eJournals Colloquia Germanica 50/2

Colloquia Germanica
0010-1338
Francke Verlag Tübingen
Es handelt sich um einen Open-Access-Artikel der unter den Bedingungen der Lizenz CC by 4.0 veröffentlicht wurde.http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
2017
502

Michelle Woods: Kafka Translated. How Translators have Shaped our Reading of Kafka. New York: Bloomsbury, 2014. 283 pp. $ 29.95.

2017
Veronika Tuckerová
254 Reviews Michelle Woods: Kafka Translated. How Translators have Shaped our Reading of Kafka. New York: Bloomsbury, 2014. 283 pp. $ 29.95. Kafka Translated examines Kafka through translation. It is a good time to undertake such a study, as new translations of Kafka’s major texts have been published since the late 1980s, based on the critical editions of Kafka’s oeuvre. Translators and publishers of Kafka in English have been striving to “recover what was felt to be lost: pieces of text (since the scholarly re-editing of Kafka’s work in the late 1970s and early 1980s), the ambiguity and strangeness of the language and the subsequent humor of it” (3). The first half of the book discusses four translators (Milena Jesenská, Villa Muir, Mark Harman, and Michael Hofmann); the second focuses on fictionalization of the theme of translation in Kafka’s writings, on “translation” of his works into other media (film), and on examination of what translation can teach us about Kafka. Although Woods’s choice of translators may seem arbitrary (a translator to Czech, three to English; two early translators, two recent), they illustrate well the shifts in translation from the 1920s to recent times. The book contributes to a limited knowledge about Jesenská and Muir; Harman and Hofmann embody the contemporary trends in re-translation of modernist authors into English. Lawrence Venuti’s theory of translation guides Woods’s approach. She considers translators as “embodied agents,” and “holistic, gendered, and literary” beings (6). Rather than evaluating translation choices, she affords translators “visibility,” allows for their voices to inform us about their work. She places their translations in the context of their thinking about languages, their exilic experiences that influenced their literary language (mainly Jesenská, Muir), the editorial practices of the time, and their literary milieu. Woods gives overdue credit to Jesenská and Muir, marginalized in their times and posthumous reception by their gender position and the status of translation as inferior art. The Czech journalist Milena Jesenská, Kafka’s first translator into any language, is known better in Czech and German contexts than in English. Woods praises her writing, and helps to demystify her as “Kafka’s lover,” an image prevalent in the English-speaking realm. Woods values her translation’s “faithfulness,” which Kafka himself questioned in one of his letters. But rather than dismissing it as resulting from her inadequate abilities as a translator, as critics did in the past, Woods sees in her translation an openness to experimentation and “transgression.” Woods argues that Jesenská translated “in a place and era in which these transgressions were actively sought out for their perceived enunciation of the potential for aesthetic, and with its social, change” (27). This is an interesting take on Jesenská’s translation, however, it seems that Reviews 255 Woods sympathetically reads into Jesenská’s translation our contemporary values, and fails to take into consideration the long tradition of translations from German to Czech with their specific stylistic and syntactic problems. On the basis of archival research, Woods attributes the original translations of Kafka to Villa Muir, although they were mostly credited to her husband, Edwin. But she also restores the credit to Muir’s translations, which had been criticized for the lack of accuracy, for failing to capture Kafka’s modernist idiom. The Scottish couple, argues Woods, did understand and value the modernity of Kafka’s prose, but knew that they had to “domesticate” Kafka, using “natural English” that was not at all natural to this Scottish couple, to help this unknown author’s introduction to English readers. Villa Muir herself was, as Woods shows, an author of modernist and experimental prose. With Harman and Hofmann, we move to “a great era of retranslation” (Harman, qtd. in Woods 91) after 1987, when new translations of Kafka were commissioned. Rather than passing a critical judgment on the merit of their translations, Woods carefully reads what both translators write about their approach in their prefaces, interviews, and essays (85). This approach helps Woods to reveal both authors’ attitudes towards English (Harman’s Irish upbringing, Hofmann’s German father) and their literary language (how Harman’s studies of Beckett may have influenced his translations). Woods’s examination shows historically changing expectations of literary translation and implicitly counters the assertion that new translations necessarily supersede the older ones. She also brings to mind that, interestingly, retranslators “have it easier,” as they are bringing in an established classic, rather than unknown author (89). The new translations such as Harman’s, are appreciated due to what Damrosch called “postmodernism’s love of fragments, internal contradiction, and incompletion” (88). The second part of the book addresses translation as fictionalized in Kafka’s writings, and “translation” of Kafka to film. Woods is inspired by current studies of “fictionalized translators” in English literature. Particularly rich is her discussion of a direct reference to translation in The Trial; her consideration of Josef K. as a translator and interpreter provides a distinct reading of the novel’s crucial parable, published by Kafka as “Before the Law.” Woods’ analysis is strongest when it is concerned with the specifics of translation and interpretation: Josef K’s extralingual communication (the use of hands and lips), or when she considers the novel’s narrator as translator. In some other instances, however, she uses “translation” interchangeably with “miscommunication,” a staple in interpretations of Kafka’s work, but also with interpretation and adaptation. It might be more useful to hold these terms further apart. 256 Reviews Woods introduces the term “transreading” to show how the attention to translation (including “translation” to film) allows for interrogative readings of the source text, how it opens up “issues of reading Kafka and points of resistance in the texts themselves” (7). Woods uses several examples of such reading, inspired by different ways of translating a key word in Kafka’s writings. “Interrogative readings” references Venuti. Woods uses terms such as “domestication,” and “visibility” throughout her book, attesting to the extent to which Venuti became a dominant model in translation studies. Some of his concepts should be perhaps approached with critical distance; “domestication,” should not be fully “at home” in our critical apparatus. Similarly, the flexible use of the word “translation” is striking. Other languages are not capable of such flexibility. Woods’s study reminds us how important it is to bear in mind that “translation discourses” are not always translatable; we always have to be sensitive to a specific context. The book gives us insight into “English Kafka,” and the distinct reception of his work via English. Its strength lies in its careful presentation of sources not formerly known in English. It is written with elegance and wit, and inspiring for anyone interested in Kafka as well as in translation. Harvard University Veronika Tuckerová