Theorizing Back-Translation: From Antoine Berman on Retranslation to the Three Layers of The Monk by Lewis, Artaud, and Phillips

Lane, Veronique (2024) Theorizing Back-Translation: From Antoine Berman on Retranslation to the Three Layers of The Monk by Lewis, Artaud, and Phillips. In: Literary Back-Translation :. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh. (In Press)

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Abstract

In this chapter, my discussion of Benjamin’s prohibitive stance on back-translation moves on to further the theoretical reading I have proposed in the book's introduction in relation to Antoine Berman’s work on retranslation. I explore two premises in ‘La retraduction comme espace de traduction’: that all translations are impaired by powerful forces of ‘non-translation’, especially first translations, and that this phenomenon gets attenuated by retranslation. It is to develop these two ideas that Berman created the concept of ‘défaillance’. I trace the evolution of Berman’s notion in his œuvre, unearthing its psychoanalytical dimension, and proposing a different translation to remediate common misinterpretations in the English-speaking world, before demonstrating how the study of ‘défaillances’ across three translative layers can be enlightening through analysis of Matthew Gregory Lewis’ gothic novel The Monk (1796), Antonin Artaud’s French translation (1931) and John Phillips’ back-translation (2003). The study of back-translations, I propose with Berman, is valuable retrospectively, insofar as it helps identifying tensions both within source texts and translations: there lies what I am calling here the ‘emphasizing potential’ of back-translations. In the case of The Monk, close textual analysis of the three textual layers reveal what was obscured as the crucial relation between the Gothic and ‘madness’, more precisely how through translation and back-translation, The Monk has contributed to operate a wider shift in Gothic literature: from the Gothic anchored in specific locations – isolated castles, convents, gardens – to an uncannily mobile gothic subjectivity in twenty-first century culture and literature. The study of ‘défaillances’ in back-translations, I argue, can thus magnify elements underdeveloped in two source texts, and in so doing, holds the power not only to transform our understanding of the trajectory of literary works, but also of grey areas in the larger trajectory of cultural movements such as the Gothic, from Romanticism to Modernism.