When I taught German in graduate school back in the late 1990s, my fellow instructors and I often used a line from Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial to illustrate a point about grammar that was also a point about untranslatability.11xThe line, which will get quite a bit of attention in this essay, is often translated more or less as follows: “Someone must have slandered Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong, he was arrested one morning.” In German, as in English, the regular subjunctive form goes mainly with wishes, counterfactual conditions, statements, and questions, as well as with polite requests. But the German form has an additional function: It can mark speculation—or, really, ambiguity—in a way that’s hard to match in English. Kafka’s line evokes a vivid sense of this gap, which, in the first place, is why we turned to it here. However, we had further reasons for doing that, starting with the fact that untranslatability is one of Kafka’s great themes.
Untranslatability is also one of George Steiner’s great themes—and one of his central concerns in his commentary on Kafka. It would be hard to think of a literary scholar or critic who has done more to draw attention to this aspect of Kafka’s work, to reveal it as a guiding principle. In his essay “K,” for instance, Steiner cites, at length, a previously underexamined diary entry in which Kafka discusses how for him the German words Mutter and Vater fail “to approximate to” Jewish mothers and fathers. Kafka suggests that his psychic life was shaped by this linguistic misalignment; as a result of it, he “did not always love” his mother as “she deserved” to be loved and as he was capable of loving her. Steiner goes on to read “The Burrow,” one of Kafka’s last stories, as “a parable” of “the artist unhoused in his language,” a point he makes to explain nothing less than “the fantastic nakedness and economy” of Kafka’s prose.22xGeorge Steiner, Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman (New York, NY: Atheneum, 1986), 125–126. Originally published 1967.
In After Babel (1975), which appeared more than a decade after “K,” Steiner went further still, deepening his engagement with how “the theme of Babel haunted” Kafka, who felt himself to be caught between the incompatible impossibilities of “writing in German” and “writing differently.” He traces the theme through a number of Kafka’s works, including “The Great Wall of China” and “The Burrow,” that enigmatic late work on the way in which the apt metaphor for verbal communication is less a building of bridges to the world than the creation of structures that seal us off from it.33xGeorge Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1975), 68–70. “In Kafka,” as Steiner puts it, “speech is the paradoxical circumstance of man’s incomprehension.”44xIbid., 70. Borrowing a phrase from the historian Gershom Scholem, he elsewhere calls Kafka a “borderline case of wisdom, representing, as no other writer has, ‘the crisis of the sheer transmissibility of truth.’”55xSee Steiner’s introduction to Franz Kafka, The Trial, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York, NY: Schocken, 1992), xix.
Josef K. in the Dock
Against this background, in the late 1990s the prospect of new English translations of Kafka’s novels The Trial and The Castle, the first done by scholars—Breon Mitchell and Mark Harman, respectively, and the first to be based on unexpurgated manuscripts—elicited excitement but also skepticism. There was no shortage of the latter attitude among graduate students of German, and I remember feeling both disappointed and vindicated when Mitchell’s rendering of The Trial appeared in 1998 and I saw that he hadn’t fared much better than Willa and Edwin Muir with the line we enlisted to stress the difficulty of the subjunctive. Our suggestions about its untranslatability had held up.