Intertextuality and Translation in Three

Recent French Holocaust Novels

Angela Kershaw

The relationships between intertextuality and translation have been

very widely discussed in Translation Studies. Intertextuality, Lawrence
Venuti tells us, is central to the production and reception of
translations . . . Intertextuality enables and complicates translation,
preventing it from being an untroubled communication and opening
the translated text to interpretive possibilities that vary with
cultural constituencies in the receiving situation.1 The concept of
intertextuality prevents us from seeing any text as unitary and univocal,
placing translations on an equal footing with their source texts and
on a par with all other forms of writing, rather than derivative and
secondary. Approached as an intertextual relation, translation becomes
a form of reading that requires and generates interpretation, and
a space is opened up in which the translators agency is valued.
Intertextuality provides a useful way of discussing translators choices:
Theo Hermans defines the connections translations have to other
translations as translation-specific intertextuality, relationships which
might be friendly filiations, in the case of accepted translatorial
norms, or hostile stand-offs, in the case of critical re-translations.2
Explicit and extensive intertextuality is a recurrent feature of recent
French novels about the Holocaust that discuss not only the events
but the memorialization of those events. Although such works are
not themselves testimonial, being the products of creative writers of
1
Lawrence Venuti, Translation, Intertextuality, Interpretation, Romance Studies, 7 (2009),
15773 (p. 157).
2
Theo Hermans, The Conference of the Tongues (Manchester, 2007), pp. 357.

Translation and Literature, 23 (2014), 18596

DOI: 10.3366/tal.2014.0149
Edinburgh University Press
www.euppublishing.com/tal

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the second or third generation (i.e. the children or grandchildren
of the generation who witnessed the events directly), and therefore
do not pose questions of authenticity in the acute form we find
in the translation of Holocaust testimony itself, they frequently rely
on overt intertextual references to a canon of Holocaust writing
that is directly testimonial. Because that canon is multilingual, the
mobilization of intertextuality in these novels often implies, though
it rarely acknowledges, translation. In the fictional representation
and thus the cultural memory of the Holocaust, translation therefore
occupies a crucial position within intertextual networks via which
shared knowledge is evoked and through which meaning is created. In
this article I shall argue that translation is a crucial rhetorical strategy
used firstly within Holocaust fiction that is, in the source text in
order to approach complex questions of identity and of representation
and unrepresentability. I shall also consider the problem that arises
when these novels are themselves translated: that of the translation of
an intertext which is already a translation.
The impetus for the present collection of essays is the recognition
that both the fact and the significance of translation are frequently occluded in discussions of Holocaust writing. Readers of Holocaust texts
generally prefer to see translation as straightforward, unproblematic,
and transparent. For perfectly good and understandable reasons
having to do with the horrific nature of the subject being represented,
the consequent impetus to bear witness to the events, and the existence
of certain morally reprehensible and historically fallacious revisionist
discourses, they do not want to acknowledge that translation is never
untroubled communication, and that it opens up the possibility of new
meanings being generated that will vary according to the situations of
reception. The problem we face in discussing translation in relation
to the production and circulation of knowledge about the Holocaust is
that the concepts of equivalence and the invariant, which have been
demystified in Translation Studies (in part thanks to work on intertextuality), still have an ethical and representational valency in the context
of Holocaust writing insofar as it acts as a transmitter of historical
knowledge, because of the special significance accorded to authenticity.
The refusal to acknowledge translation in Holocaust writing is a sort
of equivalence fantasy; it is the desire for a type of strong equivalence
that posits congruence of meaning and singularity of intent, and
leaves no room for differential voices, aberrant subject positions, or
interpretive margins.3 As Theo Hermans demonstrates, such an idea
3
Theo Hermans, Translation, Equivalence and Intertextuality, Wasafiri, 18.40 (2003),
3941 (p. 40).

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of equivalence nullifies translation itself, and would only be possible
via some form of institutional validation by the Church, for example
that declares all sanctioned versions to be originals. Translation
Studies as a discipline now rejects the possibility of an invariant, having established that translation is transformative and that it is naive
to think of translation as the reproduction or transfer of an invariant
contained in or caused by the foreign text (Venuti, p. 162). But in the
study of Holocaust writing, the dissolution of equivalence and of the
invariant can look like a dangerous undermining of authenticity.
In Des Tours de Babel, Derrida addresses the interrelated issues of
translation and multilingualism. In translation as in all other fields of
knowledge, Derrida resists binarism in favour of plurality:
Let us note one of the limits of theories of translation: all too often they
treat the passing from one language to another and do not sufficiently
consider the possibility for languages to be implicated more than two in a
text. How is a text written in several languages at a time to be translated?
How is the effect of plurality to be rendered?4

Derridas essay sets out from the simply expressed but provocative
premise that in the very tongue of the original . . . there is translation
(p. 172). The original is not characterized by stability, completeness,
and unitary identity, but calls for translation precisely because it is
not and can never be complete unto itself, because at the origin it was
not there without fault, full, complete, total, identical to itself (p. 188).
The presence of translation in the very tongue of the original can
be understood both in the sense that language is never singular and
proper to oneself, and in the sense that texts are characterized by
linguistic plurality.5 According to Venuti, the translation of a translated
intertext exacerbates the problem of decontextualization that is posed
for the translator by any intertextual reference, and the solution
most frequently adopted is substitution: allusions are usually replaced
by analogous but ultimately different intertextual relations in the
receiving language (Venuti, pp. 159, 172). Substitution encompasses
various possibilities, including replacing the original reference with a
completely different intertext deemed more meaningful to the target
reader, and using an existing translation of the intertext. Whichever
strategy is adopted even leaving a foreign intertext in its original
language the intertextual relationships necessarily change.
4
Jacques Derrida, Des Tours de Babel, translated by Joseph F. Graham in Difference in
Translation, edited by Joseph F. Graham (Ithaca, NY, 1985), pp. 165207 (p. 171). Subsequent
references in-text.
5
Derrida explores this idea fully in Le monolinguisme de lautre, ou la prosthse de lorigine
(Paris, 1996), translated by Patrick Mensah as Monolingualism of the Other (Stanford, CA, 1998).

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For purposes of further exploration I shall focus on three recent
French Holocaust novels and their English translations: Fabrice
Humberts LOrigine de la violence (2009), translated by Frank Wynne as
The Origin of Violence (2011); Boualem Sansals Le Village de lAllemand
ou le journal des frres Schiller (2008), translated by Frank Wynne as
An Unfinished Business (2010); and Sylvie Germains Magnus (2005),
translated by Christine Donougher under the same title (2008). In
the first, the extensive use of intertextuality calls attention to the
texts constructed nature and therefore to problems of representation.
Intertextuality is one of the narrative strategies employed to disrupt
the traditional conventions of the historical novel, but despite overt
attention to issues of mediation and transmission, the fact that many
of the intertexts are translated passes without comment.
One of the most significant instances of intertextuality in LOrigine
de la violence is Humberts network of references to Primo Levi. When
the narrator visits Serge Kolb, a Holocaust survivor who knew his
grandfather during their incarceration in Buchenwald, what Venuti
calls a significant node of intertextuality occurs. The encounter is
an important stage in the narrators attempt to uncover the story of
his grandfathers death in the camp, since it brings him face to face
with the complex question of why some victims survived and some did
not. The passage relies on two types of intertextuality: an extended
commentary on Levis account in Se questo un uomo of Alfred L.,
which is an example of what Genette calls metatextuality, and various
examples of marked and attributed citation, which for Genette is a
subset of intertextuality proper.6 The fact of translation is occluded
since the citations, taken from Martine Schruoffenegers 1987 French
translation Si cest un homme, are introduced as if they were Levis own
words with phrases such as crit-il and Levi dcrit.7 Wynnes strategy,
faced with the problem of translating this translated intertextuality, is
to have recourse to Stuart Woolfs 1960 translation of Levi, which is
listed in a translators note at the end of the novel.
Wynne, however, tacitly varies his strategy when Humbert cites
(Schruoffenegers translation of) Levis account of his purpose in
writing the book: fournir des documents une tude dpassionne
de lme humaine (p. 87). Woolf translates this as to furnish
documentation for a quiet study of the human mind, which is close
to Levis fornire documenti per uno studio pacato di alcuni aspetti
6

Grard Genette, Palimpsestes (Paris, 1982), pp. 10, 8.

Primo Levi, Si cest un homme, translated by Martine Schruoffeneger (Paris, 1987); Fabrice
Humbert, LOrigine de la violence (Paris, 2009), pp. 87, 88.
7

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dellanimo umano, but Wynne translates the French translation:
to provide documents for a dispassionate study of certain aspects of
the human soul.8 Wynne thus perpetuates a reinterpretation present
in Si cest un homme: that the book is a dispassionate account of the human
soul. Dpassionne is an odd choice since Levi at once goes on to say
that the book is a manifestation of the immediate and violent impulse
(un impulso immediate e violente) to tell the story, and soul/me
(which would be anima in Italian) is a mistranslation of animo: esprit
would have been closer (If This is a Man, p. 15; Se questo un uomo, p. 9).
The French translation substitutes the spiritual for the intellectual, and
misses Levis opposition between a quiet account and the thing he
wants to avoid, which is the formulation of new accusations, nuovi
capi di accusa (If This is a Man, p. 15; Se questo un uomo, p. 9). Levis
point is surely that an account of the traumatic events he witnessed and
to which his response is certainly not dispassionate can, and indeed
must, nonetheless be recounted quietly and calmly, rather than in an
accusatory manner.
This example contrasts with Wynnes strategy when faced with the
title of the chapter in which the story of Alfred L. occurs. In Si
cest un homme, and therefore in Humberts novel, Levis I sommersi
e i salvati undergoes a significant transformation to become Les
lus et les damns. Here Wynne resists the reinterpretation and
uses Woolfs The Drowned and the Saved. Of course, there is no
other acceptable choice, since the phrase is so iconic, forming the
title for a subsequent work by Levi. But as in the previous example,
the transformation in the French is significant: it goes to the heart
of Levis intellectual and ethical project insofar as i sommersi
(literally, the submerged) is so obviously a poetic avoidance of any
morally or religiously loaded term. Salvati and saved are ambiguous,
encompassing meanings that are both secular and sacred suggesting
chance (saved from shipwreck) as much as choice (saved by God)
while lus (the elect) is irrevocably religious, and, like damns (the
damned), introduces the highly problematic notion of divine will.
These examples illustrate the way in which translated intertextuality
can result in complex reinterpretations of the intertext. They also
illustrate its unpredictability, since translators are quite at liberty to vary
their strategies as they see fit, and in accordance with norms established
by what Hermans calls translation-specific intertextuality.
8
Primo Levi, If This is a Man, translated by Stuart Woolf (London, 2011), p. 15; Primo
Levi, Se questo un uomo (Turin, 1989), p. 9; Fabrice Humbert, The Origin of Violence, translated
by Frank Wynne (London, 2011), p. 75.

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Angela Kershaw/Intertextuality and Translation

A third example will underline the density of the translated intertextuality on which LOrigine de la violence depends. In a six-page incipit,
Humbert locates the story of his grandfathers death in Buchenwald
in the context of a definition of absolute evil via reference to Dantes
Divine Comedy. This is not only a citation but also an example of what
Genette calls allusion. Further, it is a proleptic allusion, since the
informed reader will come only later in the novel to link it to Levis
chapter on The Canto of Ulysses in If this is a man. In Humberts
text the quotation is presented in both Italian and French, and Wynne
maintains the multilingualism, quoting both the Italian and Mark
Musas English translation: If once he was as fair as now hes foul and
dared to raise his brows against his Maker, it is fitting that all grief
should spring from him.9 This is an illustration of the tendency of
translated intertextuality to spawn yet more intertextuality, since the
English reader cannot but hear the Witches chorus from the first scene
of Macbeth: Fair is foul and foul is fair | Hover through the fog and
filthy air. This dynamic play of intertextual meanings raises significant
interpretive complexities. Levis use of Dante has aroused ethical and
political controversy relating to the implications of invoking a literary
inferno to describe an actual place;10 extensive potential arguments
over the ethical legitimacy or otherwise of using a Shakespearian intertext as a means of rendering comprehensible the incomprehensible
evil of Buchenwald can be imagined. One of the problems posed by
translated intertextuality in Holocaust fiction is that it risks being
evaluated in radically different ways according to the perspective
of the reader. Valued positively in literary studies as an illustration
of semantic profusion, and in Translation Studies as the creative
intervention of translatorial agency, translated intertextuality can look
ethically fraught in Holocaust Studies when it releases meanings which
the intertextuality of the source text seems not to sponsor.
The proliferation of intertextuality and the exercise of translatorial
agency are also features of Wynnes translation of Boualem Sansals
Le Village de lAllemand ou le journal des frres Schiller (Paris, 2008). This
controversial novel is a meditation on the politics and poetics of memory. It concerns the discovery by the eponymous brothers that their
German father was a Nazi war criminal who evaded trial after the war
by escaping to Algeria, where he married their Arab mother. The truth
comes to light when both parents are killed by Islamists in Algeria in
9

Humbert, The Origin of Violence, p. 4; Musas translation is quoted from Canto 36.
Michael Rothberg and Jonathan Druker, A Secular Alternative: Primo Levis Place in
American Holocaust Discourse, Shofar, 28 (2009), 10426 (p. 116).
10

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the mid-1990s and the elder brother, Rachel, discovers incriminating
documents. He becomes obsessed with the past, and, overwhelmed
by guilt for his fathers crimes, ultimately commits suicide by gassing
himself while dressed in the striped pyjamas of a deportee. Sansal constructs an unstable narrative by presenting the text as the intercalated
diaries of Rachel, who has succeeded educationally and professionally
in France, and of his younger brother Malrich, who still lives on a
rough estate on the outskirts of Paris, has dropped out of the education
system, has no job, has never heard of Hitler or the Holocaust, and
has to rely on the good offices of a secondary school teacher to rewrite
his book in good French, and to edit and restructure it.
As we have seen in the case of Humbert, the problematization of
authorship in recent French Holocaust fiction is a means of provoking
reflection on problems of representation and transmission. Sansal
achieves this by creating a fiction of multiple authorship. The two
journals are typographically distinct and linguistically marked. Rachel
writes in respectable French whereas Malrichs language is the youth
slang of the Paris banlieue, heavily inflected with an Arabic that
his relatives in Algeria cannot understand. Malrich finds it hard to
read Rachels diary because son franais nest pas le mien (Sansal,
Le Village, p. 21). While the Derridean resonance of this remark
is lost in Wynnes His French isnt like mine,11 both the source
text and its translation constitute a reflection on the relationship of
language to identity, to memory, and to history. As Mireille Rosello has
demonstrated in a penetrating analysis of the novel as an intervention
in the French memory war over the Second World War and the
Algerian War, the political implications of this novel are highly
problematic. Both brothers, she argues, instrumentalize the memory
of the Holocaust in politically dubious ways: Malrich by conflating the
domination of his estate by the local Islamist Imam with the situation in
the concentration camps, and Rachel by enacting an extreme form of
historical repentance that renders the sons responsible for the crimes
of the fathers.12 While the narrative clearly does not condone either of
these positions, it does not offer any positive resolution.
In this novel the work of Primo Levi is again an important intertext,
and Wynnes strategy is interventionist. As in The Origin of Violence,
Wynne generally uses Woolfs translation. However, the translation of
11
Boualem Sansal, An Unfinished Business, translated by Frank Wynne (London, 2010),
p. 13; my emphasis.
12
Mireille Rosello, Guerre des mmoires ou parallles dangereux dans le Village
de lAllemand de Boualem Sansal, Modern and Contemporary France, 18 (2010), 193211
(pp. 1956, 2023).

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Angela Kershaw/Intertextuality and Translation

the opening poem from Si cest un homme, which Rachel quotes in full
in his diary, is taken not from If this is a man but from Levis Collected
Poems, translated by Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann.13 This choice
entails a significant shift. In Sansals text, the poem is entitled Si cest
un homme, whereas Wynne includes the title the poem bears in the
Collected Poems and in the Italian original (in the collection Ad ora
incerta), but, significantly, not in Se questo un uomo: Schem (Le Village,
pp. 789; An Unfinished Business, pp. 601). This is a reference to the
Hebrew Shema prayer, known to English readers of the Old Testament
(in the New International Version) as Hear, O Israel: The Lord our
God, the Lord is one (Deut 6: 4), which a Jew is obliged to recite
morning and night. By substituting a quotation from Se questo un
uomo for one from Ad ora incerta, Wynne increases the multilingualism
of the text by including the Hebrew title and releases a chain of biblical
and liturgical translated intertextual references not explicitly present in
Le Village de lAllemand, Se questo un uomo, or If this is a man. The idea
foregrounded in the title of the poem in Ad ora incerta but attenuated in
Se questo un uomo of a duty to meditate daily on the dehumanization
by the Nazis of the deportees is thus reintroduced into An Unfinished
Business.
The reason for this substitution relates to the problem of translating
Sansals lengthy title. An Unfinished Business is derived from
Feldman and Swanns translation of another poem by Levi, Le
pratiche inevase, written in 1981 and included in Ad ora incerta.14 The
translation of this poem is included at the beginning of the English
version of the novel even though it is not referred to anywhere in
Sansals volume. The English title certainly highlights the novels key
theme: the inability of contemporary cultures to finish with the wars
of the past. But to include a translation of this poem to highlight it
releases complex interpretive possibilities. As Rosello demonstrates,
the individual destinies the novel recounts are the result of the
protagonists failure to engage appropriately and productively with
memory wars of a collective and national nature. The poem, by
contrast, suggests a struggle to come to terms with the past on the
part of an individual, especially via the phrase in the short time thats
left, which points to the narrators death and inevitably, given Levis
subsequent fate, to the possibility of suicide. The inclusion of the poem
13
Primo Levi, Collected Poems, translated by Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann (London,
1992), p. 9. There is only one published translation of this poem into French: the version
that appears in Si cest un homme, translated by Schruoffeneger, is reprinted in Primo Levi,
A une heure incertaine (Paris, 1997), p. 19, where it bears both titles.
14
Primo Levi, Ad ora incerta (Milan, 1984), pp. 512; Levi, Collected Poems, p. 47.

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risks a confusion of individual and collective memories, and opens up
the intolerable possibility, doubtless unintended by the translator, of a
link between Rachels suicide and Levis.
Intertextuality is fundamental to Sylvie Germains uvre. The
critic Anne Roche takes as a starting point the idea of a primary
intertextuality, suggesting that each of Germains novels is an invitation
to go on and read other books by other people, and this is certainly the
case with Germains 2005 novel Magnus.15 The narrative is composed
of twenty-nine numbered fragments interspersed with notes which
generally provide factual or historical information, and sequences
which are quotations from a wide range of works, often in translation.
This discontinuous structure conveys the discontinuities of Magnus
search for his identity. The central trauma of the text is the bombing
of Hamburg during Operation Gomorrah in July 1943, from which
the five-year-old Magnus escapes, but as a result of which his memory
is completely erased. The novel recounts Magnus attempt to uncover
the truth of his origins. He gradually discovers that he was adopted by
a Nazi couple, and that his adopted father was a concentration camp
doctor who, like the Schillers father in Sansals novel, escaped trial by
moving abroad and changing his name.
Magnus is another example of a Holocaust novel that contains
unacknowledged translation. It includes citations from, for example,
Aharon Appelfeld, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Paul Celan, Juan Rulfo (whose
novel Pedro Pramo becomes crucial to Magnus quest), W. G. Sebald,
Stig Dagerman, Martin Luther King, Thomas Hardy, Shakespeare,
Matthias Johannessen, Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, and Rabbi Shem
Tov ibn Gaon. Insofar as the fact of translation is not alluded
to, the novel appears to imply that translated intertextuality is
straightforwardly transparent, even though one of the functions of
intertextuality in the novel is to complicate issues of mediation,
transmission, and authorship. But the reader of Magnus can hardly fail
to be alerted to the question of linguistic mediation for other reasons.
Magnus is multilingual, and is not even certain of his mother tongue.
He is described as un jeune homme fou de mmoire et doubli, et qui
jongle avec ses incertitudes travers plusieurs langues, dont aucune,
peut-tre, nest sa langue maternelle, or, in Donoughers translation,
a young man crazed with memory and forgetting, who juggles with
his uncertainties in various languages, none of which, perhaps, is his

15
Anne Roche, Le rapport la bibliothque in Alain Goulet, LUnivers de Sylvie Germain
(Caen, 2008), pp. 2940.

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mother tongue.16 Magnus might then be read as the incarnation of
Derridas philosophy of language taken to an extreme. In a restaurant,
Magnus hears a language which evokes what might be a memory; the
language turns out to be Icelandic (consonant with his name, derived
from that of his teddy bear, a singed remnant from the bombing), but
this narrative thread leads nowhere, and we do not find out whether
it could be part of the answer to Magnus quest. Learning Spanish
is central to Magnus search for his adopted father, which takes him
to Mexico in the fictional steps of Pedro Pramo. Magnus is a good
linguist and chooses to become a translator. When he visits his aging
uncle Lothar, linguistic mediation is explicitly staged, not through
translation, but through reading aloud. Lothar can no longer bear to
be en tte tte with the author, preferring the triple relationship
between writer, reader, and listener. In fact, since what is being read
to him is a translation (the Bible and the work of Bonhoeffer), the
relationship is quadruple. This encounter stages both mediation and
invisibility, since Lothar acknowledges that his interpretation changes
according to who is reading, but Magnus uses a neutral tone to efface
himself before the author.
Magnus poses very abundantly the two questions that have been
preoccupying us here: what is the function of translation in the source
text, and how does the translator deal with translated intertextuality?
To take the second question first, Donoughers English translation
includes a translators note (p. 190) in which Donougher points out
that Germains writing relies on references to and quotations from
several foreign literatures, but she does not comment on her chosen
translation strategy in relation to these intertexts. There is no reference
list here, and it appears, if we take for example the repeated references
to Paul Celans poem Todesfuge, that Donougher has chosen to
translate the French version quoted by Germain. There are (at least)
two published translations of this poem in French, and Germains
rendering corresponds to Valrie Briets; Donoughers translation is
close to Briets version and does not correspond to the available
English translations.17

16
Sylvie Germain, Magnus (Paris, 2005), p. 116; Magnus, translated by Christine
Donougher (Sawtry, 2008), pp. 778.
17
Paul Celan, Choix de pomes, translated by Jean-Pierre Lefebvre (Paris, 1998); Paul Celan,
Pavot et mmoire, translated by Valrie Briet (Paris, 1987); The Poems of Paul Celan, translated
by Michael Hamburger (New York, 1988); Paul Celan: Selections, translated by Pierre Joris
(Berkeley, CA, 2005); Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, translated by John Felstiner
(London, 2001).

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As in the previous examples, the translator of translated
intertextuality faces a number of choices. One could spend time
exploring the play of possibilities, but the answer I should like to
propose to the first question, as to the function of translation in the
source text, suggests that this may not be an interpretive priority with
this novel. Magnus story remains unresolved, and ultimately suggests
that the search for an origin, and by extension for an original, is
both impossible and futile. As Alain Goulet concludes, the forward
projection of individual identity is more important than the search for
its essence in the past:
lidentit nest pas rechercher dans la qute puisante et vaine
dun avant qui toujours fuit, dans une mmoire irrmdiablement
dfaillante et dans un vide originel qui ne se comblera jamais,
mais dans un projet qui lui permet davancer devant soi. La leon
rejoint celle de lexistentialisme Je suis ce que je fais et ce que je
deviens.
(identity is not to be sought in the exhausting and vain quest for a
past which always escapes, in an inevitably deficient memory, or in an
originary void that will never be filled, but in a project which allows him
to go forwards. The message is similar to that of Existentialism: I am what
I do and what I become).18

This existentialist conception of identity also suggests an approach

to translated intertextuality. The relationship to the original is less
important than the play of new meanings released by the juxtaposition
of translated fragments in the novel, and further, we might add,
in its translations. Translation in Magnus is then a figure . . . of
recurrent ambiguity19 whose function is to suggest the complexities
of representation and transmission.
Harold Bloom diagnosed the condition of the latter-day poet as
an anxiety of influence, a fear of excessive derivation, an aesthetic
psychosis overcome through various types of creative misprision or
innovative re-reading. Contemporary Holocaust novelists seem by
contrast to be beset by an anxiety of originality, a fear of excessive
invention, overcome through explicit intertextual references to
testimonial Holocaust writing. Psychosis results from repression, and it
seems that translation is the shocking truth these narratives attempt to
repress. When these narratives are themselves translated, the repressed

18
19

Alain Goulet, Sylive Germain: uvre romanesque (Paris, 2006), p. 213; my translation.
Michael Cronin, Translation and Globalization (London, 2003), p. 12.

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Angela Kershaw/Intertextuality and Translation

inevitably returns. This return is however potentially therapeutic:
reading translation back into the source text is challenging, but
ultimately positive, since it produces readings that acknowledge
the problems and possibilities of transmission in all their creative
complexities.
University of Birmingham

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