Free Quarrel & Quandary by Cynthia Ozick Page A

greatest as of the smallest, paralyzing fear of pronouncing a word, although this fear may not only be fear but also a longing for something that is greater than any fear.” A panic so intuitional suggests—forces on us—still another Kafkan impossibility: the impossibility of translating Kafka.
    There is also the impossibility of
not
translating Kafka. An unknown Kafka, inaccessible, mute, secret, locked away, may now be unthinkable. But it was once thinkable, and by Kafka himself. At the time of his death the bulk of his writing was still unpublished. His famous directive (famously unheeded) to Max Brod to destroy his manuscripts—they were to be “burned unread”—could not have foreseen their canonization, or the near-canonization of their translators. For almost seventy years, the work of Willa and Edwin Muir, a Scottish couple self-taught in German, has represented Kafka in English; the mystical Kafka we are long familiar with—and whom the Muirs derived from Max Brod—reflects their voice and vision. It was they who gave us
Amerika, The Trial, The Castle
, and nine-tenths of the stories. And it is because the Muirs toiled to communicate the incommunicable that Kafka, even in English, stands indisputably among the few truly indelible writers of the twentieth century—those writers who have no literary progeny, who are
sui generis
and cannot be echoed or envied.
    Yet any translation, however influential, harbors its own dissolution. Literature endures; translation, itself a branch of literature, decays. This is no enigma. The permanence of a work does not insure the permanence of its translation—perhaps because the original remains fixed and unalterable, while the translation must inevitably vary with the changing cultural outlook and idiom of each succeeding generation. Then are the Muirs, in their several redactions, dated? Ought they to be jettisoned? Is their “sound” not ours? Or, more particularly, is their sound, byvirtue of not being precisely ours, therefore not sufficiently Kafka’s? After all, it is Kafka’s sound we want to hear, not the nineteen-thirties prose effects of a couple of zealous Britishers.
    Notions like these, and also the pressures of renewal and contemporaneity, including a concern for greater accuracy, may account for a pair of fresh English renderings published in 1998:
The Trial
, translated by Breon Mitchell, and
The Castle
, the work of Mark Harman. (Both versions have been brought out by Schocken, an early publisher of Kafka. Formerly a Berlin firm that fled the Nazi regime for Palestine and New York, it is now returned to its origin, so to speak, through its recent purchase by Germany’s Bertelsmann.) Harman faults the Muirs for theologizing Kafka’s prose beyond what the text can support. Mitchell argues more stringently that “in attempting to create a readable and stylistically refined version” of
The Trial
, the Muirs “consistently overlooked or deliberately varied the repetitions and interconnections that echo so meaningfully in the ear of every attentive reader of the German text.” For instance, Mitchell points out, the Muirs shy away from repeating the word “assault” (“
überfallen
”), and choose instead “seize,” “grab,” “fall upon,” “overwhelm,” “waylay”—thereby subverting Kafka’s brutally intentional refrain. Where Kafka’s reiterated blow is powerful and direct, Mitchell claims, theirs is dissipated by variety.
    But this is not an argument that can be decided only on the ground of textual faithfulness. The issues that seize, grab, fall upon, waylay, etc., translation are not matters of language in the sense of word-for-word. Nor is translation to be equated with interpretation; the translator has no business sneaking in what amounts to commentary. Ideally, translation is a transparent membrane that will vibrate with the faintest shudder of the original, like a single leaf on an autumnal stem. Translation
is
autumnal; it