Errant Translation; or, Lin Shu's Don Quixote and the Paybacks of Back-Translating

Abstract Literary back-translation, the practice of bringing a text back into the language of its source after it has passed through one or more translations, has long been overlooked. To recuperate its richly entangled global history, this essay looks to the representation of translation in Cervantes's Don Quixote and to the novel's recent back-translation based on 魔俠傳 ( Moxia Zhuan ; Story of the Enchanted Knight ), a 1920s translation into classical Chinese by Lin Shu that itself was an indirect translation based on two eighteenth-century English editions of Cervantes's text. While foregrounding the generative labor of translators, both fictional and historical, the transnational and diachronic scope of this back-translational loop prompts us to rethink the domesticating/foreignizing binary. Taking a cue from Cervantes's metaphor of translation as the knotty back side of a tapestry, this study seeks to overturn front-facing notions of translation by approaching its history from the back.