My first Kafka translation came about in the 1990s when Schocken Books, an imprint of what was then Random House, held an open competition for new translations of his work. On commissioning me to translate The Castle, Fred Jordan, a Viennese-born editor, insisted that I should render every single flavoring particle (e.g. doch, wohl, eben), a part of speech, which though used indiscriminately by some German-language writers and often rightly ignored by translators, is deployed by Kafka with precision and subtlety.
That was not my only challenge in translating The Castle, a task which gave me my first taste of the resistance to new Kafka translations and led me to explore the creative process underlying his last novel.
The early translators sought to make their renderings of Dostoevsky, Proust, Kafka and other modern classics conform to traditional English-language preferences for lively and elegant prose, and their pioneering work helped to gain anglophone audiences for those writers.
Our efforts as re-translators of such works to echo the authors’ particular styles, including their idiosyncrasies, shifts in tone, and even factual errors have at times met with considerable resistance. Moreover, in the case of Kafka, a highly idiosyncratic writer, whose very name has become a byword for modern alienation and bureaucratic absurdity, the influence of his elegant and long-canonical early translators Willa and Edwin Muir still looms large.
Even as late as the 1990’s the Muirs’ translation, based on Max Brod’s flawed edition of Das Schloss, continued to enjoy dominance in the U.S. even though Brod’s edition had been superseded in 1982 by the Oxford scholar Malcolm Pasley’s German critical edition. After I submitted my translation, two outside reviewers questioned the need for new Kafka translations, and, to my dismay, a new editorial director relegated my work to a drawer.
So I wrote, published, and circulated in the upper echelons of Random House an article detailing problems with Brod’s edition and outlining the advantages of Pasley’s critical edition, on which my Castle translation is based, as well as summarizing previous critiques of the Muirs’ translation by writers, critics, and scholars in the U.K. and Ireland—and lo and behold my Castle translation finally saw the light of day.
Reading the Muirs’ beautifully wrought Castle as an undergraduate in Dublin in the early 1970’s, I was mesmerized by the protagonist K.’s obsessive reasoning and interpretative prowess. Since I myself was prone to over-interpreting the behavior of authority figures, I admired both the energy with which K., a self-proclaimed land-surveyor, spins frenetic hypotheses about every real or imagined move of the Castle, his ostensible antagonist, and the ingenuity with which he discerns hidden meanings beneath the deceptively simple sentences of an official’s six-line letter.
It was only when I read the book German that I appreciated how funny it is. Kafka uses humor, among other devices, to ironize K.’s single-minded perspective. For instance, it is K.’s two comically interchangeable assistants who hint that he should lighten up, abandon his fixation on reaching the Castle, and focus instead on life in the village, where he has established relationships with several of the villagers.
One of the challenges was how to bring out in translation the different levels of humor in the novel, which is best appreciated, at least in the original German, when it is read aloud.
Sidetracked from my primary task by curiosity about the unusually numerous passages that Kafka crossed out as he wrote, but which are still relatively neglected even among specialists, I began to plumb the substantive deletions that reveal how Kafka makes everything seem, as a character in a crossed-out passage puts it, “a little uncanny.”
As if putting into practice the ambiguously phrased self-admonition in one of his Zürau aphorisms—”For the last time, psychology!”—Kafka deletes with remarkable consistency passages that are too psychologically revealing, too readily interpretable, and too intimately personal.
A crossed-out passage in which K. openly acknowledges his isolation and his craving “for warmth, for light, and for a friendly word” falls victim to Kafka’s editing, thus leaving us with an anti-hero, who hides his existential and emotional vulnerability. Kafka also excises K.’s inner debate about his ceaseless struggle to reach the Castle and how it is leading him to forget “the present day for the sake of the highest goal.”
Such disclosures echo the existential dilemma that Kafka memorably evokes in a letter to Milena written two years prior to The Castle: “nothing has been granted me, everything must be earned, not only the present and future, but the past as well.”
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As a translator who also happens to be a Kafka scholar, I was delighted to be asked to edit and translate his Selected Stories (2024) for Harvard University Press’s series of annotated literary classics. In the biographical introduction and in the headnotes I could follow up on my hunch that the covertly visceral quality of Kafka’s seemingly detached prose is one reason for his enduring appeal.
The footnotes allowed me to alert readers to linguistic and cultural nuances that I could not adequately convey in translation. Whereas English has an exceptionally large vocabulary, in languages with smaller ones, individual words have to carry a wider range of meaning. For the translator this presents a challenge, especially in the case of a writer who likes to play with multiple meanings of individual words.
Even the task of translating Kafka’s seemingly straightforward titles can be tricky. One need only think of Der Process (“The Trial” or “The Process”) and Das Schloss (“The Castle” or “The Lock”). Whereas Kafka can toy with several meanings, the translator must choose one.
Was my decision to entitle Kafka’s bug story The Transformation “brash, if not brassy,” as the writer Joy Williams asserts in the May 2024 issue of Harper’s Magazine? Surely not. It was Kafka himself, who, having translated a section of Ovid’s Metamorphoses at his rigorous Prague secondary school, did not call the bug story Die Metamorphose but rather Die Verwandlung.
The word “Verwandlung” held personal significance for Kafka, who uses it to describe changes that he perceives in some childhood photographs in a letter to Felice Bauer written while he was composing Die Verwandlung: “At that time I think I still belonged completely to myself, and seem to have been very content that way. As the eldest, I was photographed a lot and so there is a long series of transformations (Verwandlungen).”
Although it is commonly assumed that the pioneering Muirs, who introduced most of Kafka’s works to English-speakers, were the first translators of Die Verwandlung, they were in fact preceded by A. L. Lloyd, an English folklorist, singer, and political activist, who entitled the story The Metamorphosis in 1937.
Twelve years later, however, the Muirs’ publishers Secker and Warburg billed their translation of Kafka’s stories as the “definitive edition” on the cover of the book, and proclaimed on the flap that “The Metamorphosis (Parton Press, 1937) is now The Transformation.” Yet in subsequent editions, the Muirs, or perhaps their publishers, rejected that suitably plain title and replaced it with the storied but off-key Metamorphosis.
In other languages, too, there has been a comparable back and forth about how best to render Die Verwandlung. In 1925, only a year after Kafka’s untimely death at age forty, the first Spanish translation of his most famous story appeared anonymously in the influential cultural magazine Revista de Occidente under the title La metamorfosis.
That translation was subsequently reissued in Buenos Aires in a volume of selected Kafka stories, La metamorfosis (1938), which identifies Jorge Luis Borges as sole translator. However, Borges acknowledged, no doubt with a twinkle in his eye, in an interview with Gilberto Sorrentino published in Seven Conversations with Borges (1982) that he cannot have translated Die Verwandlung since he knew enough German to know that the Spanish title should be La transformación.
Although “Transformation” reflects Kafka’s preference for plain language, its monotonous Latinate syllables fail to echo the flowing sounds of Verwandlung.
Yet, as is often the case with translation, there is no ideal solution. Although “Transformation” reflects Kafka’s preference for plain language, its monotonous Latinate syllables fail to echo the flowing sounds of Verwandlung.
So, am I tilting at windmills? Or could the now dominant mythological and scientific “Metamorphosis” eventually give way to the aptly unadorned and existentially suggestive “Transformation?”