Antoine Berman was born in the small town of Argenton-sur-Creuse, near Limoges, to a Polish-Jewish father and a French-Yugoslav mother. After living in hiding during the Second World War, the family settled near Paris. Berman attended the Lycée Montmorency. Later he studied philosophy at the University of Paris, where he met his wife Isabelle. In 1968 they moved to Argentina, where they remained 5 years. Back in Paris he directed a research program and taught several seminars at the Collège international de philosophie in Paris, and published his major theoretical work, L'Epreuve de l'étranger in 1984. He died in 1991, at age 49, writing his last book in bed.
Work
Antoine Berman's "trials of the foreign", which originates from German Romanticism, tries to show the "deforming tendencies" inherent in the act of translation. Berman's 'twelve deforming tendencies' in translation were:
Rationalisation
Clarification
Expansion
Ennoblement
Qualitative impoverishment
Quantitative impoverishment
The destruction of rhythms
The destruction of underlying networks of signification
The destruction of linguistic patternings
The destruction of vernacular network or their exoticisation
The destruction of expressions and idioms
The effacement of the superimposition of languages
Lawrence Venuti, an American translation theorist, has used Berman's concepts to write a genealogy of translation in an Anglo-American context to introduce the "foreignizing" strategy that is normatively suppressed in mainstream translation.
Influence
Berman was active in philosophical and literary circles, nevertheless he has been influential in translatology, especially in translation criticism. He claimed that there may be many different methods for translation criticism as there are many translation theories; therefore he entitled a model of his own as an analytical path, which can be modulated according to the specific objectives of each analyst and adapted to all standardized text types.
Books
Moi, le Suprême. Pierre Belfond, Le Livre De Poche, Buenos Aires, 1979
L'épreuve de l'étranger: Culture et traduction dans l'Allemagne romantique: Herder, Goethe, Schlegel, Novalis, Humboldt, Schleiermacher, Hölderlin. Paris: Gallimard, 1984. Translated into English by Stefan Heyvaert as The Experience of the Foreign: Culture and Translation in Romantic Germany. Albany: SUNY Press, 1992
Lettres à Fouad El-Etr sur le romantisme allemand. Paris: PUF, 1991
La traduction et la lettre, ou L'auberge du lointain. Paris: Seuil, 1999
L'âge de la traduction. "La tâche du traducteur" de Walter Benjamin, un commentaire. Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 2008. Translated into English by Chantal Wright as The Age of Translation. Abingdon: Routledge, 2018
