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Article published In:
Babel
Vol. 70:3 (2024) ► pp.415–435

Literary back-translation, mistranslation, and misattribution

A case study of Mark Twain’s Jumping Frog

| Kent State University
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.
Keywords: translation criticism, textual criticism, back-translation, literary metatranslation, literalism, humor, mistranslation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction: Literary back-translation, mistranslation, and misattribution
  • 2.Twain’s back-translation and humor
  • 3.“… Clawed back into a civilized language once more”
  • 4.A brief close reading of the jumping frog back-translation
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 11 December 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/babel.00365.was
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