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The Special Challenges of Attempting a New Translation of Kafka

Kafka claims in a letter to Milena Jesenská, his girlfriend and first translator, that the emotional cohesion of “The Judgment” is evident in “every sentence, every word, every—if…

We latter-day translators of this now classic modern writer are perhaps a little freer to stretch English in our inevitably less than successful attempts to echo Kafka’s austere music, his singular voice, and his rhythmic accumulation of logically sequenced detail. Kafka’s usually clear and dispassionate tone—Samuel Beckett, who read The Castle in German, called it “almost serene”—heightens the uncanniness of the events depicted in his stories while also enabling us readers to detach ourselves from the protagonist and to perceive layers of irony and, yes, humor hidden in the interstices of his sentences. Kafka’s blurring of the line between the perspective of the generally unobtrusive narrator and that of the main character, through whose point of view many of the stories in this selection are largely told, poses another challenge for the translator.

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