Stranger Shores: Essays 1986-1999

by J. M. Coetzee

  To be able to translate a literary text, says Gass, it is not enough just to know the source language, however well; it is not even enough to be able to transpose the text sentence by sentence. You have to understand it. ‘Many translators do not bother to understand their texts. That would interfere with their own creativity and with their perception of what the poet ought to have said . . . They would rather be original than right.’ (p. 69)

  Gass’s point is less obvious, and more contentious, than might at first sight appear. Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich, writes Rilke at the beginning of Elegy 1: every angel is terrible. Am I failing as a translator if, despite poring over the Elegies, over Rilke’s numerous explanations, over the best that literary criticism has to offer, I am still not sure what an angel – one of Rilke’s angels – looks like? Is it not good enough for the translator simply to call ein Engel an angel and be done with it?

  Yes and no. Ein Engel is an angel is ein Engel, but until I know what sort of angel Rilke has in mind I am not sure what schrecklich means: terrible (Leishman) or terrifying (Poulin, Mitchell) or awesome (Gass).

  So again Gass’s point needs refining. The translator does not first need to understand the text before he translates it. Rather, translating the text becomes part of the process of finding – and making – its meaning; translating turns out to be only a more intense and more demanding form of what we do whenever we read.

  How well does the translator need to know the source language? One extreme is represented by Ezra Pound. Pound’s knowledge of written Chinese was amateurish. In translating classic Chinese poetry he used cribs, and for the rest guessed, falling back on the highly questionable theory that Chinese characters are stylised pictographs which any trained eye can ‘read’. The other extreme is represented by Vladimir Nabokov, who demanded that the translator be fully at home in the source language in all its nuances and ephemeral connotations.

  Gass’s position is somewhere in the middle. A native command of the source language, he says, is less important than a ‘native-like’ command of the language into which one is translating (in translators’ jargon, the target language). (p. 70) He might have added that a non-native translator who does not have native informants to call on – in the case of poetry, sensitive, well-read informants – is in a parlous position. Gass himself worked closely with Heide Ziegler of the University of Stuttgart, whose help he handsomely acknowledges though he does not list her as co-translator.

  Finally, in setting out the rules of his craft, Gass warns against ‘construing’ the poem, by which he seems to mean stitching into the translation, at difficult points, an explanation of what you think it means. ‘Render the poem as the poet wrote it and let the poet’s poem explain itself,’ he writes. (p. 84)

  Once more the common-sensical formulation evades a substantial question: what might ‘the poet’s poem’ be, as distinct from my understanding of the poem? Gass’s own practice involves a fair amount of construal, as we see in his rendering of Elegy 8. The eighth Elegy is one of the most compact of the sequence. Its subject is the sundering of man from the natural world; its project, a paradoxical one, is to find words that will take us back to before words and allow us to glimpse the world as seen by creatures who do not have words, or, if that glimpse is barred to us, then to allow us the sad experience of standing at the rim of an unknowable mode of being. Although one of the more abstract of the Elegies, it is accessible on its own terms, not least because such earlier poems of Rilke’s as ‘The Panther’ have prepared us for it.

  Gass the professor of philosophy is in his element in this Elegy. He understands what Rilke is up to, understands so well that more than once he succumbs to the temptation to clarify – to us his readers, but in a sense to Rilke as well – thoughts that Rilke is still struggling to articulate.

  For instance, Rilke writes (I transpose into English word for word): ‘What is out there, we know it from the animal’s face alone; for even the young child we turn around and compel to look back, seeing form/formation [Gestaltung], not the open [das Offne], that in animal vision is so deep.’

  Rilke’s main point – that for an unmediated experience of the world we have to fall back on empathy with animals – is clear enough, but the details are less easy to decode. (In retrospect, Rilke would admit that one reason why the Elegies were so difficult to understand was that in places he had, so to speak, written down the total without revealing what was being added up.) Gass translates the lines as follows:

  What is outside, we read solely from the animal’s gaze,

  for we compel even the young child to turn and look back at preconceived things,

  never to know the acceptance so deeply set inside

  the animal’s face. (p. 210)

  Though the English here is clearer than the German, Gass’s decision to interpret or construe the problematic terms Gestaltung (as ‘preconceived things’) and das Offne (as ‘acceptance’), rather than giving their closest semantic equivalents, even at the risk of producing a version as opaque as the original, is open to question. Gass’s English breathes an assurance – the assurance of the speaker who knows his subject – not present in the German, with its general effect of a speaker pushing at the limits of language, striving to find his own meaning. Furthermore, offen (open) and öffnen (to open) are key words in Rilke, revisited again and again, each time with a different nuance. By hiding Rilke’s das Offne behind the unrelated word ‘acceptance’, Gass is false to a characteristic movement of Rilke’s poetic thinking.

  At a philosophical level, Elegy 8 is concerned with relations between thought and language and with the problem of other minds. If we wanted to find out something about these topics in general, Gass’s Elegy 8 would probably be a better guide than Rilke’s hesitating effort. What we lose, as Gass tightens up Rilke’s terminology and oils the joints of his syntax, is the drama of a poet at the height of his powers striving to find words for intuitions at the limit of his grasp.

  VI

  Gass justly denies Rilke the status of a philosophical poet: what present themselves as ideas in Rilke, he says, are for the most part emotions, moods, attitudes. The chapter in which he unpicks Rilke’s characteristic paradoxes constitutes the best brief exposition of Rilke’s thought I know of.

  He gets the quality of Rilke’s verse exactly right: the typical poem is, as he says, ‘obdurate, complex, and compacted . . . made of plucked tough sounds, yet as rapid and light and fragile as fountain water’. (p. 32) On the wide appeal of the Duino Elegies he is equally illuminating: ‘These poems are the most oral I know . . . They must be spoken – not merely by but for yourself, as if you were the one who wondered whether you had anyone to call to.’ (p. 101)

  As for his treatment of Rilke the man, the problem here is not that Gass is uncharitably inclined toward his subject but that he is out of sympathy with the milieu that formed him. Reading Rilke is an ambitious book, but one of the things it does not attempt is to situate Rilke historically. We could do with more on Rilke and Nietzsche (at whom Gass takes a few disparaging swipes), and on the cult of the lonely genius in late Romantic times. It would also help to learn more about the back-to-nature movement that was so strong in German-speaking countries at the turn of the century, divorced from which Rilke’s nude sunbathing, vegetarianism, etc., look like mere personal fads.

  Gass’s Rilke translations will not satisfy readers who prefer to stay as close to the original as possible, even if at the risk of finding themselves in a no man’s land between German and English. Nor, on the other hand, will they please readers who want to be swept away by grand verbal music. What Gass provides are versions which, if not inspired verse-making in their own right, reflect a lucid appreciation of the original based on years of close reading, realised with verbal resourcefulness of the highest order.

  8 Translating Kafka

  I

  IN 1921 THE Scottish poet Edwin Muir and his wife Willa gave up their jobs in London and went to live on the Conti
nent. The dollar was strong; they hoped to make ends meet by reviewing books for the American periodical The Freeman.

  After a nine-month spell in Prague, the Muirs moved to Dresden and began to learn German. Willa did some school-teaching while Edwin stayed at home reading the latest German-language writers. When hyperinflation struck Germany, they moved to Austria, then to Italy, then back to England. There they put their newly acquired German to use and became professional translators. For the next fifteen years, until the outbreak of war, they were, in Edwin’s words, ‘a sort of translation factory’. Together they translated over thirty books; Willa did a further half-dozen by herself. ‘Too much of our lives was wasted . . . in turning German into English,’ wrote Edwin afterwards, ruefully.1

  With one of their first projects, a translation of Lion Feuchtwanger’s Jud Süss, they struck it lucky: the book became a bestseller and their London publisher asked what other writers they could recommend. Edwin had been reading Franz Kafka’s posthumously published Das Schloss. ‘It is a purely metaphysical and mystical dramatic novel . . . quite unique,’ he wrote in a letter.2 His and Willa’s translation was published in 1930. Despite selling only 500 copies, it was followed by further Kafka translations: The Great Wall of China (1933), a collection of shorter pieces; The Trial (1937); America (1938); and, after the war years, In the Penal Colony (1948). These translations, despite their many defects, have dominated the English-language market since then.

  Edwin Muir saw his task as not only translating Kafka but also guiding English readers through these new and difficult texts. The Muir translations therefore came armed with forewords in which Edwin, relying heavily on Kafka’s friend and editor Max Brod, explained what Kafka was all about. These forewords proved highly influential. They proposed Kafka as ‘a religious genius . . . in an age of skepticism’, a writer of ‘religious allegory’ preoccupied with the incommensurability of the human and the divine.3

  Inevitably the conception of Kafka as a religious writer influenced the choices the Muirs made as they translated his words. The English versions they produced conformed to the interpretation supplied in the forewords. So it is not surprising that Kafka’s first English-speaking readers accepted without demurral the Muirs’ version of him. Their interpretation, embedded in their translations – particularly of The Castle and The Trial – has long been a source of concern to Kafka scholars. In the United States, in particular, the Muirs’ 1930 translation of The Castle, implicitly packaged with the Muirs’ 1930 reading and reprinted time and again, has seemed to hold an unfair monopoly. (The situation has not been as bad in Britain, where a new translation of The Trial appeared in 1977 and of The Castle in 1997.)

  There are other reasons as well why the Muir translation and the Muir monopoly have assumed a faintly scandalous air. The 1930 translation was based on the 1926 text given to the world by Brod, and this text was heavily edited. Brod was the one who made decisions about which parts of Kafka’s fragmentary manuscript should go into the printed text and which not, and about where the chapter divisions should fall. Brod also augmented Kafka’s light, even minimal punctuation. Further errors were introduced by the printers. Thus the Muirs, through no fault of their own, were working from an original that was, by scholarly standards, unacceptable.

  II

  The main challenge facing a translator of Kafka, in the eyes of the Muirs, was to reconcile fidelity to Kafka’s word order – which was, of course, subject to the rules of German grammar – with the ideal of a natural-sounding, idiomatic English. To Edwin Muir, Kafka’s word order was ‘naked and infallible . . . Only in that order could he have said what he had to say . . . Our main problem was to write an English prose as natural in the English way as [Kafka’s] was in his own way.’4

  Naturalness is a concept not easily pinned down, but to Edwin Muir it appears to have included freshness of phrasing and lexical variousness. Thus, paradoxically, the Muirs are often more vivid than Kafka, whose German tends to be restrained, even neutral, and who is not afraid to repeat key words again and again.

  Furthermore, although the Muirs’ mastery of German – particularly Willa’s – was astonishing, given the fact that they were more or less self-taught, and although Edwin in particular had read widely in contemporary German and Austrian writing, neither had a systematic grounding in German literature, so their ability to pick up literary references was rather haphazard. Finally, there were areas of German or Austrian life, each with its own specialised vocabulary, that they knew only sketchily.

  One of these – unfortunately for them as translators of Kafka – was the law and legal bureaucracy. I give one instance. In The Trial Josef K. tells the men arresting him that he wants to telephone Staatsanwalt Hasterer. The Muirs translate this as ‘advocate Hasterer’.5 Readers brought up in the Anglo-American legal system will assume that K. is asking to call his lawyer. In fact K. is trying a bluff, threatening to call a friend in the prosecutor’s office.

  In The Castle in particular, the Muir translation embodies scores, perhaps hundreds of errors of detail which, while they may not be important individually, have a cumulative effect, putting readers on an insecure footing, driving them back to check the original at every crux of interpretation.

  I cite instances to give an idea of the range of the Muirs’ inadequacies.

  Reading Kafka, Edwin Muir observes, is much like reading ‘a travel book which recounts minutely the customs, dresses and utensils of some newly discovered tribe.’6 But when it comes to the everyday material culture of Central Europe, the Muirs are uncertain guides. The Strohsack on which K. beds down in the village inn, for instance, is not a bag of straw (as they say) but a palliasse, a straw mattress. (Muir translation, pp. 9, 120)

  The curious telephone system of the Castle, and the related telephone etiquette, also seem to defeat the Muirs. To them, telephonieren (to telephone) is the ringing sound a telephone makes. When the Castle officials disconnect the ringing mechanisms on their receivers, the Muirs say they are ‘leav[ing] their receivers off’; and when they reconnect them, the Muirs say they are ‘hang[ing] the receivers on’. (Muir, pp. 73–4)

  If the legal system of the ex-Austrian Empire is strange to them, the practices of Kafka’s fictional Castle officials are even stranger. Without expanding words into phrases or adding footnotes, it is hard to explain to the English-speaking reader what is meant by the claim that the only road to Herr Klamm of the Castle leads through the Protokolle of his secretary, or quite what the Briefschaften are that Castle messengers ceaselessly carry back and forth. Nevertheless, the Muirs are too often content with indicating only approximately what is meant, for instance by replacing a German word with its English cognate (Protokolle by ‘protocols’) or with a term of vaguely similar denotation (Briefschaften by ‘commissions’) and hoping that enough of the meaning comes across. In this respect the Muirs’ standards are simply too rough to qualify them as interpreters of The Castle, which is partly, though not wholly, a fantasy of bureaucracy run wild. (Muir, pp. 110, 171)

  Sometimes the Muirs’ guesses at Kafka’s meaning are mere stabs in the dark. Kafka writes, for instance, of officials who revel in their despotic power over petitioners, ‘against their own will [loving] the scent of wild game like that’. Though he was the least ideological of writers, Kafka had an acute feel for the obscene intimacies of power. Hinted at in his striking metaphor is a bestial, predatory appetite in the officials, sometimes submerged, sometimes baring itself. The Muirs, missing the point, write that the officials ‘in spite of themselves, are attracted by those outlaws’. (Muir, p. 209)

  When Kafka is obscure enough to defeat any but an inspired reader (what is a clinging street, eine festhaltende Strasse?), the Muirs’ tactic is to take a guess at what Kafka might have intended, rather than – the last honourable recourse of the baffled translator – to fall back on word-by-word transposition. Their guesses are not always convincing – here ‘the obsession of the street’. (Muir, p. 17)

&n
bsp; And sometimes the Muirs simply fail to see what is before them. ‘Her blank loveless gaze,’ writes Kafka. ‘Her cold hard eye,’ write the Muirs, missing the ambiguity of ‘loveless’ [lieblos]. (Muir, p. 194)

  At a broader level, there are occasions when the Muirs, whether consciously or not, sacrifice fidelity to Kafka’s text to a vision – their own vision – of the whole. To the Muirs, taking a hint from Brod, Surveyor K. is a sympathetic pilgrim figure. So when K. claims at one point to have left a wife and child at home, yet at a later point wants to marry the waitress Frieda, the Muirs save their embarrassment by eliding the wife and child.

  Finally, however ‘natural’ the Muirs’ English may have been in its day, it is now dated – as we might expect, given that it is nearly seventy years old. Unless readers make conscious allowance for this, they will not know how to interpret moments when the Muirs’ language seems to take a dip into the past: ‘stoutly-built’ rather than powerful; ‘guttersnipe’ rather than tramp; ‘remiss in industry’ rather than lacking diligence. (Muir, pp. 172, 10, 11)

  But has Kafka himself used outdated forms, the reader might ask, and might the Muirs be signalling this in their word choice? The answer is, in each case, no. Although there are levels of formality in the language of The Castle, there is no historical dimension built into it – no old-fashioned usages or up-to-the-minute idioms that are intended to bear a signifying function.