Kafka Translated: How Translators have Shaped our Reading of Kafka by Michelle Woods (review)

In her intriguing book, Kafka Translated, Michelle Woods explores issues of translation at many levels, highlighting that translators bring a particular cultural identity and set of experiences to the task, making translation choices for specific reasons. She combines a nuanced look at the work and lives of four key translators of Kafka with broader investigations in the chapters that follow: of Kafka’s fictional interpreters and depictions of muddled communication; of the insights that emerge from filmic adaptations of Kafka’s works; and of how Kafka’s works were “translated” to a global readership as Kafka became the icon we know him to be today.

Woods’s first and longest chapter, focused on the four translators, is the richest. Even seasoned Kafka scholars will find something new in her discussion of Milena Jesenská, one of Kafka’s lovers and epistolary correspondents. It is fascinating to reconsider Jesenská as first and foremost a translator, Kafka’s first. Woods points out numerous details that may be unfamiliar to readers who only know of Jesenská as Kafka’s love. She explains that the intellectual milieu of Prague, which included a fascination with communism, made Jesenská’s translation of Kafka’s “The Stoker,” about a proletarian man at work on a ship, especially appealing. Woods notes, too, that the Czech readership at the time was far more receptive to Kafka’s innovative narrative stylistics than the Muirs found or expected readers of their translations into English to be. Woods’s careful close reading of the texts, together with her knowledge of both Czech and German, allows her to showcase how Jesenská’s translations reveal a remarkable sensitivity to Kafka’s aesthetic style.

Woods continues her investigation of what she calls the embodiment of the translator with her reconsideration of Willa Muir. She places the translation efforts of Willa Muir and her husband Edwin in the broader context of their life and times. Woods examines how the Muirs’ Scots and Orkney background played a role: they had a keen sense that their translations needed to be domesticated, presented in standard English for publishers and audiences. Woods emphasizes, too, how Willa negotiated her role as a woman in a married pair, revealing a tension between public comments that belittled the extent of her contributions to the translation process and more private expressions of her larger role, as well as her frustration. Most fascinating here is Woods’s close analysis of a manuscript that reveals Willa working alone after her husband Edwin’s death, translating fragments from Amerika (focusing on the character Brunelda).

Woods continues by looking at the work of two more recent translators: Mark Harman and Michael Hofmann. She interviewed both of these men extensively for this book. In her discussion of Harman, she explores how his Irish upbringing affects what she calls his Irish tonality, rhythm, and phrasing, but she spends more time explaining Harman’s decision to translate Kafka’s works as they are found in manuscript: long “steamroller” sentences with little punctuation. Woods points out that although Harman has been criticized by some for creating a postmodern Kafka, it is more the case that because readers are now accustomed to all that has come after Kafka, they are more ready or willing to accept the radical innovation of Kafka’s style. In the case of Michael Hofmann, Woods argues that his more literary tastes and practices have a complex reasoning behind them, including several pages of an indepth interview with him.

In her following, much shorter chapter, Woods turns to Kafka’s portrayals of characters who struggle to translate or communicate clearly, at first somewhat of a surprising turn given the book’s title. Her point is to show that Kafka’s “self-awareness of the perils and possibilities of translation” (129) reveals a wry delight. She includes Josef K.’s attempts to translate Italian and understand the parable “Before the Law,” and examples of...