Antoine Berman

Antoine Berman (French: [bɛʁman]; 24 June 1942 – 22 November 1991) was a French translator, philosopher, historian and theorist of translation. 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 for five years. On their return to Paris, Berman directed a research program and taught several seminars at the Collège international de philosophie (International College of Philosophy) in Paris, and published his major theoretical work, L'Epreuve de l'étranger (The Experience of the Foreign) in 1984. He died in 1991, at age 49, writing his last book in bed. Antoine Berman's "trials of the foreign", which originates from German Romanticism (especially Friedrich Schleiermacher), tries to show the "deforming tendencies" inherent in the act of (literary) translation. Berman's 'twelve deforming tendencies' in translation were: 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.