Literary Back-Translation
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€112.99
back-translation
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comparative literature
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gender
Literary translation
postcolonialism
translation
translation theory
women
Product details
- ISBN 9781399523042
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 30 Jun 2025
- Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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Walter 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 they 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.
Véronique Lane is Lecturer in Comparative Literature and Medical Humanities at Lancaster University. She has edited two collections of essays on literary genealogies and translation for L’Esprit Créateur (2018) and Translation and Literature (2020), and is the author of Literary Translation and Mental Health (also forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press).
