Re-translating Kafka: Examples, Second Thoughts, and Reflections

RETHINKING TRANSLATION

SPEAKER: Mark Harman, Elizabethtown College

Mark Harman will focus on the challenges and pitfalls of (re-)translating Kafka, drawing on examples from The Castle (Schocken Books, 1998) and Selected Stories (Harvard University Press, 2024) while also reflecting on his dual role as editor and translator in the latter book. Whereas some practitioners insist that translations ought to be self-sufficient, Harman contends that a combination of translation, annotations and glosses can complement the work of the translator along the lines suggested by Kwame Anthony Appiah in “Thick Translation” (1993). Such a dual approach, combining the efforts of translator and editor, can help reconnect Kafka’s iconic texts to a web of social, literary, linguistic, and cultural contexts in early twentieth-century, largely German-Jewish Prague that underpins but does not explain his writing. Those contexts have been obscured--especially for the primary target audience of the Selected Stories, namely students and general readers--by the ravages of twentieth-century history.

About the Speaker

Born and raised in Dublin, Mark Harman received his Ph.D. in German from Yale. Professor Emeritus of German and English at Elizabethtown College, he has also taught at Dartmouth, Oberlin, and the University of Pennsylvania. His dissertation was on Kafka and Kleist, and he has since published over twenty articles and book chapters on Kafka’s life, times, and work. His Kafka translations including The Castle and Amerika: The Missing Person have been widely acclaimed. J. M. Coetzee praised the Castle translation in a review-essay in the New York Review of Books for being “semantically accurate to an admirable degree, faithful to Kafka’s nuances, and responsive to his sentences and to the larger music of his paragraph construction.” In its citation for the First Lois Roth Award, the Modern Language Association jury wrote that Harman "fashioned a style that expressively recreates Kafka’s unsettling blend of the mundane and the unnerving, the wryly comic and the obliquely menacing. Harman’s syntax in particular, with its controlled and grammatically subversive use of comma splices, captures the narrative’s progressive mood of disorientation and bafflement.” In the Washington Post, Pulitzer-Prize-winning critic Michael Dirda wrote of the Selected Stories that "you couldn’t ask for a better introduction to Kafka…If you’ve never read Kafka before or if you already love him, you’ll still want Harman’s Selected Stories.” In the Times Literary Supplement, Karen Leeder, Schwarz-Taylor Professor of the German Language and Literature at Oxford, characterized the book as “richly illustrated and filled with fascinating references to contemporary sources, critical commentary, and relevant passages from Kafka’s letters and diaries…Anyone interested in knowing more about these stories will find this volume a treasure trove.” 

Harman has also translated Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (HUP), Hermann Hesse, Soul of the Age (Farrar Straus), Robert Walser Rediscovered: Stories, Fairy-Tale Plays, and Critical Responses (UPNE), which he edited and partly translated, and shorter works by a range of contemporary writers including Günter Grass, Martin Walser, Christopher Hein, Angela Krauss, and Ermine Sevgi Özdamar. A former Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, his residencies include the MacDowell Colony, Djerassi, Tyrone Guthrie Center (Annamakerrig, Ireland), and the Übersetzer-Kollegium in Straelen.