As Balzac suggests in The Physiology of Marriage: “To read is to join with the writer in a creative act” (2016c, n. p.). What is true of any reader may be even truer of translators, as primordial readers entrusted with rewriting a text for a foreign audience. This paper will consider two of Balzac’s short stories, Le Réquisitionnaire (1831) and L’Élixir de longue vie (1830), in English, Spanish and Chinese translation. Our observations draw on reception theories, especially the most recent ones that integrate a cultural dimension to translating, but they are essentially informed by O’Neill’s macro- and transtextual model (2005). This model is a complex multilingual system that includes the author and translators, as well as all the texts, the original as well as the translations, with all their consonances, dissonances, and transformations, whether of form or content. This macrotextual approach will not only help understand Balzac’s impact in the world, but also highlight some of the strategies the translators adopted in performing their task: stylistic choices to transfer what they perceived to be Balzac’s style, but also domesticating or foreignizing strategies as discussed by Schleiermacher, Venuti or Berman. Whatever the strategies used, however, it becomes clear that once a piece is published, it no longer belongs to its author, but has a life of its own in the target context that the author could not foresee and can do nothing about (Chan, 2010, p. 3). To illustrate and measure some of these transformations, be they of form or content, we follow these two short stories in a few countries and linguistic systems.