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  • Kafka Translated: How Translators Have Shaped Our Reading of Kafka by Michelle Woods
  • Ingo Stoehr
Michelle Woods. Kafka Translated: How Translators Have Shaped Our Reading of Kafka. New York: Bloomsbury, 2014. 293p.

A long time ago, I heard the quip that most of our students believe Franz Kafka to be an English-language writer. The reason is clear: Every literary anthology seems to include his perplexing, haunting, and profoundly human stories—especially the shorter ones. Even a longer time ago, as a graduate student, I once heard a fellow student’s presentation that depended on connecting the meanings of “penal” and “penis”; it was not a bad interpretation of Kafka’s “Penal Colony,” but the presenter was oblivious to the fact that the sexual connotations played out in a specific way because the text was a translation. And translation is about choices that influence a reader’s understanding, as Michelle Woods insists on in a liberating way.

It is liberating because, in her book Kafka Translated, Woods repeatedly demonstrates that thinking about translation choices is a great deal more productive than focusing on alleged translation mistakes. As a result, a book about the way in [End Page 258] which translations have shaped our understanding of Kafka is more than welcome, especially a book like Michelle Woods’s Kafka Translated that not only differentiates among specific translations (focusing on the work of four translators) but also explores “translation” in a wider sense of what a narrator, an author, or a film director does. Woods’s fascinating book is much too complex to be fully discussed in a brief review; therefore, I will concentrate on her discussion of language-to-language (as opposed to text-to-movie) translations in order to highlight two core concepts—the translation effect and an author’s personal style—that are not only central to Woods’s investigation but to any solid understanding of translation.

To refocus the scholarly discourse from translator bashing (for alleged mistakes), Woods turns to theorizing about translation choices. Of course, translation mistakes happen, but treating every “strange” translation as a mistake is a dead-end for translation theory because this approach usually ignores the contexts and causes of the “mistake.” In addition, at the level of the translations that Woods is considering, it is most likely that any seemingly “strange” translation is a conscious choice that deserves critical attention rather than schoolmasterly correction. In short, the turn that Woods proposes and practices is much needed for us to increase our understanding of the translation process. Woods uses the core concept of the “translator-effect” (she credits Luise von Flotow for coining the term): it includes asking “what effect their [that is, the translators’] background has, their relationship to the English language as much as to the source language, what draws them to translating certain authors” (79-80), as well as other questions. Woods’s research on these questions leads to interesting answers that span the entire spectrum from personal to literary and to political aspects of translation.

The reasons for individual translators to be “hooked” on Kafka are highly personal. For example, Milena Jesenská “saw herself as Gregor Samsa” (29). Incorporating Kafka’s famous observation about the force of literature, Mark Harman says, “translating The Castle was like an axe for the frozen sea within me” (qtd. 82). Woods approaches political aspects of translation when she tries to redirect critical attention to the undervalued work of two female translators. Milena Jesenská, the very first translator of Kafka’s stories (from German into Czech), is defended by Woods both against the “Milena myth” (which reduces Jesenská’s life and work to the story of her brief affair with Kafka) and against having been forgotten as a result of world politics: her own journalistic work in Prague was cut short after the Nazi invasion (she was arrested and deported, and she died in Ravensbrück concentration camp), and after the war, her achievements as Kafka’s translator were silenced when Kafka’s work was banned in her then-Communist native Czechoslovakia. Woods also attempts to revaluate Willa Muir’s [End Page 259] contribution to not only translating Kafka and but actually introducing...

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