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If, on the one hand, legal translation as one of the most specialized forms of translation practicehas received scholarly attention within the field of Translation Studies itself, on the other, little criticalattention has been paid to the way in which the concepts of ‘law’ and ‘legal discourse’, to name only themost obvious, have been dealt with in literary translation. Focussing on the 400-year history of translationinto English of Cervantes’s Don Quijote (1605), and especially by looking closely at 10 translations of avery specific and somewhat controversial passage in Part I, Chapter 22 (often called “the episode of thegalley slaves”), the article argues that translation might be better suited than any other practice to illustratethe extent to which legal concepts are (and are not) linguistically, culturally and, in this case, chronologicallybounded. Referring extensively to the analysis of this “episode of the galley slaves” by Roberto GonzálezEchevarría in his brilliant Love and the Law in Cervantes (2005), and in particular to his discussion of thestory of whom he calls the “prisoner of sex”, the article uses translation and translated texts to propose how“love and the law” might even be more intricately related than what has been suggested by the famous YaleHispanist in his work on the subject.