Translation is an ever-evolving form of transmission that carries with it ideas, hopes, politics, poetics, and desires. Building upon Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s assertion that “translation is the most intimate form of reading,” the present paper explorestranslation as a form of labor that can be described as intimate through metaphor and history. This paper offers a diachronic perspective on translation and erotic labor through the lens of metaphor, theory and translation history, andproposes that the marginal nature of both sex work and translation reflects a cultural aversion to alterity or otherness. Situated within these overlaps, this paper will trace 1) erotic dimensions of translation depicted through theory and metaphor; 2) a discussion on the figure of the yoginī from Hindu Tantric religion as well as the colonial construct of “sleeping dictionaries” as translator/ consort figures; and 3) examples from the contemporary intersections of translation, global commerce, and sex work.