Kafka Again

Lovers of literature are forever indebted to Franz Kafka’s friend Max Brod, who ignored Kafka’s “last request” to destroy all his manuscripts and proceeded to edit and publish, in particular, his three full-length though unfinished novels. These are the novels that anglophone readers have known as The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika, in translations by the poet Edwin Muir, the first two in collaboration with Willa Muir. Their versions were based on Max Brod’s editing, which on further study of the manuscripts was seen to be in certain respects excessively freehanded and arbitrary. A prime instance was the title attached to the “American” novel, Kafka’s own proposed title for it being Der Verschollene—most literally “The Declared Missing One.” Mark Harman’s new translation, based on the reedited German text of 1983, renders this as The Missing Person. An English title closer to the Empsonian ambiguity of Verschollene, as well as to the story being told (and noting the masculine article), might well be “The Young Man Gone Missing.”

Mark Harman’s translation follows his earlier prizewinning translation of The Castle, and an interest of both is in comparing them to the Muirs’s versions. Professor Harman generously acknowledges that the Muirs’s translations are “elegant” and “beautiful,” but agrees with, among others, S. S. Prawer, in noting their tendency to tone down and smooth out Kafka’s frequently compact and abrupt tautness of phrasing. Harman in his two prefaces also acknowledges the real difficulties presented by “the often conflicting demands of Kafka’s tone and style,” with its alternations of blunt colloquialisms and more or less opaque prolixity.

A test case would be the beautifully straightforward opening paragraph of The Castle. Here is the original:

Es war spätabends, als K. ankam. Das Dorf lag in tiefem Schnee. Vom Schlossberg war nichts zu sehen, Nebel und Finsternis umgaben ihn, auch nicht der schwächste Lichtschein deutete das grosse Schloss an. Lange stand K. auf der Holzbrucke, die von der Landstrasse zum Dorf führte, und blickte in die scheinbare Leere empor.

And here in succession are the Muir and Harman renderings:

It was late in the evening when K. arrived. The village was deep in snow. The Castle hill was hidden, veiled in mist and darkness, nor was there even a glimmer of light to show that a castle was there. On the wooden bridge leading from the main road to the village K. stood for a long time gazing into the illusory emptiness above him.

It was late evening when K. arrived. The village lay under deep snow. There was no sign of the Castle hill, fog and darkness surrounded it, not even the faintest gleam of light suggested the large Castle. K. stood for a long time on the wooden bridge that leads from the main road to the village, gazing upward into the seeming emptiness.

A first point to make is about the punctuation. Both translations follow Kafka’s own preference, as described in Harman’s preface, for joining sentences by commas rather than attention-constraining periods—i.e., full stops. Maintaining Kafka’s abruptness, Harman eliminates the Muirs’s preposition and article in the opening sentence, and with “lay” in the sentence following keeps to the verb “lag”—but substitutes “under” for the Muirs’s simple, and literal, “in.” His third sentence in its main sense is closer than the Muirs’s to Kafka’s “from the Castle hill was nothing to be seen,” and the next clause (“fog and darkness”) directly matches Kafka’s phrasing. In the phrase-sentence following (“auch nicht”), Harman’s eleven words more nearly match Kafka’s ten than the Muirs’s fifteen, but the Muirs’s “show” seems to me a step closer to “deutete” than Harman’s “suggested,” and their terminal “was there” catches the rhythm of the sentence’s ending better than does Harman. Harman’s “faintest gleam...