TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE

Translating Kafka was once my dream. Now I only dream of how I might have done it better. From the moment I first read The Trial, as a teenager on the plains of Kansas in the late 1950s, I was drawn into Kafka’s world so strongly that I have never quite escaped it. I had no idea then that scarcely five years later I would be studying with Malcolm Pasley in Oxford, hearing first hand the tale of how he had retrieved most of Kafka’s manuscripts and arranged for their deposit in the Bodleian Library, nor that my next summer would be spent walking the streets of Prague on a pilgrimage that, in the mid-60s, still retained its spiritual excitement, and even a hint of danger, under a regime that had forbidden the publication and sale of Kafka’s works.

Thirty years have passed, and Kafka now gazes from the shop windows of every bookstore in Prague. Nor did Kafka ever leave my life. Now, after almost three decades of reading, teaching, and writing about Kafka, I have undertaken the closest reading of all, faced with the challenge of doing him justice.

Historians of literary translation have often noted a strange phenomenon: although an original text still gives us pleasure even centuries after it was written, almost all translations age quickly. Why translations should be more time-bound than literary works of art remains a mystery, but the consequences are clear: each new age demands its own versions of the literary past. The appearance of the definitive Fischer edition of the works of Franz Kafka offers a fitting moment to see him through new eyes.

There are, or should be, as many philosophies of translation as there are works to be translated. Each text is unique and demands unique solutions. Any given philosophy of translation is invariably modified according to the work at hand, often in the course of the act of translation itself. We take for granted, however, that the translation should be accurate, complete, and faithful to the style of the original. But what do we mean by such terms? George Steiner has suggested that a translation that improves upon the original is the greatest betrayal of all. Yet most contemporary translations have precisely that in mind when they strive to produce flowing and readable versions for the public, even if that means smoothing over stylistic lapses and supposed errors on the part of the author. The Muirs clearly took this approach when they first translated Kafka’s novels in the 1930s, and their versions have continued to wear well over the years. Yet it can be argued that Kafka presents a very special case, one that demands a quite different approach to translation.

For all its power, Kafka’s Trial is clearly an unfinished novel with rough edges. At the same time, in place of a polished final version, it offers a revealing portrait of a writer at work. Malcolm Pasley has noted that as Kafka became more engrossed in the writing process his punctuation tended to loosen, periods turning into semicolons or commas, and commas themselves disappearing, as if a bird were lifting off in flight. I have attempted to reproduce the feel of his text as a work in progress by respecting that sense of fluidity. Yet even in works published during his lifetime, Kafka’s style and world are often reflected most tellingly in passages marked by a sense of slight unease, perhaps even discomfort. A translation must attempt to match those moments closely, whether it be by means of an equally unexpected word choice, the exact repetition of a phrase where style would normally require some elegant variation, or the retention of a complex and even occasionally awkward syntactic structure. In offering this new version of The Trial to the American public, I have attempted to follow Kafka’s text with unusual fidelity, in order to give the reader a true feel for both the flow of the unfinished manuscript and his unique style.

In the present translation the structure of the definitive text of The Trial is rendered precisely, paragraph by paragraph, and sentence by sentence. Punctuation generally follows established English usage, since Kafka’s own punctuation, even where it loosens substantially, normally remains well within the range of accepted German usage, and I do not wish for it to appear falsely ungrammatical. It should be noted in particular that Kafka’s prevalent use of what we call a comma splice has been perfectly acceptable in German prose since the eighteenth century, as are the long and complex sentences resulting from this practice. I have, however, attempted to reflect every truly unusual use of punctuation, including the occasional omission of commas in a series, or a period where one would expect a question mark.

The present version thus attempts to mirror the critical edition of the text quite closely. But rendering Kafka’s prose involves far more than punctuation and paragraphing. The power of Kafka’s text lies in the language, in a nuanced use of the discourses of law, religion, and the theater, and in particular in a closely woven web of linguistic motifs that must be rendered consistently to achieve their full impact. Here the Muirs, for all the virtues of their translation, fell far short, for in attempting to create a readable and stylistically refined version of Kafka’s Trial, they consistently overlooked or deliberately varied the repetitions and interconnections that echo so meaningfully in the ear of every attentive reader of the German text. Which is not to say that there are any easy solutions to the challenges Kafka presents.

The translator’s trial begins with the first sentence, in part because the hint of uncertainty grammatically present in the subjunctive verb “hätte[n]” is inevitably lost in the standard translation, even with E. M. Butler’s later revisions: “Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.” Although in this version it is by no means clear why Josef K. has been arrested, there is no doubt about his innocence. Nor does there seem to be in the German, since the subjunctive is merely required by the “ohne daß” construction. Of course nothing is ever that simple in Kafka, even in translation, and we could also argue that since the information received is filtered through Josef K.’s own mind from the very beginning, it is constantly suspect in any case. On a strictly literal level, however, any English translation is forced to declare K.’s innocence.

There are other problems as well. Why render the common phrase “eines Morgens” with the false irony of “one fine morning”? Why not end the sentence, as in German, with the surprise of his arrest? And why has the legal resonance of “verleumden” (to slander) been reduced to merely “telling lies”? A further problem is posed by “Böses,” a word that, when applied to the actions of an adult, reverberates with moral and philosophical overtones ranging from the story of the Fall in the Garden of Eden to Nietzsche’s discussion of the origins of morality in Jenseits von Gut und Böse (Beyond Good and Evil). To claim that K. has done nothing “Böses” is both more and less than a child’s claim he has done nothing wrong. Josef K. has done nothing truly wrong, at least in his own eyes.

In wrestling with these problems I finally settled upon the following: “Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested.” Although at first I had hoped, by using the phrase “truly wrong,” to push the word “wrong” toward the province of the criminally malicious and to introduce, on a level corresponding to the almost subliminal use of the subjunctive in German, the question of truth, I eventually realized that this would be to err in the other direction, by moving too strongly toward interpretation.

There are no totally satisfying solutions to the difficulties presented by Kafka’s opening sentence. But it is crucial to recognize and grapple with them. Such a struggle is not inappropriate in a novel that deals with Josef K.’s attempts throughout the course of a year to twist and turn his way through the process of his own trial. And indeed, having made it through the first sentence, the translator is immediately confronted by problems of another sort in the second.

Here Kafka himself is partly to blame. He originally began the sentence quite straightforwardly: “Die Köchin der Zimmervermieterin, die ihm jeden …”; but the manuscript reveals that he inserted the words “Frau Grubach, seiner” between the lines, introducing her immediately into the cast of characters. Literal versions such as “The cook of Frau Grubach, his landlady, who brought him breakfast …” or “His landlady Frau Grubach’s cook, who brought him breakfast …” are impossibly awkward and even grammatically misleading. The Muirs solved this problem by simply omitting her name: “His landlady’s cook, who always brought him his breakfast …” Here as so often, the Muirs smooth away the difficulties at some cost, since when Frau Grubach’s name first comes up later in the scene, it is not clear in the English version who she is. In order to reflect Kafka’s obvious intentions, I have retained her by name: “His landlady, Frau Grubach, had a cook who brought him breakfast …” Although this solution is less readable, it remains true to Kafka’s text, even in its slightly awkward construction.

Of course, Kafka may well have smoothed out such sentences, or even rewritten them entirely, had he completed the novel and prepared it for publication. He would surely have removed inconsistencies in the spelling of a character’s name, Kullich and Kullych, both versions of which are retained in the critical edition; he would probably have straightened out the confusion with time in the cathedral chapter, where K. plans to meet the Italian at ten o’clock, then later refers to eleven instead; he might well have cleared up the matter of the maid’s room where Block works and sleeps, which is at first windowless (“fensterlos”), although a few pages later it includes a window that looks out onto an air shaft. But we can hardly hold the author of The Metamorphosis to a strict standard of reality. Kafka constantly distorts time and space, and often underlines the frailty of human perception. The critical edition therefore retains such apparent anomalies, allowing the reader direct access to Kafka’s text in progress, and here too I have followed the German version faithfully.

The Trial begins as farce and ends in tragedy. The opening chapter has a strong theatrical air, complete with an audience across the way. Later that evening, when Josef K. reenacts the scene for an amused Fräulein Bürstner, who has just returned from the theater herself, he takes on both his own role and that of his accuser, replaying the farce, shouting his own name aloud with comedic consequences. The final chapter of the novel offers a carefully balanced counterpart in which the men who are sent for him, like a pair of “old supporting actors,” stage the final scene in the deserted quarry before yet another audience at a distant window. But this time no one is laughing.

Josef K.’s appearance before the examining magistrate at the initial inquiry is yet another farce, a staged gathering in which the supposed parties of the assembly are merely acting out their roles before the gallery under the direction of the magistrate. In the lawyer’s apartment, Huld calls in the merchant Block and offers a performance intended solely to demonstrate his power to K. Even the priest’s appearance in the cathedral has all the trappings of a private show for K.’s benefit.

Throughout the novel the line between farce and tragedy is blurred in such scenes. Although they are connected at the level of the plot, the relationships are made striking and forceful in the language itself. The Muirs’ translation weakens these connections by failing time and again to render Kafka’s language precisely. When K. accuses the inspector of staging “the most senseless performance imaginable” before the “audience” at the opposite window, the Muirs misread “führen … auf” as a reflexive verb and simply have him “carry on in the most senseless way imaginable,” while the group opposite is turned into a “crowd of spectators.” When K. reenacts that same scene for Fräulein Bürstner in the second chapter, moving the nightstand to the center of the room for his performance, he tells her she should “visualize the cast of characters” (“die Verteilung der Personen”) including himself, “the most important character,” before the action begins. The Muirs lessen the effect of this language by having her simply “picture where the various people are,” including K., “the most important person,” and undermine the sense of a rising curtain implied by “Und jetzt fängt es an,” with a colorless: “And now we can really begin.”

In the final chapter, the two “supporting actors” (the Muirs call them “tenth-rate,” but “untergeordnet” is not pejorative in German) work hard to stage the execution properly. They seek out a loose block of stone lying by the rock face of the quarry and attempt to place Josef K. upon it in a posture that seems “plausible.” Then the appalling action of the final scene begins. The Muirs, evidently unfammiliar with quarries, have the men approach a “spot near the cliffside where a loose boulder [is] lying,” and prop K. up against the “boulder.” This transformation from the manmade to a natural formation, however, creates a scene that is not only less theatrical, but impoverished in meaning, since it obscures any sense of the rectangular quarry stone as a sacrificial altar, and thus weakens the connection made throughout K.’s trial between religion and the Law. When, at the crucial moment, it becomes obvious that K. is expected to seize the butcher knife and plunge it into his own heart, it is clear in what sense the two men are “supporting actors.” Josef K. is still the most important figure in the drama, even if he cannot perform the final act himself.

Over the course of the novel, such verbal echoes accumulate with great power. Kafka took special care to create links between important passages in his work, links the Muirs consistently missed or unintentionally weakened. One extended example must suffice here.

Fräulein Bürstner’s apparent reappearance in the final chapter reminds the reader how crucially related she is to K.’s fate. Kafka has reinforced this in many ways, including in particular his use of the verb “überfallen” (to attack by surprise, assault). Although this verb has a range of meanings, including “mugging” if it occurs on the street, it is of crucial importance to render it consistently. In the opening chapter K. wonders: “wer wagte ihn in seiner Wohnung zu überfallen” (“who dared assault him in his own lodgings”). On two further occasions in that first chapter he refers specifically to this “assault,” and when he appears before the examining magistrate at the initial inquiry he repeats the same word again. Thus when he hesitates to speak to Fräulein Bürstner because his sudden emergence from his own darkened room might have “den Anschein eines Überfalls” (“resemble an assault”), and even more strikingly, when he suggests to her “Wollen Sie verbreitet haben, daß ich Sie überfallen habe” (“If you want it spread around that I assaulted you”), and repeats the phrase a sentence later, the verbal link between his slander and arrest and his relationship to the young typist is made abundantly clear. A final link in the chain of associations is forged when K. worries that his lawyer is simply lulling him to sleep, “um ihn dann plötzlich mit der Entscheidung zu überfallen” (“so that they could assault him suddenly with the verdict”). The Muirs, however, render the five occurrences where K. is referring to his own arrest or the possible verdict as: “seize him,” “grab me,” “fall upon me,” “seized,” and “overwhelm him,” while the three times Kafka uses the term in Josef K.’s conversation with Fräulein Bürstner are rendered as “waylaying her” and “assaulted” (twice). Thus no reader of the English version is in the position to recognize one of the central links in the novel, nor fully understand why her appearance in the final chapter is such a strong reminder of the futility of all resistance.

The dominant discourse in The Trial is of course legal. Some critics have gone so far as to suggest that the whole of the novel is written in legalese, reflecting Kafka’s own training as a lawyer and his abiding interest in the law, effacing all distinctions of tone, so that “everybody in The Trial, high or low, uses the same language.” But in fact the voices of the novel are clearly varied. They include not only the long legal disquisitions of the lawyer Huld, but also the voices of women, of K.’s uncle, of the merchant, the painter, and the priest. Moreover, the narrative itself is recounted in a voice we have long since come to recognize as distinctly Kafka’s own. The translator’s task includes rendering these voices individually, even if they are all entangled in the web of the law.

The German word “Prozeß,” as has often been noted, refers not only to an actual trial, but also to the proceedings surrounding it, a process that, in this imaginary world, includes preliminary investigations, numerous hearings, and a wide range of legal and extra-legal maneuvering. “The Trial” is a reasonable translation of the German, combining as it does the literal and figurative associations surrounding Josef K.’s yearlong struggle. Yet the shadowy and seemingly infinite hierarchy of mysterious courts depicted in The Trial does not correspond to any actual legal system so far as we know, then or now. Nevertheless, Kafka employs a vocabulary of recognizable legal terms that have come down to us relatively intact from the period in which he practiced law. Somewhat surprisingly, the Muir translation misses several of these scattered throughout the novel, often with unfortunate consequences, as in the following two examples, chosen from among many.

The three possibilities the painter Titorelli presents to Josef K. as outcomes for his trial are “wirkliche Freisprechung,” “scheinbare Freisprechung,” and “Verschleppung.” The first two of these, “actual acquittal” and “apparent acquittal,” represent a distinction with no parallel in actual law, but the third, which seems on the surface least likely to be real, is in fact a common German legal term referring to drawing out a trial by delaying tactics, or “protraction.” When the Muirs chose to translate this as “indefinite postponement,” they misrepresented both the tactic itself (the trial is not in fact indefinitely postponed) and its basis in actual law.

Perhaps the most striking use of a legal term occurs in the final lines of the novel, yet up to now a reader of the standard English version could have no idea it was there. When the two men thrust the knife into Josef K.’s heart, then draw near his face to observe the “Entscheidung,” the Muirs tell us they are “watching the final act.” Yet “Entscheidung” is not only the ordinary German word for “decision,” but also the legal term for a judge’s verdict. This is the verdict K. has been moving toward throughout his trial, the verdict he feared would be sprung upon him, like an assault, once he was lulled into sleep or a state of helplessness. The lessons of such a final verdict are lost, he has been told, even on the officials of the court. They can be learned only by the accused, for he alone follows the trial to its very end. Thus when the two men draw near his face and lean cheek-to-cheek “to observe the verdict,” they seek it in Josef K.’s own eyes.

Over the course of a year, Josef K. gradually weakens in his struggle with the mysterious forces that surround him. His true trial begins with the first sentence and ends only with his death. The translator’s trial is in its own way a similar ordeal. Faced with his own inadequacy, acutely aware each time he falls short, the translator too is impelled toward a final sentence in an imperfect world. No one is more aware of these imperfections than one who, like Josef K., has followed that process to its very end. It is always dangerous to translate an author one reveres as deeply as I do Kafka. The journey has not been an easy one, but it has brought me even closer to the most complex and intriguing writer of our century.

BREON MITCHELL