being me feels to me? [...] At the close of Stravinsky's Histoire du soldat, there are the words Un bonheur est tout le bonheur.
p 482
[A] human soul is a pattern that is nurtured in a single brain over a specific lifetime, but thanks to the power of language and other deep cultural products such as music and art, much of that abstract pattern can float across from the original brain into other human brains, Not just ideas or "memes", but hopes and fears, desires and pangs --who knows, maybe even shards of consciousness-- might float across from one brain to another, thus causing the soul to spread itself out a little, to form a little "bell" centered on one specific brain but blurring outwards to inhabit, at different grades of intimacy, a set of close, empathic brains.
p 505
Although meaning seems to be being bypassed, it is in some sense involved. That's the whole trick of symbolic logic, of course --and in fact, it's the trick behind algebra and all of computation. Manipulate symbols by rules, get truths.