Possession

I'm working on a translation project that begins with a discussion of writers becoming possessed by their subject matter. I'll write about it more concretely when it's official — things are looking good, but I don't want to jinx rights or contracts by being premature. But it's funny; I just read something about the author's work, and the scholar writing about it made her own sub-par translation of a few sentences of a different text he had written and that she was discussing. And I felt not possessed but possessive of his words in English. Reading his work rendered badly in English was more painful than a simple translation because I felt that I should somehow be the custodian of the form in the English language.