There exists no English Romance, prior to the days of Chaucer, which is not a translation of some earlier French one.

مگوی آنچه دانای پيشينه کفت که دردر نشايد دو سوراخ سفت Don’t repeat what the older sage has said; It is not good to bore two holes in the pearl

Amplifying the above statement by Walter Scott, it is possible to say that the corpus of texts in the medieval period – whether in the Eastern or the Western cultural sphere, whether in prose or in verse – is packed with “repeated characters, motifs, vocabulary, episodes and plot structures.” This is due to the fact that a literary work does not appear ex nihilo: its intertextual memory, relating to the subject matter and/or to the style, will be more or less prominent, depending first on the degree of the author’s conscience of the phenomenon and the acuteness of his intention and also on information available to the audience in order to decode the references and resemblances at play. A work always entertains relations with earlier writings, but, as we shall examine, this does not preclude an act of creation and a demonstration of originality by its author. And how interesting is this phenomenon when related to self-conscious rewritings! The porous border between creation and imitation enables a wide spectrum of kinds of rewritings, such as pastiche, parody or plagiarism, citation or adaptation.