This is the companion website of Literary Back-Translation, a book published by Edinburgh University Press.

What is "literary back-translation"?

A concept, a practice, and a philosophy; it is a non-linear way of approaching translation:

"A literary back-translation is created when a text or part of a text, which has been translated, is itself translated back into the language of its initial composition" (as defined and theorized in the book).

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Why does it matter?

While some deem it dangerous for literary texts to travel "the wrong way", or in too many ways as it were, I would invite readers to consider the larger conception of literature entailed by the publication of back-translations. That is, literary back-translations are not only curious oddities; their very existence reveals translation as less teleological a process than has long been assumed; a process that is open-ended and that should therefore not be approached through the limiting lens of "restitution", but as a way to enable literary works to travel in both directions, with no preconceived trajectory.

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Is it ethical?

Yes, as long as publishers acknowledge that literary back-translations are back-translations: legal beneficiaries are usually, and understandably, reassured by prefaces, footnotes and forewords contextualizing the text presented to readers. The Introduction of Literary Back-Translation emphasizes that this kind of contextualization is always important when publishing translations, but argues that it becomes imperative with literary back-translations, since they not only involve works with a complex trajectory, but two authors, styles, and textual layers – and both layers need to be historicized and contextualized.

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A corpus in expansion

My hope when conceiving this collective project five years ago was that the book be an incentive for the constitution of a much larger corpus of literary back-translations crossing countries and centuries, and that back-translations, which have long been overlooked as rather odd anomalies, start being studied as they are by my co-authors and I in the book: as literary texts in their own right.

Here we are reaching out to international web users to expand our bibliography of known literary back-translations.

The analysis of back-translations, of course, requires a lot: time and resources, the mastery of several languages, and awareness of the existence of such texts in the first place.

So if you are reading this, and know of a literary back-translation (as defined above, but not listed in the catalogue), please reach out through the contact form!