Irretrievable (German: Unwiederbringlich, 1892, also known as Beyond Recall and No Way Back ) is one of realist Theodor Fontane's mature German novels. As with some other of Fontane's novels (including Effi Briest), its heroine is believed to be based roughly on a real person whose demise Fontane heard about, and it deals delicately with near taboo (at the time of writing) topics including adultery and suicide.The novel has been translated twice into English. The first by Douglas Parmée in 1963 as Beyond Recall, it was re-published in 2011 by New York Review of Books as Irretrievable. In 2010 a new English translation, No Way Back, was published by Angel Classics (London). There also is a German made-for-TV movie (1968, director Falk Harnack).As for translating this haunting novel into English, even deciding on a translation for the title presents many choices in English (irrecoverable, unrecoverable, irretrievable, unrepeatable, beyond recall, past retrieval, beyond retrieval and irreparable, just to name a few). The subtle word-plays and linguistic motifs which add to the power of its German text are challenging to render into English.