In his work on retranslation, Antoine Berman is probably the theorist who came closest to reflecting on back-translation. This article offers translations and interpretations of two of his premises in ‘La retraduction comme espace de traduction’: that all translations are impaired by forces of non-translation and that this phenomenon is attenuated by retranslation. It is partly to investigate these hypotheses that Berman developed the concept of ‘défaillance’. The article retraces the evolution of Berman’s notion in his œuvre, before demonstrating how the study of ‘défaillances’ across translative layers can be enlightening, by analysing three scenes in Matthew Gregory Lewis’ gothic novel The Monk (1796), Antonin Artaud’s French translation (1931), and John Phillips’ back-translation (2003). It argues that the study of back-translations is valuable retrospectively insofar as it magnifies elements which were underdeveloped in source-texts and that, in so doing, it has the potential to transform our understanding of the larger trajectory of literary works.