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.
If anything, Mitchell’s translation appeared to be less effective than the Muirs’ original English version (1937), which made the line seem all the more well-suited for the role we assigned it. The first sentence of The Trial reads, in German, “Jemand mußte Josef K. verleumdet haben, denn ohne daß er etwas Böses getan hätte, wurde er eines Morgens verhaftet.” (“Someone must have slandered Josef K., for without having done anything wrong, he was arrested one morning.”66xThis is meant as a basic, straightforward translation; it is close to, but not identical to, respectively, the translations of the Muirs and Breon Mitchell.) The subjunctive form is “hätte,” which, when paired with a past participle (e.g., “getan”), would most often be translated as “would have” or “had,” as in “if he had done something wrong, we would have found out,” or “if only he had done something wrong.” Neither a condition nor a wish nor a request in the case at hand, it signals, unobtrusively but importantly, that we don’t have here an unambiguous statement of fact. Josef K. may have “done something wrong” (“etwas Böses getan”), or maybe not. Maybe the narrator knows but is not saying whether it’s one way or the other, and the more decisive first and last parts of the sentence—“Someone must have slandered Josef K.,…he was arrested one morning” (“Jemand mußte Josef K. verleumdet haben…wurde er eines Morgens verhaftet”)—don’t ultimately make it all clear.
This element of uncertainty is not preserved in the Muirs’ rendering. Since it turns on a use of the subjunctive that, you could say, lies outside the cognitive field of the English counterpart feature, you can’t keep it without resorting to paraphrase—“even though he may not or would not have done anything wrong”—which still points too much in the direction of guiltlessness. In the Muirs’ translation, Josef K. is thus introduced as someone who was arrested one morning “without having done anything wrong.” He’s presented as a victim, in other words, and Anglophone readers have tended to see the book as being about an innocent man who is arrested and punished by a bizarrely opaque and capricious legal system. This, for example, is how the novel has been portrayed in US legal reasoning, where it has figured more prominently than you might think. According to one estimate, “Since the mid-1970s…Kafka’s name has appeared in more than 400 opinions written by American state and federal judges.”77xParker B. Potter Jr., “Ordeal by Trial: Judicial References to the Nightmare World of Franz Kafka,” The University of New Hampshire Law Review, vol. 3, no. 2 (May 2005); http://scholars.unh.edu/unh_lr/vol3/iss2/6.
Mitchell tried to finesse the situation, following the Muirs into the indicative mood but inserting the word “truly” into the sentence, so that Josef K. is arrested “without having done anything truly wrong.”88xFranz Kafka, The Trial, trans. Breon Mitchell (New York, NY: Schocken, 1998), 3. He’s no longer simply innocent: Mitchell’s translation tells us that Josef K. may have transgressed, just not in a substantial or serious way. In essence, then, Josepf K. remains a victim, only now we have to contend with a distinction that plays no role in the German text: something wrong versus something truly wrong.
So if there is a politics to this particular instance of untranslatability—one that has to do with things postwar critics haunted by totalitarianism prized in Kafka, among them Steiner and Theodor Adorno, things such as developing in readers a capacity to live with doubt, or, perhaps, to understand that interpretation involves overreach and thus guilt—then it is a fragile politics. Necessarily, the political content changes in English, and the consequences for Kafka’s Anglophone reception have been significant.
The Kafkaesque Untranslatables
In the years after Mitchell’s translation was published, untranslatability won greater prominence as a topic in literary studies, thanks in large part to the work of the scholar Barbara Cassin, whose 1,344-page Dictionary of Untranslatablesappeared in French in 2004 and as an expanded English edition ten years later.99xBarbara Cassin was the main editor for the French edition. She had several co-editors for the English one: Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood; the individual entries were written by many different scholars. See Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014). Like Steiner, and Kafka, too, Cassin stopped short of making untranslatability “a criterion of truth.” But her project, carried out with scores of collaborators, certainly thickened the association between untranslatability and semantic depth and heft, since the list of terms included—they are all terms with a place in the history of philosophy—reads like a who’s who of philosophical key terms: e.g., “Geist” and “Dasein.” During this time, as the English retranslations of Kafka kept coming, I continued to think about the translation challenges his works pose, or, as Cassin says with reference to philosophical untranslatables, about how the translation of his works can “create a problem.” It seemed, and still seems, like a productive way to reflect on his writing and the sources of its special appeal.
Consider what happens when we compare two recent translations of The Metamorphosis—Susan Bernofsky’s, from 2014, and Mark Harman’s, from 2024. The novella begins with Gregor Samsa waking up to find that he has been transformed into a “monstrous insect.” This turn of events clearly comes as a surprise, one that perplexes Gregor, prompting him to ask, “What has happened to me?” But he never follows up on his question, and it’s another unexpected occurrence, which he notices a little later, that leaves Gregor truly baffled and looking for answers: He has overslept. He wants to know how he could have done that, as well as what the best way to respond might be. Here, in Harman’s translation, are a few sentences from this part of the story:
Shouldn’t the alarm clock have rung? He could see from his bed that it was correctly set for four o’clock; surely it must have rung. Yes, but was it possible to sleep through this furniture-rattling alarm? Well, he had certainly not slept quietly, but probably all the more deeply for that. But now what should he do? The next train left at seven o’clock; to catch up with it he would have to hurry like mad, the cloth samples were not yet packed, and he certainly didn’t feel especially fresh and active. And even if he caught up with the train, it would be impossible to avoid a tongue-lashing from the boss, for the office assistant would have been waiting beside the five o’clock train and would have reported his negligence long ago.1010xFranz Kafka, Selected Stories, trans. and ed. Mark Harman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2024), 87.
And here are the same sentences in Bernofsky’s translation:
Could the alarm have failed to ring? Even from the bed one could see it was properly set for four o’clock; it must have rung. Yes, but was it possible to sleep tranquilly through this furniture-shaking racket? Well, his sleep hadn’t been exactly tranquil, but no doubt that’s why it had been so sound. But what should he do now? The next train was at seven o’clock; to catch it, he would have to rush like a madman, and his sample case wasn’t even packed yet, and he himself felt far from agile or alert. And even if he managed to catch this train, his boss was certain to unleash a thunderstorm of invective upon his head, for the clerk who met the five o’clock train had no doubt long since reported Gregor’s absence.1111xFranz Kafka, The Metamorphosis, trans. Susan Bernofsky (New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 2014), 25.
Right from the start—“Could the alarm have failed to ring?” versus “Shouldn’t the alarm clock have rung?”—we see that Bernofsky opts for a more formal register. Since we are sliding into Gregor’s perspective, and thus getting the phrasing in his head, this makes for a little more wackiness—the monstrous insect with the genteel formulations: “Even from the bed one could see,” “tranquilly,” “rush like a madman,” “thunderstorm of invective upon his head.” Not only is the diction in Harman’s rendering less elevated, but the prose tends toward greater compression—“he could see,” “hurry like mad,” “tongue-lashing,” “would have reported his negligence long ago” versus “had no doubt long since reported Gregor’s absence.” Similarly, Harman’s syntax is a little less complex, and as a result of these differences, the sentences in his translation move forward faster.
In the German, the repetition of words is more conspicuous than it is in both translations. Kafka uses the same word for “ring/noise” (“läuten”) in three consecutive sentences. Both translators reduce that to two occurrences and the two occurrences of “ja” (“yes”) to one. The word “selbst” is employed two different ways (“himself” and “even”) in consecutive sentences, which makes the repetition difficult to preserve. But, unlike Harman, Bernofsky compensates for that loss by repeating a phrase (“no doubt”) where there isn’t repetition in the source text. Furthermore, she keeps the doubling of the term “ruhig” (“tranquil” in her translation), whereas Harman doesn’t, and in contrast to him she retains all three instances of “and” (“und”) in the last two sentences, thereby reproducing more of the dynamic of prose cycling around.
The differences with respect to forward thrust and repetition bring us to the key translation challenge: Kafka’s sentences manage to be both recursive and propulsive. Gregor’s thoughts wind around and around, and yet even many of the longer sentences drive forward, since as he repeats words, Kafka takes advantage of resources for compression that we lack in English (e.g., gendered nouns and heavy case inflection make it possible to lean on pronouns without risking confusion). Because the recursive element plays the greater role in producing the atmosphere readers have come to think of as “Kafkaesque,” which is characterized in part by recursive reflection going on where you don’t expect it to (the former traveling salesman wondering in detail about how he could have overslept and ignoring the matter of how he turned into an insect), translators have made conveying it a priority.
Harman’s bold move in his translation of The Metamorphosis, which he calls The Transformation, is to back away from this priority—not a lot, but perceptibly—and to allow the propulsive character of Kafka’s prose to be brought into English more fully. As a longtime reader of that prose, I had certainly experienced the tension in its sentences between two contrasting, even opposing, kinds of movement. But the tension didn’t come into relief for me as something I was consciously aware of until I thought about how Harman’s translation differs from earlier ones and about the reprioritization—whether intentional or not—his project entails.
When we compare the versions of The Metamorphosis by Harman and Bernofsky, we encounter another pair of dichotomous tendencies, which is perhaps even more striking. Neither version manages to preserve the full effect of Kafka’s sentences—the translation of his work does indeed “create a problem”—and yet both renderings are excellent: careful, thoughtful, and polished. They give us a Kafka who is recognizably himself. In fact, for an author so much associated with radical singularity, linguistic self-alienation, and Talmudic indeterminacy, or, in a word, untranslatability, Kafka has proven to be remarkably translatable.1212xWhether or not Kafka thought about the translatability of his writing into widely read languages, what might be called its practical translatability, certainly coheres with at least one side of his literary self-conception—the side that thought about producing work of the stature and reach of the most famous European literature (Goethe’s, for example). Furthermore, Kafka’s translatability does not contradict his desire to remain outside established literary movements and bring about work that would not be easy to consume or reproduce. There is a difference between translatability and reproducibility, and it is difficult to think of would-be imitators of Kafka in German.
Parables Without a Key
The Muirs’ translations are still used, appreciated for what Steiner himself described, in speaking of their version of The Trial, as a certain “freshness of encounter,” by which he may have meant they preserved the antic mood one finds so often in the social world of Kafka’s fiction. But there are now many other successful Anglophone efforts: Harman’s translations of The Castle (1998) and Amerika (2008), Idris Parry’s translation of The Trial (2000), J.A. Underwood’s translation of The Castle (1997), Michael Hofmann’s translations of Amerika (2002) and The Metamorphosis (2007), Anthea Bell’s translation of The Castle (2009), Shelley Frisch’s translation of Kafka’s aphorisms (2022), and Ross Benjamin’s translation of his diaries (2023), to name a few beyond the ones already mentioned.
Part of what has brought about this situation, I think, is simply that Kafka, an uncompromising innovator with high-modernist aura and a broad readership, has attracted very talented, ambitious translators. Another part is that he maintained diverse allegiances. In this he bears an affinity with Steiner, who was devoted to modernist “Gnosticism,” to use his (Steiner’s) term, and who celebrated Walter Benjamin as a “theologian of language” with an unrivaled eye for the paradoxes of Kafka’s mysticism, yet whose own prose differs so starkly from Benjamin’s in terms of directness and limpidity. There is a side of Kafka that not only draws on the realist tradition of Dickens, Flaubert, Balzac, and Tolstoy, all writers whom he studied attentively, but also tries to streamline it.
Compare the first lines of the 1912 short story “The Judgment,” which Kafka regarded as his best work, with the opening of Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice, which appeared the very same year and lifted Mann out of an extended writing slump. (The two stories have quite a bit in common, by the way, including the theme of deindividuation and the respective watery demises of their protagonists.) With his self-narrative breaking down more and more—he can hardly remember anything by the end of the story—Kafka’s Georg Bendemann hastens to carry out his father’s dramatic judgment: He hurls himself into a river, vanishing without a trace. (Mann’s Gustav von Aschenbach, exhausted by his lifelong struggle to balance the Dionysian and Apollonian tendencies within him, finds himself drawn irresistibly to the formless “liquid element.”1313xSee Paul Reitter, “Bad Writing in Franz Kafka’s ‘Das Urteil,’” Seminar vol. 38, no. 2 (Spring 2002), 134–141; https://doi.org/10.3138/sem.v38.2.134.) Kafka gives us a series of lean, descriptive sentences with straightforward syntax: They begin with a subject followed immediately or nearly immediately by a verb and contain only a couple of subordinate clauses. Mann’s opening sentences are so full of extended modifiers and internal clauses that an acclaimed recent Anglophone translation simply drops one of those clauses for the sake of getting the sentences into literary English. In contrast to Mann’s fiction, moreover, Kafka’s largely avoids local references and also dialects, two things that can bedevil translators. Whereas Mann cultivated a musical style, at times echoing the rhythms of Wagner’s compositions, Kafka strove, as Mark Anderson has put it, to make his prose “non-musical,” even boasting of his “unmusical” nature in letters to his Czech translator Milena Jesenská.
But in at least one respect, the Kafkaesque itself, or the atmosphere that counts as that, lends itself to translation. It does so because this atmosphere depends, to a large extent, on structural conceits. That this is so should already be clear, in fact. Recall the passage where Gregor realizes he has overslept. Whatever an individual translator’s priorities may be, the basic incongruousness of Gregor’s response to his situation will likely come across in the translation because it is part of the structure of the scene: Again, Gregor puzzles over how he managed to oversleep rather than over the forces that metamorphosed him into a giant insect. Furthermore, the same goes for the strangeness of such an insect engaging not only in thought but in intricate, lawyerly, recursive thought, in which the doubts pile up—and even if x problem were solvable, what about y problem?—yet the most obvious problem is omitted. How can Gregor hope to pack up his samples, catch his train, and carry out his job, given that he no longer has a human body?
Let’s consider the Muirs’ translation of the passage:
Had the alarm clock not gone off? From the bed one could see that it had been properly set for four o’clock; of course it must have gone off. Yes, but was it possible to sleep quietly through that ear-splitting noise? Well, he had not slept quietly, yet apparently all the more soundly for that. But what was he to do now? The next train went at seven o’clock; to catch that he would need to hurry like mad and his samples weren’t even packed up, and he himself wasn’t feeling particularly fresh and active. And even if he did catch the train he wouldn’t avoid a row with the chief, since the firm’s porter would have been waiting for the five o’clock train and would have long since reported his failure to turn up.1414xFranz Kafka, The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, and Other Stories, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York, NY: Schocken, 1995), 69. The Muir translation of The Metamorphosis is originally from 1936.
As with the first sentence of The Trial, the Muirs are prepared to let subjunctive forms go here—for example, note their “Had the alarm clock not gone off?” as compared with Harman’s “Shouldn’t the alarm clock have rung?” and Bernofsky’s “Could the alarm have failed to ring?” The loss of the subjunctive doesn’t substantially alter the meaning in this case by eliding a crucial ambiguity, but neither is it an unimportant change. Holding a little closer to the German, as Harman and Bernofsky do with the slightly non-colloquial “Shouldn’t the alarm clock have…” and “Could the alarm have failed…,” and as Bernofsky does with “thunderstorm of invective” for Kafka’s “Donnerwetter,” whose non-metaphorical meaning is “stormy weather,” creates an air of linguistic scruple that matches Kafka’s. The Muirs’ “row” doesn’t begin to reproduce the vividness of Kafka’s expression and suggests “quarrel” when Gregor is unlikely to stick up for himself—hence Harman’s “tongue-lashing.” Such translation differences have cumulative effects, making for profoundly different reading experiences, and yet the point still stands: The Kafkaesque is palpable in all three translations. The structural conceits are of course present in all three, and if, as is often the case with first translations of works that become classics, the Muirs’ translation of the passage feels almost a little slapdash compared with the carefully weighed out later versions, it is at least as attuned to other basic elements of the Kafkaesque, such as repetition.
Another of Kafka’s great themes is paradox—“plenty of hope, just not for us,” “what do I have in common with the Jews? I hardly have anything in common with myself.” And then there are the paradoxes of his work—parables without “a key,” to speak with Adorno, fiction so tied to a Czech-Jewish-German milieu and yet able to resonate with the most diverse audiences, to the point that an early biographer saw fit to describe Kafka as “representative man.” We can add this paradox to the list: eminently translatable, untranslatable.