The very metaphor of piracy concedes that texts are not owned by their authors.

Evidence

‘I shouldn’t be doing this,’ I said to myself, ‘it’s just political ventriloquism, and a non-commercial defence of the ludicrous American insistence on “intellectual” (!) property rights.’ This is why, while inspecting the ‘royalist’ Thai translation of IC, I have decided to be a translational traitor. IC is not my book any more. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 828

Categorization

• BMF: No — the idea of a theorist disowning a translated text to let it be ‘pirated’ doesn’t map to any specific plot in the listed library. Skip.
• XREF: Reinforces the anti-essentialist stance that authoritative concepts mutate in transit — methodologically central before applying ‘Orientalism’ as a portable lens.