Literary back-translation, mistranslation, and misattribution

Abstract

Abstract This study seeks a threefold exploration of an aspect of Mark Twain’s forays into translation, particularly with respect to one tale’s fate in its first French version. First, back-translation’s most ostensible purpose is to represent a foreign language text’s (in)accuracy transparently; Twain, assuming a persona as a naive mistranslator, humorously reinvents the procedure to disparage a rendering of his work, constituting an act of translation (meta)criticism and producing a work of parody. The study turns to literary back-translation as an emerging horizon of translation “against our teleological conception of translation” (Lane 2020a, 6), and a potential source of creative misprision or misreading. Twain uses literalism, I demonstrate, as a comic strategy to confound sense. I show cases in which Twain indulged in pseudotranslation and free-associational mistranslation often as imaginative perspective-taking. Secondly, I survey the intrigue behind his famous back-translation of the jumping frog tale, including its textual variations, and locate it as a subversion. Thirdly and finally, I perform a comparative reading of representative passages from Twain’s story, the 19th-century translation by Theodor Bentzon (actually Marie-Thérèse Blanc), and Twain’s vengeful back-translation, in order to reveal patterns of the American writer’s translation technique.