I analyze how Ricardo Piglia's work emphasizes the privileged role of mistranslation, rewriting, and misreading in Argentine literature. The article focuses on Assumed Name and The Absent City (1992), in which Piglia reworks some of the techniques practiced by Jorge Luis Borges and Roberto Arlt, such as the appropriation and recontextualization of foreign texts, and applies them to the contentious socio-political setting of Argentina's 1970s, 80s, and 90s. By questioning literary lineages at times of political and aesthetic uncertainty, Piglia demonstrates how translation can function as an act of resistance in the periphery. As one of Piglia's translators in the U.S., I argue that translating Piglia's texts complicates the matter by revealing the need to include center-periphery dichotomies into contemporary debates about the effects of neoliberalism on culture and society. In the novel The Absent City, Piglia explores the relationship between individuals and language and the circulation of this relationship through society in narratives, mistranslated against the flow of state and market discourses, in the process addressing some of the key issues of our times, for north and south alike.