The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The Castle by Franz Kafka
John Kulka

Untitled document

Franz Kafka. The Castle. Trans. and preface by Mark Harman. Afterword by Malcolm Pasley. Shocken, 1998. 328 pp. $25.00.

This new translation of Kafka’s The Castle comes heralded by its publisher as “a Kafka for the twenty-first century,” a claim made with one eye cast uneasily backward at the famous and earliest English translation of 1930 by Willa and Edwin Muir. It is the Muirs’ translations of Kafka’s stories and novels, after all, that first brought international acclaim, in the English-speaking parts of the world, to a then relatively unknown writer of highly idiosyncratic and demanding German prose. Arthur Samuelson, whose publisher’s note is otherwise filled with valuable information regarding Max Brod’s German edition, has almost nothing to say about the Muirs. Mark Harman, in his translator’s preface, passes brusquely over the Muirs’ considerable accomplishments; his somewhat misleading reference to the Muirs as “a gifted Scottish couple” can only be seen as an attempt to escape his rivals’ shadow. Who can blame him? In addition to being an accomplished translator, Edwin Muir was himself a poet of extraordinary power. One can hardly do better than to pick up a copy of his Collected Poems to recall exactly how good a poet he was.

Nonetheless, there is good reason to support the claims regarding Harman’s translation. First, there is the matter of the Muirs’ translation. To start with, that translation is now nearly seventy years old and, yes, it is beginning to show its age. Often the Muirs’ language looks old-fashioned on the page—sometimes quaint. Secondly, the Muirs’ explicitly religious interpretation of The Castle (via Max Brod) inevitably influenced their own writing and editorial decisions to a degree that is perhaps undesirable in the art of translation. Thirdly, and through no fault of the Muirs, their translation of The Castle is based on Brod’s heavily edited German edition. Brod saw it as his primary editorial obligation to bolster and protect his dead friend’s literary reputation. In regard to The Castle, he wanted to turn a fragmentary and unfinished manuscript into a whole and unified novel to the degree this was possible. He therefore excised material that didn’t fit his own limited understanding of The Castle and lopped off the last chapters of the manuscript to bring the narrative to what he felt was a more logical conclusion. Furthermore, he regularized Kafka’s punctuation in an effort to make the “finished” novel more readable, inserting semicolons and breaking up longer sentences; nor did he always honor Kafka’s intentions regarding chapter breaks.

In the 1970s an international group of scholars led by Malcolm Pasley began reassembling the German text of The Castle, essentially undoing all of Brod’s editorial and stylistic interventions and fixing transcription errors. Harman’s translation is based on this restored text, which was finally published in 1982. His translation therefore more closely mirrors Kafka’s lightly punctuated German, which makes for a book that is both stylistically less pure and unified than the Muirs’ Castle. Unconventional punctuation, a certain stylistic unevenness, and word repetition all serve an oral function in Kafka’s German. By and large, I think, Harman has successfully rendered the breathless quality of Kafka’s own prose. When Harman’s writing falters, as it does occasionally, it’s through a desire to remain close to Pasley’s German text. This new translation, which owes so much to the old one, will likely be the preferred translation for years to come. [John Kulka]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction The Castle by Franz Kafka John Kulka Untitled document Franz Kafka. The Castle. Trans. and preface by Mark Harman. Afterword by Malcolm Pasley. Shocken, 1998. 328 pp. $25.00. This new translation of Kafka’s The Castle comes heralded by its publisher as “a Kafka for the twenty-first century,” a claim made with one eye cast uneasily backward at the famous and earliest English translation of 1930 by Willa and Edwin Muir. It is the Muirs’ translations of Kafka’s stories and novels, after all, that first brought international acclaim, in the English-speaking parts of the world, to a then relatively unknown writer of highly idiosyncratic and demanding German prose. Arthur Samuelson, whose publisher’s note is otherwise filled with valuable information regarding Max Brod’s German edition, has almost nothing to say about the Muirs. Mark Harman, in his translator’s preface, passes brusquely over the Muirs’ considerable accomplishments; his somewhat misleading reference to the Muirs as “a gifted Scottish couple” can only be seen as an attempt to escape his rivals’ shadow. Who can blame him? In addition to being an accomplished translator, Edwin Muir was himself a poet of extraordinary power. One can hardly do better than to pick up a copy of his Collected Poems to recall exactly how good a poet he was. Nonetheless, there is good reason to support the claims regarding Harman’s translation. First, there is the matter of the Muirs’ translation. To start with, that translation is now nearly seventy years old and, yes, it is beginning to show its age. Often the Muirs’ language looks old-fashioned on the page—sometimes quaint. Secondly, the Muirs’ explicitly religious interpretation of The Castle (via Max Brod) inevitably influenced their own writing and editorial decisions to a degree that is perhaps undesirable in the art of translation. Thirdly, and through no fault of the Muirs, their translation of The Castle is based on Brod’s heavily edited German edition. Brod saw it as his primary editorial obligation to bolster and protect his dead friend’s literary reputation. In regard to The Castle, he wanted to turn a fragmentary and unfinished manuscript into a whole and unified novel to the degree this was possible. He therefore excised material that didn’t fit his own limited understanding of The Castle and lopped off the last chapters of the manuscript to bring the narrative to what he felt was a more logical conclusion. Furthermore, he regularized Kafka’s punctuation in an effort to make the “finished” novel more readable, inserting semicolons and breaking up longer sentences; nor did he always honor Kafka’s intentions regarding chapter breaks. In the 1970s an international group of scholars led by Malcolm Pasley began reassembling the German text of The Castle, essentially undoing all of Brod’s editorial and stylistic interventions and fixing transcription errors. Harman’s translation is based on this restored text, which was finally published in 1982. His translation therefore more closely mirrors Kafka’s lightly punctuated German, which makes for a book that is both stylistically less pure and unified than the Muirs’ Castle. Unconventional punctuation, a certain stylistic unevenness, and word repetition all serve an oral function in Kafka’s German. By and large, I think, Harman has successfully rendered the breathless quality of Kafka’s own prose. When Harman’s writing falters, as it does occasionally, it’s through a desire to remain close to Pasley’s German text. This new translation, which owes so much to the old one, will likely be the preferred translation for years to come. [John Kulka]

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