elements," "no longer anything," "not a single element." This practice of synonymization seems innocent, but its systematic quality inevitably smudges the original idea. And besides, what the hell for? Why not say "go" when the author says "gehen"? O ye translators, do not sodonymize us!
Richness of Vocabulary
Let's look at the verbs in the sentence: vergehen (went by-from the root gehen, go); haben (have); sich verir-ren (go astray); sein (be); haben; ersticken mussen (must suffocate); tun konnen (can do); gehen; sich verirren. Thus Kafka chooses the simplest, the most elementary verbs: go (twice), have (twice), go astray (twice), be, do, suffocate, must, can.
Translators tend to enrich the vocabulary: "never ceased to experience" (for "have"); "thrust," "advance," "go a long way" (for "be"); "walk" (for "go"); "find" (for "have").
(What terror the words "be" and "have" strike in all the translators in the world! They'll do anything to replace them with words they consider less routine.)
That tendency is also psychologically understandable: what can the translator get credit for? For fidelity to the authors style? That's exactly what the readers in the translator's country have no way of judging. On the other hand, the public will automatically see richness of vocabulary as a value, as a performance, a proof of the translator's mastery and competence.
Now, richness of vocabulary is not a value in itself. The breadth of the vocabulary depends on the aesthetic intention governing the work. Carlos Fuentes' vocabulary is nearly dizzying in its richness. But Hemingways is extremely narrow. The beauty of Fuentes' prose is bound up with richness, the beauty of Hemingway's with narrowness of vocabulary.
Kafka's vocabulary too is relatively restricted. That restriction has often been explained as one of Kafka's asceticisms. As his anti-aestheticism. As his indifference to beauty. Or as the cost exacted by Prague German, a language withering from being torn away from its popular roots. No one was willing to grant that this bareness of vocabulary expressed Kafka's aesthetic intention, that it was one of the distinctive marks of the beauty of his prose.
A General Remark on the Problem of Authority
For a translator, the supreme authority should be the author's personal style. But most translators obey another authority: that of the conventional version of "good French" (or good German, good English, etc.), namely, the French (the German, etc.) we learn in school. The translator considers himself the ambassador from that authority to the foreign author. That is the error: every author of some value transgresses against "good style," and in that transgression lies the originality (and hence the raison d'etre) of his art. The translator's primary effort should be to understand that transgression. This is not difficult when it is obvi-
ous, as for example with Rabelais, or Joyce, or Celine. But there are authors whose transgression against "good style" is subtle, barely visible, hidden, discreet; as such, it is not easy to grasp. In such a case, it is all the more important to do so.
Repetition
Stunden (hours) occurs three times-repetition preserved in all three translations;
gemeinsamen (mutual) twice-repetition eliminated in all three translations;
sich verirren (go astray) twice-repetition preserved in all three translations;
die Fremde (strange) twice, and then once die Fremdheit (strangeness)-in Vialatte: "a l'etranger" (abroad) once, "strangeness" replaced by "exile"; in David and in Lortholary: once "foreign" (as an adjective) and once "foreignness";
die Luft (the air) twice-repetition preserved by all three translators;
haben (have) twice-the repetition exists in only one of the translations;
weiter (farther) twice-this repetition is replaced in Vialatte by repetition of the word "continue"; in David by the (weak) repetition of the word "still"; in Lortholary, the repetition has disappeared;
gehen, vergehen (go, went by)-this repetition (admittedly difficult to preserve) has disappeared in all three translations.
In general, we see that translators (obeying their schoolteachers) tend to limit repetitions.
The Semantic Meaning of Repetition
Twice die Fremde, once die Fremdheit: with this repetition the author introduced into his text a term with the quality of a key notion, a concept. If the author develops a lengthy line of thought from this word, repeating the word is necessary from the semantic and logical viewpoint. Suppose that, in order to avoid repetition, a Heidegger translator were to render "das Sein" once as "being," next as "existence," then as "life," then again as "human life," and finally as "being-there." Never knowing whether Heidegger is speaking of a single thing under different names or of different things, we would have not a scrupulously logical text but a mess. A novel's prose (I am speaking, of course, of novels worthy of the name) demands the same rigor (especially in meditative or metaphorical passages).
Another Remark on the Necessity of Preserving Repetitions
A bit farther on the same page of The Castle: "… Stimme nach Frieda gerufen wurde. 'Frieda,' sagte K. in Friedas Ohr and gab so den Ruf weiter."
Literally, this means: "…a voice summoned Frieda. 'Frieda,' said K. in Friedas ear, thus passing on the summons."
The French translators want to avoid the triple repetition of the name Frieda:
Vialatte: "'Frieda!' said he in the maid's ear, thus passing on… "
And David:"'Frieda,' said K. in his companion's ear, passing on to her…"
How false the words replacing Frieda's name sound! Note that in the text of The Castle, K. is never anything but K. In dialogue, others may call him "surveyor" or perhaps other things, but Kafka himself, the narrator, never refers to him by the words "stranger," "newcomer," "young man," or whatever. K. is nothing but K. And not only he but all the characters in Kafka always have just a single name, a single designation.
Thus Frieda is Frieda; not lover, not mistress, not companion, not maid, not waitress, not whore, not young woman, not girl, not friend, not girlfriend. Frieda.
The Melodic Importance of Repetition
There are moments when Kafka's prose takes flight and becomes song. That is the case with the two sentences I have been considering. (Note that both of these exceptionally beautiful sentences are descriptions of the love act; this says a hundred times more than all the biographers' research about the importance of eroticism for Kafka. But let's go on.) Kafka's prose takes flight on two wings: intensity of metaphorical imagination and captivating melody.
Melodic beauty here is connected to the repetition of words; the sentence begins: "Dort vergingen Stunden, Stunden gemeinsamen Atems" gemeinsamen Herzschlags, Stunden…" ("There, hours went by, hours of mutual breaths, of mutual heartbeats, hours … ") In nine words, five repetitions. At the
middle of the sentence: the repetition of the word "Fremde" ("strange") and the word "Fremdheit" ("strangeness"). And at the end of the sentence, yet another repetition: "… weiter gehen, weiter sich verir-ren" ("… keep going, keep going astray"). These multiple repetitions slow the tempo and give the sentence a yearning cadence.
In the other sentence, K.'s second coition, we find the same principle of repetition: the verb "seek" repeated four times, the word "something" twice, the word "body" twice, the verb "paw" twice; and lets not forget the conjunction "and," which, against all the rules of syntactic elegance, is repeated four times.
In German, that sentence begins: "Sie suchte etwas und er suchte etwas …" Vialatte says something entirely different: "She was seeking something and was seeking something again…" David corrects him: "She was seeking something and so was he, on his part." How odd: preferring to say "and so was he, on his part" rather than to translate literally Kafka's beautiful and simple repetition: "She was seeking something and he was seeking something…"
Repetition Skill
There's a skill to repetition. Because there certainly are bad, clumsv repetitions (as when, in the description of a dinner, the words "chair," "fork," and the like appear three times in two sentences). The
rule: a word is repeated because it is important, because one wants its sound as well as its meaning to reverberate throughout a paragraph, a page.
Digression: An Example of the Beauty of Repetition
The very short (two-page) Hemingway story "One Reader Writes" is divided into three parts: 1) a brief paragraph describing a woman writing a letter "steadily with no necessity to cross out or rewrite anything"; 2) the letter itself, in which the woman speaks of her husbands venereal disease; 3) the interior monologue that follows it, quoted here:
"Maybe he can tell me what's right to do, she said to herself. Maybe he can tell me. In the picture in the paper he looks like he'd know. He looks smart, all right. Every day he tells somebody what to do. He ought to know. I want to do whatever is right. It's such a long time though. It's a long time. And it's been a long time. My Christ, it's been a long time. He had to go wherever they sent him, I know, but I don't know what he had to get it for. Oh, I wish to Christ he wouldn't have got it. I don't care what he did to get it. But I wish to Christ he hadn't ever got it. It does seem like he didn't have to have got it. I don't know what to do. I wish to Christ he hadn't got any kind of malady. I don't know why he had to get a malady."
The entrancing melody of this passage is based entirely on repetitions. They are not a device (like rhyme in poetry), but they come out of everyday spoken language, thoroughly unpolished language.
In addition: this very short story, it seems to me, is a unique instance in the history of prose fiction where the musical intention is primordial: without that melody the text would lose its raison d'etre.
Breath
By his own account, Kafka wrote his long story "The Judgment" in a single night, without interruption, that is to say at extraordinary speed, letting himself be carried along by a practically uncontrolled imagination. Speed, which later became the surrealists' programmatic method ("automatic writing")-allowing for the liberation of the subconscious from supervision by reason, and making the imagination explode-played roughly the same role in Kafka.
Roused by that "methodical speed," the Kafkan imagination runs like a river, a dreamlike river that finds no respite till a chapter's end. That long breath of imagination is reflected in the nature of the syntax: in Kafka's novels, there is a near absence of colons (except for those routinely introducing dialogue) and an exceptionally modest number of semicolons. The manuscripts (in the critical edition: Fischer, 1982) show that even commas seemingly required by the rules of syntax are often lacking. The texts are divided into very few paragraphs. This tendency to minimize the articulation-few paragraphs, few strong pauses (on rereading a manuscript, Kafka often even changed periods to commas), few markers emphasizing the text's logical organization (colons, semicolons)-is consubstantial with Kafka's style; at the same time it is a perpetual attack on "good German style" (as well as on the "good style" of all the languages into which Kafka is translated).
Kafka made no definitive version of The Castle for the printer, and one could reasonably assume that he might still have brought in this or that correction, including punctuation. So I am not enormously shocked (not pleased, either, obviously) that Max Brod, as Kafka's first editor, from time to time should have created a paragraph indentation or added a semicolon to make the text easier to read. Actually, even in Brod's edition, the general character of Kafka's syntax still shows clearly, and the novel preserves its great long breath.
Let's go back to that third-chapter sentence: it is relatively long, with commas but no semicolons (in the manuscript and in all the German editions). So what disturbs me most in the Vialatte version of this sentence is the added semicolon. It represents the end of a logical segment, a caesura that invites one to lower the voice, take a short pause. That caesura (although correct by the rules of syntax) chokes off Kafka's breath. David then even divides the sentence into three parts, with two semicolons. These two semicolons are all the more incongruous given that throughout the entire third chapter (according to the manuscript) Kafka uses only one semicolon. In the edition established by Max Brod there are thirteen. Vialatte reaches thirty-one. Lortholary twenty-eight, plus three colons.
Typographical Appearance
You can see the long, intoxicating flight of Kafka's prose in the text's typographical appearance, which is often a single "endless" paragraph, over pages, enfolding even long passages of dialogue. In Kafka's manuscript, the third chapter is divided into just two long paragraphs. In Brod's edition there are four. In Vialatte's translation, ninety. In Lortholarv's translation, ninety-five. French editions of Kafka s novels have been subjected to an articulation that is not their own: paragraphs much more numerous, and therefore much shorter, which simulate a more logical, more rational organization of the text and which dramatize it, sharply separating all the dialogue exchanges.
In no translation into other languages, to my knowledge, has the original articulation of Kafka's texts been changed. Why have the French translators (all, unanimously) done this? They must certainly have had a reason for it. The Pleiade edition of Kafka's novels contains over five hundred pages of notes. Yet I find not a single sentence there giving such a reason.
And Finally, a Remark on Type, Large and Small
Kafka insisted that his books be printed in very large type. These days that is recalled with the indulgent smile prompted by great men's whims. Yet nothing about it warrants a smile; Kafka's wish was justified, logical, serious, related to his aesthetic, or, more specifically, to his way of articulating prose.
An author who divides his text into many short paragraphs will not insist so on large type: a lavishly articulated page can be read rather easily.
By contrast, a text that flows out in an endless paragraph is very much less legible. The eye finds no place to stop or rest, the lines are easily "lost track of." To be read with pleasure (that is, without eye fatigue), such a text requires relatively large type that makes
reading easy and allows one to stop anytirne to savor the beauty of the sentences.
I look through the German paperback edition of The Castle: on a small page, thirty-nine appallingly cramped lines of an "endless paragraphe": it's illegible; or it's legible only as information; or as a document; in any case not as a text meant for aesthetic perception. In an appendix, on some forty pages: all the passages Kafka deleted from his manuscript. They disregard Kafka's desire (for thoroughly justified aesthetic rea-sons) to have his text printed in large type; they fish out all the sentences he decided (for thoroughly justified aesthetic reasons) to destroy. In that indifference to the authors aesthetic wishes is reflected all the sad-ness of the posthumous fate of Kafka's work.
FRENCH TRANSLATIONS OF THE SENTENCE
Des heures passèrent là, des heures d'haleines mêlées, de battements de coeur communs, des heures durant lesquelles K. ne cessa d'éprouver l'impression qu'il se perdait qu'il s'était enfoncé si loin que nul être cirant lui n'avait fait plus de chemin; à l'étranger, dans un pays où l'air même n'arait plus rien des éléments de l'air natal, où l'on derait étouffer d'exil et où l'on ne pouvait plus rien faire, au milieu d'in-sanes séductions, que continuer à marcher, que continuer à se perdre.
– Alexandre Vialatte
Des heures passèrent là, des heures d'haleines mêlées, de battements de coeur confondus, des heures durant lesquelles K. ne cessa d'éprouver l'impression qu'il s'égarait, qu'il s'enfonçait plus loin qu'aucun être avant lui; il était dans un pays étranger, où l'air même n'avait plus rien de commun avec l'air du pays natal; l'étrangeté de ce pays faisait suffoquer et pourtant, parmi de folles séductions, on ne pouvait que marcher toujours plus loin, s'égarer toujours plus avant.
– Claude David
Là passèrent des heures, des heures de respirations mêlées, de coeurs battant ensemble, des heures durant lesquelles K. avait le sentiment constant de s'égarer, ou bien de s'être avancé plus loin que jamais aucun homme dans des contrées étrangères, où l'air lui-même n'avait pas un seul élément qu'on retro
uvât dans l'air du pays natal, où l'on ne pouvait qu'étouffer à force d'étrangeté, sans pouvoir pourtant faire autre chose, au milieu de ces séductions insensées, que de continuer et de s'égarer davantage.
– Bernard Lortholary
Là, s'en allaient des heures, des heures d'haleines communes, de battements de coeur communs, des heures durant lesquelles K. avait sans cesse le sentiment qu'il s'égarait, ou bien qu'il était plus loin dans le monde étranger qu 'aucun être avant lui, dans un monde étranger où l'air même n'avait aucun élément de l'air natal, où l'on devait étouffer d'étrangeté et où l'on ne pouvait rien faire, au milieu de séductions insensées, que continuer à aller, que continuer à s'égarer.
– Milan Kundera
PART FIVE. A la Recherche du Present Perdu
Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts Page 9
