Walter Benjamin famously warned against translating translations. Yet, literary back-translations are increasingly published: translations of literary texts are thus made accessible in the source language to their initial audience.

This book argues that the malaise generated by literary back-translations is their very promise, as it transforms our conception of translation itself!

If translations are literary works in their own right, then, they are also worthy of translation.

Questioning our discomfort with back-translation helps unravel what it is exactly that instinctively pushes us to prefer the first iteration of a text: could it be that the marginal status of translations has less to do with our refusal to perceive them as literary texts in their own right than with how we conceive translation as a process with a clear point of departure and destination; that our reverence for "originals" hides a rather limiting instinctive tendency that leads us to approach literature and translation teleologically, unilinearly?

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 such a thing were even possible – but as a way to enable literary works to travel in both directions, with no preconceived trajectory...

· The first book on literary back-translation.

· An introduction theorizing literary back-translation, distinguishing it from retranslation and indirect translation, and delineating its historical, political, ethical, and philosophical implications for authors, translators, publishers and readers.

· Chapters providing close textual analyses of poems and texts back-translated into several languages including Turkish and Chinese, by a dozen authors, from Artaud, Beauvoir, Celan, Koestler and Cao Xueqín, to Benjamin and Derrida.

· A book that not only works with - but also contributes to - several methodological approaches: women and gender studies, postcolonial studies, material history, poetry, hermeneutics, AI translation, film, photography, and architecture. For literary back-translation impacts how these fields, too, can be approached differently.