Inexplicably, it has become a commonplace of Kafka criticism to overlook nearly altogether the social roots of the psychological predicaments animating Kafka’s fables. To an extent there is justice in this disregard. Kafka’s genius will not lend itself to merely local apprehensions; it cannot be reduced to a scarring by a hurtful society. At the other extreme, his stories are frequently addressed as faintly christological allegories about the search for “grace,” in the manner of a scarier Pilgrim’s Progress. It is true that there is not a word about Jews—and little about Prague—in Kafka’s formal writing, which may account for the dismissal of any inquisitiveness about Kafka’s Jewishness as a “parochialism” to be avoided. Kafka himself is said to have avoided it. But he was less assimilated (itself an ungainly notion) than some of his readers wish or imagine him to have been. Kafka’s self-made, coarsely practical father was the son of an impoverished kosher butcher, and began peddling in peasant villages while he was still a child. His middle-class mother was descended from an eminent Talmud scholar. Almost all his friends were Jewish literati. Kafka was seriously attracted to Zionism and Palestine, to Hebrew, to the pathos and inspiration of an East European Yiddish theater troupe that had landed in Prague: these were for him the vehicles of a historic transcendence that cannot be crammed into the term “parochial.” Glimmerings of this transcendence seep into the stories, usually by way of their negation. “We are nihilistic thoughts that come into God’s head,” Kafka told Max Brod, the dedicated friend who preserved the unfinished body of his work. In all of Kafka’s fictions the Jewish anxieties of Prague press on, invisibly, subliminally; their fate is metamorphosis.
But Prague was not Kafka’s only subterranean torment. His harsh, crushing, uncultivated father, for whom the business drive was everything, hammered at the mind of his obsessively susceptible son, for whom literature was everything. Yet the adult son remained in the parental flat for years, dreading noise, interruption, and mockery, writing through the night. At the family table the son sat in concentration, diligently Fletcherizing his food, chewing each mouthful a hundred times, until it liquified. He experimented with vegetarianism, gymnastics, carpentry, and gardening, and repeatedly went on health retreats, once to a nudist spa. He fell into a stormy, fitfully interrupted but protracted engagement to Felice Bauer, a pragmatic manufacturing executive in Berlin; when he withdrew from it he felt like a felon before a tribunal. His job at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute (where he was a token Jew) instructed him in the whims of contingency and in the mazy machinery of bureaucracy. When his lungs became infected, he referred to his spasms of cough as “the animal.” In his last hours, pleading with his doctor for morphine, he said, “Kill me, or else you are a murderer”—a final conflagration of Kafkan irony.
Below all this travail, some of it self-inflicted, lay the indefatigable clawings of language. In a letter to Max Brod, Kafka described Jews who wrote in German (he could hardly exclude himself) as trapped beasts: “Their hind legs were still stuck in parental Judaism while their forelegs found no purchase on new ground.” They lived, he said, with three impossibilities: “the impossibility of not writing, the impossibility of writing German, the impossibility of writing differently. You could add,” he concluded, “a fourth impossibility, the impossibility of writing.”
The impossibility of writing German? Kafka’s German—his mother tongue—is spare, somber, comic, lucid, pure; formal without being stilted. It has the almost platonic purity of a language unintruded on by fads or slang or the street, geographically distanced from the tumultuous bruisings of the mean vernacular. The Hebrew poetry written by the Jews of medieval Spain was similarly immaculate; its capital city was not Córdoba or Granada but the Bible. In the same way Kafka’s linguistic capital was not German-speaking Prague on the margins of empire, but European literature itself. Language was the engine and chief motive of his life: hence “the impossibility of not writing.” “I’ve often thought,” he ruminated to Felice Bauer, “that the best way of life for me would be to have writing materials and a lamp in the innermost room of a spacious locked cellar.” When he spoke of the impossibility of writing German, he never meant that he was not master of the language; his wish was to be consecrated to it, like a monk with his beads. His fear was that he was not entitled to German—not that the language did not belong to him, but that he did not belong to it. German was both hospitable and inhospitable. He did not feel innocently—uncomplicatedly, unself-consciously—German. Put it that Kafka wrote German with the passion of an ingenious yet stealthy translator, always aware of the space, however minute, between his fear, or call it his idea of himself, and the deep ease of at-homeness that is every language’s consolation. Mutter, the German word for “mother,” was, he said, alien to him: so much for the taken-for-granted intimacy and trust of die Muttersprache, the mother tongue. This crevice of separation, no thicker than a hair, may underlie the estrangement and enfeebling distortions that shock and ultimately disorient every reader of Kafka.
But if there is, in fact, a crevice—or a crisis—of separation between the psyche and its articulation in Kafka himself, what of the crevice that opens between Kafka and his translators? If Kafka deemed it impossible to be Kafka, what chance can a translator have to snare a mind so elusive that it escapes even the comprehension of its own sensibility? “I really am like rock, like my own tombstone,” Kafka mourned. He believed himself to be “apathetic, witless, fearful,” and also “servile, sly, irrelevant, unsympathetic, untrue … from some ultimate diseased tendency.” He vowed that “every day at least one line shall be directed against myself.” “I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable,” he wrote. “Basically it is nothing other than … fear spread to everything, fear of the greatest as of the smallest, paralyzing fear of pronouncing a word, although this fear may not only be fear but also a longing for something that is greater than any fear.” A panic so intuitional suggests—forces on us—still another Kafkan impossibility: the impossibility of translating Kafka.
There is also the impossibility of not translating Kafka. An unknown Kafka, inaccessible, mute, secret, locked away, may now be unthinkable. But it was once thinkable, and by Kafka himself. At the time of his death the bulk of his writing was still unpublished. His famous directive (famously unheeded) to Max Brod to destroy his manuscripts—they were to be “burned unread”—could not have foreseen their canonization, or the near-canonization of their translators. For almost seventy years, the work of Willa and Edwin Muir, a Scottish couple self-taught in German, has represented Kafka in English; the mystical Kafka we are long familiar with—and whom the Muirs derived from Max Brod—reflects their voice and vision. It was they who gave us Amerika, The Trial, The Castle, and nine-tenths of the stories. And it is because the Muirs toiled to communicate the incommunicable that Kafka, even in English, stands indisputably among the few truly indelible writers of the twentieth century—those writers who have no literary progeny, who are sui generis and cannot be echoed or envied.
Yet any translation, however influential, harbors its own dissolution. Literature endures; translation, itself a branch of literature, decays. This is no enigma. The permanence of a work does not insure the permanence of its translation—perhaps because the original remains fixed and unalterable, while the translation must inevitably vary with the changing cultural outlook and idiom of each succeeding generation. Then are the Muirs, in their several redactions, dated? Ought they to be jettisoned? Is their “sound” not ours? Or, more particularly, is their sound, by virtue of not being precisely ours, therefore not sufficiently Kafka’s? After all, it is Kafka’s sound we want to hear, not the nineteen-thirties prose effects of a couple of zealous Britishers.
Notions like these, and also the pressures of renewal and contemporaneity, including a concern for greater accuracy, may account for a pair of fresh English renderings published in 1998: The Trial, translated by Breon Mitchell, and The Castle,
the work of Mark Harman. (Both versions have been brought out by Schocken, an early publisher of Kafka. Formerly a Berlin firm that fled the Nazi regime for Palestine and New York, it is now returned to its origin, so to speak, through its recent purchase by Germany’s Bertelsmann.) Harman faults the Muirs for theologizing Kafka’s prose beyond what the text can support. Mitchell argues more stringently that “in attempting to create a readable and stylistically refined version” of The Trial, the Muirs “consistently overlooked or deliberately varied the repetitions and interconnections that echo so meaningfully in the ear of every attentive reader of the German text.” For instance, Mitchell points out, the Muirs shy away from repeating the word “assault” (“überfallen”), and choose instead “seize,” “grab,” “fall upon,” “overwhelm,” “waylay”—thereby subverting Kafka’s brutally intentional refrain. Where Kafka’s reiterated blow is powerful and direct, Mitchell claims, theirs is dissipated by variety.
But this is not an argument that can be decided only on the ground of textual faithfulness. The issues that seize, grab, fall upon, waylay, etc., translation are not matters of language in the sense of word-for-word. Nor is translation to be equated with interpretation; the translator has no business sneaking in what amounts to commentary. Ideally, translation is a transparent membrane that will vibrate with the faintest shudder of the original, like a single leaf on an autumnal stem. Translation is autumnal; it comes late, it comes afterward. Especially with Kafka, the role of translation is not to convey “meaning,” psychoanalytical or theological, or anything that can be summarized or paraphrased. Against such expectations, Walter Benjamin magisterially notes, Kafka’s parables “raise a mighty paw.” Translation is transmittal of that which may be made out of language, but is a condition beyond the grasp of language.
The Trial is just such a condition. It is a narration of being and becoming. The title in German, Der Prozess, expresses something ongoing, evolving, unfolding, driven on by its own forward movement—a process and a passage. Joseph K., a well-placed bank official, a man of reason, sanity, and logic, is arrested, according to the Muirs, “without having done anything wrong”—or, as Breon Mitchell has it, “without having done anything truly wrong.” At first K. feels his innocence with the confidence, and even the arrogance, of self-belief. But through the course of his entanglement with the web of the law, he drifts sporadically from confusion to resignation, from bewilderment in the face of an unnamed accusation to acceptance of an unidentifiable guilt. The legal proceedings that capture K. and draw him into their inescapable vortex are revealed as a series of implacable obstacles presided over by powerless or irrelevant functionaries. With its recondite judges and inscrutable rules, the “trial” is more tribulation than tribunal. Its impartiality is punishing; it tests no evidence; its judgment has no relation to justice. The law (“an unknown system of jurisprudence”) is not a law that K. can recognize, and the court’s procedures have an Alice-in-Wonderland arbitrariness. A room for flogging miscreants is situated in a closet in K.’s own office; the court holds sessions in the attics of rundown tenements; a painter is an authority on judicial method. Wherever K. turns, advice and indifference come to the same.
“It’s not a trial before the normal court,” K. informs the out-of-town uncle who sends him to a lawyer. The lawyer is bedridden and virtually useless. He makes a point of displaying an earlier client who is as despairing and obsequious as a beaten dog. The lawyer’s maidservant, seducing K., warns him, “You can’t defend yourself against this court, all you can do is confess.” Titorelli, the painter who lives and works in a tiny bedroom that proves to be an adjunct of the court, is surrounded by an importuning chorus of phantomlike but aggressive little girls; they too “belong to the court.” The painter lectures K. on the ubiquity and inaccessibility of the court, the system’s accumulation of files and its avoidance of proof, the impossibility of acquittal. “A single hangman could replace the entire court,” K. protests. “I’m not guilty,” he tells a priest in a darkened and empty cathedral. “That’s how guilty people always talk,” the priest replies, and explains that “the proceedings gradually merge into the judgment.” Yet K. still dimly hopes: perhaps the priest will “show him … not how to influence the trial, but how to break out of it, how to get around it, how to live outside the trial.”
Instead the priest recites a parable: Kafka’s famed parable of the doorkeeper. Behind a door standing open is the Law; a man from the country asks to be admitted. (In Jewish idiom, which Kafka may be alluding to here, a “man from the country”—am ha’aretz—connotes an unrefined sensibility impervious to spiritual learning.) The doorkeeper denies him immediate entrance, and the man waits stoically for years for permission to go in. Finally, dying, still outside the door, he asks why “no one but me has requested admittance.” “No one else could gain admittance here,” the doorkeeper answers, “because this entrance was meant solely for you. I’m going to go and shut it now.” Torrents of interpretation have washed over this fable, and over every other riddle embedded in the body of The Trial. The priest himself, from within the tale, supplies a commentary on all possible commentaries: “The commentator tells us: the correct understanding of a matter and misunderstanding the matter are not mutually exclusive.” And adds: “The text is immutable, and the opinions are often only an expression of despair over it.” Following which, K. acquiesces in the ineluctable verdict. He is led to a block of stone in a quarry, where he is stabbed, twice, in the heart—after feebly attempting to raise the knife to his own throat.
Kafka’s text is by now held to be immutable, despite much posthumous handling. Translations of the work (supposing that all translations are indistinguishable from opinions) are often only expressions of despair; understanding and misunderstanding may occur in the same breath. And The Trial is, after all, not a finished book. It was begun in 1914, two weeks after the outbreak of the First World War. Kafka recorded this cataclysm in his diary, in a tone of flat dismissal: “2 August. Germany has declared war on Russia—Swimming in the afternoon,” and on August 21 he wrote, “I start ‘The Trial’ again.” He picked it up and left it off repeatedly that year and the next. Substantial fragments—unincorporated scenes—were set aside, and it was Max Brod who, after Kafka’s death, determined the order of the chapters and appended the allegorical reflections which so strongly influenced the Muirs. Discussion continues about the looseness of Kafka’s punctuation—commas freely and unconventionally scattered. (The Muirs, following Brod, regulate the liberties taken in the original.) Kafka’s translators, then, are confronted with textual decisions large and small that were never Kafka’s. To these they add their own.
The Muirs aim for a dignified prose, unruffled by any obvious idiosyncrasy; their cadences lean toward a formality tinctured by a certain soulfulness. Breon Mitchell’s intent is radically other. To illustrate, let me try a small experiment in contrast and linguistic ambition. In the novel’s penultimate paragraph, as K. is brought to the place of his execution, he sees a window in a nearby building fly open, and a pair of arms reach out. The Muirs translate: “Who was it? A friend? A good man? Someone who sympathized? Someone who wanted to help? Was it one person only? Or was it mankind? Was help at hand?” The same simple phrases in Mitchell’s rendering have a different timbre, even when some of the words are identical: “Who was it? A friend? A good person? Someone who cared? Someone who wanted to help? Was it just one person? Was it everyone? Was there still help?” The Muirs’ “Was help at hand?” has a Dickensian flavor: a touch of nineteenth-century purple. And “mankind” is not what Kafka wrote (he wrote “alle,” everyone), though it may be what he meant; in any case it is what the Muirs, who look to symbolism, distinctly do mean. To our contemporary ears, “Was it one person only?”—with “only” placed after the noun—is vaguely stilted. And surely some would find “a good man” (for “ein guter Mensch,” where “Mensch” signifies the essential human being) sexist and ideologically wanting. What we hear in t
he Muirs’ language, overall, is something like the voice of Somerset Maugham: British, cultivated, cautiously genteel even in extremis; middlebrow.
Breon Mitchell arrives to sweep all that Muirish dustiness away, and to refresh Kafka’s legacy by giving us a handier Kafka in a vocabulary close to our own—an American Kafka, in short. He has the advantage of working with a restored and more scholarly text, which edits out many of Brod’s interferences. Yet even in so minuscule a passage as the one under scrutiny, a telltale syllable, therapeutically up-to-date, jumps out: Americans may be sympathetic (“teilnahm”), but mainly they care. Other current Americanisms intrude: “you’d better believe it” (the Muirs say tamely, “you can believe that”); “without letting myself be thrown by the fact that Anna didn’t appear” (the Muirs: “without troubling my head about Anna’s absence”); “I’m so tired I’m about to drop”; “you’d have to be a serious criminal to have a commission of inquiry come down on you”; “You’re not mad at me, are you?”; “fed up”; and so forth. There is even a talk-show “more importantly.” Mitchell’s verb contractions (“isn’t,” “didn’t”) blanket Kafka’s grave exchanges with a mist of Seinfeld dialogue. If the Muirs sometimes write like sticks, Mitchell now and then writes shtick. In both versions, the force of the original claws its way through, despite the foreign gentility of the one and the colloquial unbuttonedness of the other. Unleashed by Kafka’s indefinable genius, unreason-thwarting-reason slouches into view under a carapace of ill-fitting English.
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