Michelle Woods: Kafka Translated

Franz Kafka is the most commonly listed writer in a study of online dating profiles, followed by Milan Kundera and Paolo Coelho. Kafka has his own adjective and, as Michelle Woods points out in her fascinating Kafka Translated, has even made it into The Wire. You can't get much bigger. And yet Kafka made it big in English via a series of translators. Woods sets out to make those translators a little more visible, and to explore other aspects of translation in and of the writer's work. Her book's tagline is How Translators have Shaped our Reading of Kafka.

She begins with his first translator, into Czech in this case, Milena Jesenská. Many readers know of her through the collection of Kafka's Letters to Milena. I read these letters once, only once, and then tucked them away safely on the shelf because I knew I ought never to read them again. Love letters between a writer and his translator. They can't be un-read and it's an idea a translator would probably do better not to have in her head. Too late. Jesenská's side of the correspondence has been lost, and she remains so invisible to this day that she rarely warrants a surname. Woods tells us how she has been dismissed as a "bad translator" by all sorts of people who don't read Czech, and romanticized by novelists. Her story as Kafka's lover and a victim of the Nazis is inviting but is rarely told with her as an active protagonist. Being a reader of Czech, Woods goes some way to redeeming Jesenská's translations and certainly lends her a voice of her own, as a journalist and translator. She also gives us some fascinating information on the literary climate in which Kafka's Czech translations were first published - a new nation interested in writing experiments and new styles, with much scope for non-domesticating translation.

The next maligned woman in the plot is Willa Muir. Like Jesenská, Muir led a ground-breaking life of her own accord, growing up in poverty in the Shetlands, being one of the first women to attend a British university, moving to Europe and then London and attempting to make a feminist idea of marriage work. What Woods does in her book is provide convincing evidence that Kafka's first translations into English were not done by Edwin Muir and his wife, but by Willa Muir with occasional assistance from her husband. The Muir translations have been subject to a lot of criticism (there's a pattern arising here) for their smoothing-out and domesticating, along with other petty things like their use of allegedly Scottish words. Woods is not naive; she admits that much of this criticism is legitimate – although some of the blame can be placed on Max Brod for his posthumous sanitizing of Kafka through the editing process. What she does here, however, is show that Willa Muir was probably perfectly aware of what she was doing and chose to domesticate because that was what publishers at the time wanted. Sometimes, I'm afraid, they still do. Based on Muir's diaries and an unpublished, thinly disguised autobiographical novel, Woods unearths a fiercely intelligent woman who was translating to feed her family and hated some of the work – notably Feuchtwanger – but loved some of it too, even though it kept her from her own writing. Also, she was very funny indeed.

Woods moves on to living translators, starting with the Irish-born Mark Harman, who pressed Schocken to publish his re-translations of Das Schloß and Amerika because of the drawbacks to the Muir versions. In this section, she focuses partly on the way a translator's own language and reading colour their work. Harman is a Kafka scholar and a great fan of Samuel Beckett, who apparently found Kafka difficult and said that he wrote "like a steamroller". Here, Woods traces the tiny impressions left in Harman's Kafka by Beckett, and looks at the issue of "mid-Atlantic English", something I'm not sure exists. Certainly, it's not a language I can produce, but Harman seems to think he can, having lived in the States for many years. It's in this part that Woods introduces us to an indirect argument between two writer-critics, Milan Kundera and J.M. Coetzee. Both of them have grumpily critiqued Kafka translations, something many writers seem to enjoy doing, as Woods reveals by the by. Coetzee is the baddy, arguing in the case of Harman's The Castle that the translator ought to have tidied things up more towards the end, been less stylistically faithful. When it comes to Michael Hofmann, however, Coetzee finds his Joseph Roth translations not faithful enough. Kundera meanwhile argues that it's important for translators to render not into conventional good French, or English, but to show the author's transgressions against accepted style. To his credit, while this may seem utterly obvious, he did write it in 1996.

The section on Michael Hofmann was the most exciting reading, for me. I have had a problem with Michael Hofmann for a while, presumably founded on envy pure and simple. It's a little late in this review to admit it, but I've only ever read two translations of Kafka, and those were two versions of Ein Landarzt by Michael Hofmann and by Joyce Crick, both built into Will Self's magnificent digital essay "Kafka's Wound". I absolutely adore Hofmann's version. It is playful and stylish and it embellishes very slightly to make up for anything that may have been lost along the way. Whereas Crick's is the translation students ought to read, because it's more accurate and sober. I loved Hofmann's voice as Irmgard Keun in Child of All Nations, and in general I am all too willing to admit that Michael Hofmann is an outstanding translator. I suppose the non-envy part of the problem must be that I don't share his literary taste, with a few exceptions. Michelle Woods contests that his taste is what makes him stand out as a translator, and I found that very interesting. Because he has in fact translated a large swathe of mid-twentieth-century German-speaking men whose work doesn't grab me in the slightest. Which has the major advantage of leaving contemporary writers for the rest of us. I do think there is a kind of translator typecasting at play to some extent, whereby certain translators end up doing historical fiction, some will do classics, one will do racy contemporary novels by young writers, and so on. The subject was discussed by readers at Vishy's Blog last November, and it was interesting to think about how much choice translators have in the matter. Hofmann, at least, speaks of his own "imprimatur" and his wish that people will see his name on a book cover and buy a translation on the strength of that. I think in a small way that already happens.

Woods conducted an interview with Hofmann, which helps matters further by making him seem less pompous than in some of his critical writing. I was most relieved, after about a hundred pages of translation comparisons highlighting euphony and metre and the use of plosives, to find that Hofmann is often motivated by impatience and that he tackles his translations instinctively. Those daring translatorial choices of his that I so much admire are not the result of hours of weighing up and syllable-counting but spur-of-the-moment decisions. So despite being closer to Willa Muir in terms of financial constraints on my work, I now feel I can genuinely aspire to translate as playfully as Hofmann, when the occasion allows. Where he details his working philosophy in the interview, I find myself nodding:

Everything I do is on a case-by-case basis. The degree to which a book is left in German or all goes into English – I call it the schapps or wurst (or brandy or sausage) question. Whereabouts on the Anglo-American continuum it goes.

And elsewhere, he wrote something I find equally inspiring and close to my own emerging understanding of translation as a utopian project. Woods quotes him as describing translation as "a mode of reading so sympathetic and transitive that the outcome is a wholly new work, it's hunch and nerve and (my own muse) impatience. It's approaching the avowed-impossible, and shrugging your shoulders and just getting on with it." Yes.

There is much more in Kafka Translated but the second half focuses on Kafka's reception, which is of less specific interest here – although well worth reading. For me, the first half is an inspiring read for all those interested in translation. Woods is inherently sympathetic to the translator as a creative individual and has done us all a good turn by shining a light on four of the people who have indeed shaped our reading. She argues that what critics often launch upon as "mistakes" are almost always conscious decisions and should be respected as such. I devoured the book in one day and would wholly recommend it to general readers as well as translators, if only it weren't so expensive. for those interested in exploring translation decisions for themselves, Susan Bernofsky's exciting-looking new The Metamorphosis is more affordable.

Michelle Woods on Re-Translating Kafka

The other day I linked to Daniel Kehlmann's speech in praise of his translator, Carol Brown Janeway. I did so mainly because it's wonderful to see translators lauded in public, especially by such a high-profile writer. However, there was one part of the speech I actually objected to, and that was this:

Academic translating means, more or less, translating in order to make it sound bad. I am not joking. For quite a while now some of the more important University departments for translation have taught their students to stay as close to a text’s original syntax as possible, in order to make the reader never forget that he or she is reading a translation.

Now, I am not party to what goes on in university departments for translation - important or not - although I do have a modest insight into what happens in more practice-oriented translation workshops. But I do think Kehlmann missed the point with this comment. What I hope is going on is that translators are learning to find their own fine line between fidelity and betrayal, and also to question the notions in the first place. There are many times, in my opinion and indeed in my work, when I too think it's wise to retain a semblance of German syntax in English, but there are others when I feel it's asking too much of readers. There are times when I do in fact want them to remember they're reading a translation and times when I want to give rhythm priority over content, or whatever.

One of the places where I think and talk about translation in a practical way is the no man's land translation lab in Berlin. Literary translators, either professional or amateur, old hands, beginners or even those still thinking about trying it out, can come along and bring texts they're working on for us to go through in the group. A while ago one of us was translating Kafka fragments, so we were looking at how on earth to put Kafka into English, with the added difficulty that this was unedited, unfinished Kafka. What on earth did he mean by that, what might that word have meant in 1914 Prague, and just how important is that modal particle? In this case, most of us agreed that the translator Ina Pfitzner needed to stay pretty close to the original syntax most of the time. But there are other Kafka translations - for other purposes - that veer further away, for instance Michael Hofmann's excellent version of "A Country Doctor". What Hofmann does is embellish ever so slightly, teasing out the gruesome humour. Whereas Joyce Crick's translation of the same story is closer to the original and therefore more useful for scholarly readers. Neither of the two is objectively better for an imaginary universal reader.

Anyway, there is a fascinating interview with Michelle Woods - someone who does teach translation theory - at World Literature Today, in which she talks about her forthcoming book on re-translating Kafka.