ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the relevance of working out a history of literary retranslations from one language into another, and tries to answer the question of what extra information can be obtained from this approach to translation history. As the selection process of texts to be translated in a certain culture is often very arbitrary and even accidental, especially in the early years, foreign literary works only become truly ‘canonical’ when they are retranslated. As the case study (of earliest retranslations from Russian into Dutch) in this chapter shows, there are at least three entirely different motives for retranslation of literary works. Retranslations are made in the first place when the literary quality of a work or the author’s fame has been firmly established, but other considerations may also stimulate retranslation, i.e., the purely economic potential of the work and the importance of the work for political or ideological purposes. By focusing on the history of retranslations only, features that remain hidden in ‘regular’ translation history tend to surface and shed a complementary light on the evolution of canon formation in a particular culture at a particular time.
