It is thanks to Max Brod’s failure to comply with Franz Kafka’s stipulation that all of his unpublished writing should be burned after his death that his diaries, stories and novels are available for us to read. It is thanks to his translators that those of us who are unable to read his remarkable work in the original German can do so.
In Kafkaesque by Maïa Hruska, translated by Sam Taylor, the author recounts how the earliest translators of his work discovered and responded to Kafka’s writing. They had to be the early advocates for an unknown writer with a highly unorthodox conception of the intrinsic workings of human relations.
Among the most important of those champions of his work were Jorge Luis Borges and Bruno Schulz, both of whom, like Kafka, reshaped the nature and possibilities of the short story. The detailing of Borges’s views on the nature of translation is among the most interesting aspects of the book. His radical view that the original text has no greater status than a translation is superbly provocative, as was his assertion that “the pleasure to be found in Kafka’s work precedes all interpretations and depends on none”.
In telling us about 10 translators, Hruska adopts a non-academic, conversational style, regularly diverting to issues unrelated to the translations, which are not evaluated. This style allows for discussions of Kafka’s life and an analysis of the politics of the time, especially as it impacted Jews like him (and later, Paul Celan and Primo Levi), even if his own feelings about his religious inheritance were as ambiguous as his general sense of alienation: “What do I have in common with Jews? I have scarcely anything in common with myself.”
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To convey the understanding Kafka and his translators had of their individuality, Hruska repeatedly uses the term pokoj, meaning, at its simplest, a “room of one’s own”, but also: “The place where we learn to say no, the location in which we refuse to let ourselves be reduced. In this sense, it is the incubator of all literature.” This allows for the universality that accounts for Kafka’s continuing appeal to people everywhere. The “meaning” of Kafka is not fixed, even in two readings by the same person.
Declan O’Driscoll is a critic based in Co Tipperary.
