In his work on retranslation, Antoine Berman is probably the theorist who came closest to reflecting on back-translation. This article offers interpretations of two of his premises in ‘La retraduction comme espace de traduction’: that all translations are impaired by forces of non-translation and that this phenomenon is attenuated by retranslation. It is partly to investigate these hypotheses that Berman developed the concept of ‘défaillance’. The article traces the evolution of Berman's notion before demonstrating how the study of ‘défaillances’ across translative layers can be enlightening, by analysing three scenes in Matthew Gregory Lewis’ gothic novel The Monk (1796), Antonin Artaud's French translation (1931), and John Phillips’ back-translation (2003). It argues that the study of back-translations is valuable retrospectively, insofar as it magnifies elements which were underdeveloped in source-texts, and that, in so doing, it has the potential to transform our understanding of the larger trajectory of literary works.
Dom Claude Frollo de Notre-Dame de Paris, moine démoniaque de la tradition des romans noirs ou avatar français de Faust ?
