Modern Greek poets often imagine interlingual translation as intralingual—that is, as rewording within the same language when two distinct languages are involved. George Seferis and Yannis Ritsos provide two cases, Seferis in translating Ancient Greek poetry and Ritsos in translating Romanian, Czech, and Slovakian poetry. For these poet-translators on opposite sides of the political spectrum, the claim of intralingualism responds to different experiences of exile: Seferis as a refugee from Asia Minor and then as an overseas diplomat, Ritsos as a political prisoner and then as a Communist Party emissary. Intralingual translation assuages xenitia, the pain of not being able to go home, but it also masks interlingual differences that serve other cultural and political functions, whether imagining a national language that continues a valuable cultural past or serving as a transnational vehicle for unifying minor cultures.

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.

While it no longer seems possible to speak of an invisible narrator of La princesse de Clèves, the 1678 historical novel by Madame de Lafayette, the notion of an invisible translator defines the work of late-twentieth-century English translations of the novel. According to this view, the translator should remain unseen by the reader and therefore “faithful” to the original text, so as not to upset the interpretive possibilities that Lafayette offers. In fact, however, the translator's infidelity is both necessary and vital to interpreting eros in La princesse de Clèves. The novel itself makes infidelity a form of insight, and Lafayette's vocabulary forces English translators into situations where any choice can be simultaneously unfaithful and correct. Like the character of the princess, translators have conflicting fidelities that should be made visible to fully reveal the richness of the novel.

Some readers prefer an earlier translation in which they encounter a source text, particularly a canonized work, over later versions of the same text. The decisive encounter is so compelling as to establish an enduring attachment that entails denigration or outright rejection of later versions. Insofar as the attachment suggests obsessiveness, it can be called a fixation. The readers’ responses share features that transcend membership in specific linguistic communities and cultural institutions: they value a high degree of readability, which is construed as an indication of greater equivalence to the source text. Here the readers reveal their assumption of an instrumental model—that is, an understanding of translation as the reproduction or transfer of an invariant contained in or caused by the source text, an invariant form, meaning, or effect. The fixation can be illuminated by considering the intersubjective relations in which the preferred translation is first encountered. Cases recorded or represented in literary texts enable a more incisive account of the conditions that shape the reader's experience: John Keats's poem “On First Looking into Chapman's Homer” (1816) and Vladimir Nabokov's novel Pnin (1957). These texts disclose an identity-forming process that can be deepened with Jacques Lacan's concept of the “object a.” The instrumentalism that underpins the fixation deserves consideration because it would in effect deny or stop cultural change, innovative interpretation, the very practice of translation.