Frontmatter -- Contents -- List of Figures -- Notes on Contributors -- Introduction: The Challenges of Translation Theory Heightened by Literary Back-Translation / Véronique Lane -- PART I THEORETICAL REFLECTIONS -- 1. Inventive Languages: Walter Benjamin, Ernst Jandl, and the Possibility of Back-Translation / Dominik Zechner -- 2. Theorizing Back-Translation: From Antoine Berman on Retranslation to the Three Layers of The Monk by Lewis, Artaud, and Phillips / Véronique Lane -- PART II BACK-TRANSLATION AND IDEOLOGY -- 3. Simone de Beauvoir, Brigitte Bardot, and Back-Translation: The Trajectory of Beauvoir's Discourse on the "Eternal Feminine" / Pauline Henry-Tierney -- 4. Back-Translation in Chinese for the Chinese? Hong Lou Meng in the Library of Chinese Classics and the Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press / Wang Jinbo -- 5 Back-Translation as Self-Translation: The Strange Case of Darkness at Noon / Howard Gaskill -- PART III BACK-TRANSLATION AND ARCHITECTURE -- 6 Karl: An Architectural Narrative / Peter Yeadon, Riccardo Duranti, Lawrence Venuti -- 7 (Back-)Translations Make Pluriversal History / Esra Akcan -- PART IV BACK-TRANSLATION AND THE HERMENEUTICS OF READING -- 8 "Untranslatable Testimony": Paul Celan in Back-Translation / Byron Byrne-Taylor -- 9 Translation Without Reserve? / Jan Mieszkowski -- 10 Crypto-Back-Translation in Van Rooten's Homophonic Nursery Rhymes / Alexandra Lukes -- Bibliography -- Index of Names -- General Index

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The first book to theorise literary back-translation, distinguishing it from retranslation and indirect translation, and delineating its aesthetic, ethical, political and philosophical implications Offers an introduction theorizing literary back-translation, distinguishing it from retranslation and indirect translation, and delineating its aesthetic, political, ethical, and philosophical implications for authors, translators, publishers and readersProvides close analyses of poems and texts back-translated into a range of languages including Turkish and Chinese by a dozen authors (from Artaud, Beauvoir, Celan, Koestler and Cao Xueqín, to Benjamin and Derrida)Spans several methodological approaches (women and gender studies, postcolonial studies, material history, poetry, hermeneutics, AI translation, architecture, film, and photography)Includes a bibliography with a special section dedicated to known literary back-translations, to be collectively expanded on a companion websiteWalter Benjamin famously warned against translating translations. Yet, literary back-translations are increasingly being published: whether commissioned by publishers to make celebrated translations of literary works accessible to their original audience, or sponsored by nations and feminist groups working for the cultural reappropriation of texts that first appeared in translation, back-translations are becoming more common. This book argues that the malaise back-translations still generate are their very promise: literary back-translation transforms our conception of translation itself, through the recognition that translations are literary works in their own right, and as such also worthy of an afterlife. It thereby responds to the call of Maria Timoczko's call for new approaches enlarging translation, conceptually as well as ideologically. Literary back-translation reveals translation as much less teleological a process than assumed, a process that should no longer be understood as a balance of forces seeking 'restitution' - as if it were possible - but as a way to enable literary works to travel in both directions, with no preconceived trajectory.

Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.

In English.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed March 03 2026)