Philological translations take a positivist attitude toward translation: what can be translated can be translated clearly, what cannot be translated clearly must be consigned to silence. But difficulty, openness, and ambiguity are at the heart of literary language. Under the banner of accuracy, using the tools of clarity and silence, philological translations replace literary texts with non-literary texts, thereby deforming the representation of much of world literature. Examples from the translation history of early Irish literature show how these philological norms of translation, continuing to the present, reenact cultural imperialism on postcolonial peoples.