Translator’s Afterword

IT WOULD BE IDEAL if each of us could read all the world’s literature in the language in which it was originally written. Since that is not a realistic possibility, every reader, sooner or later, comes to rely on the interpretive skills of a translator.

Being an act of interpretation, a translation is also an act of criticism. At any given point several options are available and critical choices must be made. These choices will obviously reflect the translator’s understanding not only of the text but of the author’s intentions. What the translator sees or reads into the text—bringing to bear all of his or her knowledge and experience—invariably influences these decisions to some degree. But one hopes that the portion of this understanding that might be called “biases” can be kept to a minimum.

By nature, a translator must be flexible and approach each work as a separate challenge, although there are larger principles that guide translation in general. The foremost of these is to stay true to the text. This entails adhering to the author’s intentions, insofar as the translator can discern them, and being able to view the text as a distinct entity while not losing sight of the context in which it was written. The translator must decide how best to serve the not always compatible demands of the author, the reader, and the text. He or she must choose what to stress and what to sacrifice; some authors are noted for their particular use of language—Henry James and Ernest Hemingway come to mind; some are known more for the content of their work, the historical moment that they chronicle—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Harriet Beecher Stowe might be examples; and some, like Jorge Luis Borges and Franz Kafka, for creating a new kind of story altogether—familiar yet strange, rich in its specifics yet timeless in its reach.

There is always compromise in translation because every language affords different possibilities and imposes unique limitations. Still other problems arise when dealing with texts that were written long ago or in circumstances alien or unfamiliar to the contemporary reader or translator. If one completely modernizes a text, one risks losing the delicious essentials of time and place; if one adheres strictly to the language and knowledge of an earlier time, one may obscure the reader’s access to the timeless appeal of the original work. Although great literature often outlives its author, it is written at a specific time and in a specific place, and this must be taken into consideration when translating.

The stories of Franz Kafka largely address the human condition and are therefore timeless, but Kafka was also a German-speaking Jew in early twentieth-century Prague. One way that I have attempted, in this translation, to make his work accessible to the modern reader is to update his language, particularly in the dialogue, where modern idiom and phrasing have been employed with some regularity. On the other hand I’ve also maintained some of the vocabulary of the time in which Kafka lived. For example, the furniture, money, and clothing of his time and place are very different from those of ours, as are the words used to signify them. Using the English equivalents for the original European terms for these things, rather than convert them into their modern, American incarnations, helps to establish the actual historical time and setting in which the events take place and thus allows the reader to savor the ambience of the original instead of merely surveying its outlines. In this case it seems to me that this is an aspect of these texts that the reader need not and ought not be excluded from.

This translation attempts to present the stories of Franz Kafka in as readable a version as possible and in much the same way as they would be read and understood by the German reader. The singular situations Kafka’s characters find themselves in, the turns these situations take—at times uncanny, at times all too frighteningly routine—the sensation of being pressed to the existential brink without knowing how one got there (or whether one will be permitted to return) all have far more immediate impact than his diction. His language is, in fact, quite simple and straightforward; it is his verbal structure that is often complex. This is due, in part, to the structure of the German language, which builds sentences—often of astounding length—in modular units. Kafka did make diligent and sometimes amusing—and subversive—use of this aspect of his native tongue. But some of the older English translations have become mired in those structural complexities. As a result, the stories have been made less available to the reader than they might otherwise have been.

In an effort to cope with such difficulties, a proclivity has developed in contemporary American translation for rendering the original text as it might have been constructed if written by a contemporary American. Toward that end, modern idioms and rhythms are introduced. Sentence lengths and even paragraphs are restructured to embrace the American ear. Translators who employ this style feel this is the best way to bring the original across and keep it fresh.

For the most part—except where it would interfere with the reader’s full understanding of the text—I have maintained Kafka’s sentence length and paragraph structure in this translation, as I feel that both are strategic elements of his writing style. At the same time I have tried to alleviate those difficulties within his sentence structure that arise merely because normal German and English word order are substantially different. I didn’t find it necessary to sacrifice the rhythm and length of Kafka’s sentences for the sake of clarity.

Once the structural dilemmas have been resolved in English, the stories speak for themselves, but when Kafka does use a particular storytelling device I have tried to incorporate it into the English translation. In “The Metamorphosis,” for example, Kafka first—and almost continually thereafter—refers to Gregor’s parents and sister as “the mother,” “the father,” and “the sister.” Other translators have employed personal pronouns here (i.e., “his mother,” etc.), probably because it seemed less formal and awkward in English. But it is awkward in the German text, and meant to be. It is an intentional device, serving to make immediately apparent Gregor’s alienation from his family. And it soon comes to seem—under Kafka’s skillful guidance—appropriate. At one point later in the story, however, it is “his father” who kicks Gregor into the room; this usage is also intentional and is introduced because Gregor had previously seen his father as pathetic—it was due to his father’s business failure that Gregor had to work as a traveling salesman—and his own father is now the very personal cause of his being banished from the family instead of their helping him, something he could not feel impersonal about.

Similarly, it is the abrupt switch to the present tense that catapults the story “A Country Doctor” forward. From the moment when the groom attacks the maid, the doctor is uncontrollably propelled through the story in the present tense, until he attempts to take matters into his own hands and leaves the patient’s house, at which point the tense reverts to the past. While my first priority in this translation has been to maintain clarity for the English reader, I felt it was imperative not to lose sight—as many other translators of this story have—of an author’s device that is there for the purpose of enhancing the narrative.

There are also moments when Kafka seems so caught up in the narrative drive of a story that some of its continuity gets lost. In “The Stoker,” the maid that Karl impregnates is later referred to as the cook. This may have been an oversight that Kafka would have corrected in future revisions (he planned to include “The Stoker” as the first chapter in a novel he did not complete, posthumously published under the title Amerika), but this translation remains faithful to the text. I have not corrected these lapses or reconciled such minor inconsistencies, as they may be of interest to the reader. They are, however, footnoted in the text itself.

Despite the common conception of Kafka as a spurt writer periodically driven by the white heat of inspiration—perhaps the result of the well-known anecdote of Kafka’s writing his breakthrough story “The Judgment” in one all-night session in 1912—it would seem that he worked and reworked his stories and, in some cases, held a clear picture of what he planned to write well in advance of the first draft. In 1906 he wrote a story about a man who splits into an insect and a man, the insect self going off to work and the man staying home in bed.^s This precursor to “The Metamorphosis” was never published. He also wrote in a letter to his friend and publisher Kurt Wolff that he wished to include “The Judgment,” “The Stoker,” and “The Metamorphosis” in one volume under the title The Sons. This letter is dated April 4, 1913—well before he had written either “The Stoker” or “The Metamorphosis.” For whatever reasons, the stories were never published together under that title while Kafka was alive. Kafka’s wish that these three stories be published together has in part formed the basis of this collection. All of the stories included, of course, have become classics, but it has been a special pleasure for me that by including “Josephine the Singer” along with “The Judgment,” this collection contains both the last and the first stories that Kafka saw published in his lifetime.

—DONNA FREED
1996