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In this dissertation I argue that multilingual authors can, and frequently do, produce texts in multiple languages in and through translation whose compositional complexity erases the distinction between original and translation; although these texts are often understood to be original-translation pairings, in actuality they seriously challenge the simplistic conception of equivalence such discrete categories imply. I term these texts “polytexts” in order to emphasize their genesis, and continued creative evolution, in and through the multiple languages spoken by these polyglot authors. I show that polytexts grow and expand an originary artistic impulse diachronically through multiple authorial interventions in the work as authors work cooperatively with their translators to produce new texts tailored for new linguistic and cultural audiences. I employ Lebanese-British author Hanan al-Shaykh’s literary corpus to illustrate the concept by analyzing in depth how she shifts her works through a process of translation and rewriting that produces two polytexts, one directed to her anglophone reading audience and one to her arabophone readership. I contend that al-Shaykh’s polytextual corpus, as well as the polytextual corpora of other canonical writers of world literature, challenges our dichotomous understanding of translations as inert mirror images of other texts, decentralizes the significance and synchronic nature of the holy (presumed) original, invalidates assumptions that composition is a monolingual and monocultural process, and validates the dynamism of authors’ diachronic interventions in their creative works across multiple linguistic and cultural spheres.