This essay explores the modernist paradox that modernists return to and engage with tradition in order to pursue originality and newness, and their oblique relationship with the tradition by reading Eliot’s “Tradition and Individual Talent.” And then I argue that the paradox and their indirect relationship are part of the reason why for modernists there is no clear distinction between writing and translating by looking at Eliot’s The Waste Land and Pound’s partial translation of Homer in his The Cantos. Allusion and translation are useful implements through which modernists revisit the tradition or previous writers. Eliot alludes to so many previous writers including Chaucer, Dante, Shakespeare etc that The Waste Land becomes derivative and unoriginal; Pound transforms Homer so much by deleting large parts of the Homeric original, using the Renaissance Latin translation by Andreas Divus and inserting its publication information as part of his translation that his Homeric translation becomes creative and original. In this context, it would be hard to answer which one is writing and which one is translating for modernists. To them, the distinction between writing and translating does not matter; what truly matters to them is “make it new”, to pursue newness and originality.