Like most people of my generation, I first came across Theo Hermans’s work when I read The Manipulation of Literature: Studies in Literary Translation, the widely celebrated and agenda-setting volume he edited in 1985. Routledge’s reprint of the volume in 2014 seems to be based on a scan of the original, which was typed by his late wife Marion, probably on an electric typewriter, and probably on the kitchen table. Despite the publisher’s apology on the copyright page for the ‘imperfections’ of the volume, the unpolished look and the rather antiquated typeface of the old-fashioned typewriter are part of its charm and history. They provide a feel for the era, something of the sense of excitement and adventure that the group represented in the volume must have felt as they set out to articulate a bold new vision – a new paradigm as Hermans refers to it in his introduction – for a discipline that was only just beginning to emerge. Although Hermans insisted in the introduction to the volume that “this group is not a school, but a geographically scattered collection of individuals with widely varying interests” (1985a:10), it quickly became known as the Manipulation School, a designation that stuck and continues to have much currency today. In revisiting and reassessing the theoretical legacy of this ‘school’ some fourteen years later, Hermans tells us that the designation was coined by Armin Paul Frank in 1987 and given wider currency by Mary Snell-Hornby in her account of the approach a year later “as one of the two main schools of thought in translation studies in Europe in the 1980s” (Hermans 1999b:8), the other being the so-called Leipzig School in Germany (Snell-Hornby 1988:14).

According to Hermans (1985a:14–15), the Manipulation group had been “meeting and publishing for close on a decade”; they had come together through “a series of symposia on literary translation” at the University of Louvain in 1976, the University of Tel Aviv in 1978, and the University of Antwerp in 1980. Being an outsider to the discipline and to the group myself at the time (in the early 1990s), and seeing this ‘school’ so idolized in the literature and at the conferences I was beginning to attend, I must admit that I wrongly took Hermans to be the cheer leader of an elite academic clan that dominated the field, that saw the world mostly through the privileged eyes of a jet-setting European, and that was only interested in literary translation – itself being the elite end of a discipline I envisioned as much broader in scope. It wasn’t long before I discovered that first impressions can be very misleading. In the years that followed, I came to realize that Hermans was one of the most fiercely independent, non-elitist, principled and culturally aware scholars in the field. Among other things, it was Hermans who pointed out as early as 1996 – long before Maria Tymoczko, Martha Cheung and others began to question the dominant Eurocentric conceptions of translation – that we inevitably translate concepts of translation that are radically different from ours in our own terms, “by making use of our own categories of translation” (1996b:46–47). And it was he who first exhorted scholars of translation to be wary of

In a two-volume collection he edited in 2006 that went beyond what he called “prevailing disciplinary hegemonies” to feature contributions on translation in Asia, Africa and the Middle East (a revolutionary intervention at the time), Hermans reminded us again that however intercultural translation studies aspired to be, “its disciplinary history poorly prepared it for radical difference, the particularity of the local, the sheer variety of phenomena coming within its purview” (2006:9). A cornerstone of his vision for the discipline has thus been to “create a vocabulary at once more imaginative and self-critical” than what was available in the field at the time (2003a:380), and to “interrogate translation studies as currently constituted in a language such as English” in order to make the Western academy “a province of a larger intellectual world, not its centre” (2009a:104). This was a vision I could identify with, and that inspired me and many others to follow his lead in conducting research that engaged with the world at large and required the analyst to reflect critically on their own position within it.

As I read more of Hermans’s work and interacted with him in a variety of contexts, it also became clear to me that far from being confined to what appeared to be his immediate areas of expertise (literary translation and European history), or to a particular theoretical school such as descriptivism or polysystem theory, his vision was much more ambitious, critical and wide ranging than that of any other scholar of his generation. In the years that followed the publication of The Manipulation of Literature, he engaged with a wide range of theories – from poststructuralism to relevance theory, and from Luhmann’s systems theory and Bourdieu’s field theory to Gadamer’s hermeneutics and Goffman’s symbolic interactionism. Each allowed him, in its own way, to address various limitations of descriptive studies and polysystem theory. Resorting to Bourdieu, for instance, allowed “a shift of emphasis from texts and repertoires to the more amenable concept of the individual translator’s agency” (Hermans 2011:14), a concept that is central to his own unique approach and is evoked repeatedly in his reorientation of the notion of norms to accommodate the complexity of individual and institutional dynamics (Hermans 1991, 1996b, 1999a, 2012a). Allowing “abstract actors” to become “human agents operating in institutional contexts” (2011:14) also supported historical studies of the type he has devoted much of his career to promoting (1997b, 2009b, 2012b, 2015).

Reflecting back on this early period in 2007, Hermans stressed the key role that The Manipulation of Literature played in introducing descriptivism to Anglophone readers, and consequently in the development of the discipline. Nevertheless, its limitations within the broader landscape of theoretical offerings of relevance to the study of translation at the time also had to be acknowledged, for while “descriptivism was cultivating its structuralist lineage, post-structuralism [had by then] passed it by” (2007c:89). Hermans had already written a detailed critical assessment of the paradigm he helped establish in 1985 (Hermans 1999b). Translation in Systems: Descriptive and System-Oriented Approaches Explained, which quickly established itself as the definitive reference on this theoretical strand, gained much of its authority from being recognized as the account of “an informed insider”, and specifically one whose position as a key player in developing the field did not prevent him from acknowledging its limitations where he felt it necessary to do so (von Flotow 2001:2). It offered a critical, nuanced but fair assessment of descriptive translation studies and polysystem theory; while highlighting their strengths and achievements, it concluded that “[t]he structuralist-inspired model of empirical-descriptive translation studies as it was elaborated in the 1970s and ‘90s, new and exciting as it once was, is now a thing of the past” (1999b:160). But Translation in Systems also gained wide popularity because of the quality of Hermans’s writing. Unlike “the convoluted syntax and scientific jargon” typical of Gideon Toury’s writing in particular (Hermans 1995:215), it is highly accessible and engaging. In a review of the book published a year later, Candace Séguinot commented: “If there is a prize for the most literate of English-language writers on translation, there has never been any doubt in my mind that Theo Hermans would be a strong contender. … His language is a delight” (2000:198). The ability to explain complex theoretical interventions through lively and varied examples of real-life instances of translation and interpreting, and to do so in a language that skilfully balances intelligibility with terminological rigour, and with a bit of characteristic dry wit, is a hallmark of Hermans’s writing, and – as anyone who has listened to him speak will know – of his lecturing style.

Having started his career as a key member of a particular group of scholars with a distinctive approach to (literary) translation, Hermans never remained stuck in any ‘school’ or theoretical strand. He quickly moved on to articulating his own unique research agenda, continually working across groups, continents and sub-disciplines. While this rich research agenda clearly cannot be summarized in a few words, it would be fair to say that whatever lines it followed, it ultimately consisted of blowing apart the many illusions surrounding the concept of translation, of showcasing its “hybridity and plurality” and “its cultural force” (Hermans 1996a), irrespective of who undertook it, where and when it took place, and what domain or genre it fell within.