TRANSLATING KAFKA AND OTHERS

In 1921, Edwin and Willa Muir, Scottish poets of good standing, went to Prague and then Germany, Austria, and Italy, and then back to England where they decided to become professional translators. They were lucky with a first effort and chose to tackle Franz Kafka next, who had died in 1924 leaving behind an unfinished novel, Das Schloss, The Castle. They introduced Kafka to the English-speaking world in translation, their translation. J.M. Koetzee (2003 Nobel Prize in Literature) in His Stranger Shores (2001) deals with the art of translating, by means of Kafka, in the Chapter "Translating Kafka". His analysis is of great interest and picks holes in the Muirs´rendering of Kafka into English well-worth reading and studying by all would-be translators. Particularly a paragraph stands out: "... although the Muirs mastery of German -particularly Willa´s- was astonishing, given the fact that they were more or less self-taught, and although Edwin in particular had read widely in contemporary German and Austrian writing, neither had a systematic grounding in German literature, so their ability to pick up literary references was rather haphazard. Finally, there were areas of German and Austrian life, each with its own vocabulary, that they knew only sketchily" (My emphasis.) This serves notice to translators: it is not enough to know the language you are translating from, but a good grounding in the original literature and culture is a must.