Cynthia Ozick / The Impossibility of Translating Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka

The Impossibility

of Translating Franz Kafka

How do you translate a writer who felt alienated from his own words?

By Cynthia Ozick
January 3, 1999

Franz Kafka is the twentieth century’s valedictory ghost. In two incomplete yet incommensurable novels, “The Trial” and “The Castle,” he submits, as lingering spirits will, a ghastly accounting—the sum total of modern totalitarianism. His imaginings outstrip history and memoir, incident and record, film and reportage. He is on the side of realism—the poisoned realism of metaphor. Cumulatively, Kafka’s work is an archive of our era: its anomie, depersonalization, afflicted innocence, innovative cruelty, authoritarian demagoguery, technologically adept killing. But none of this is served raw. Kafka has no politics; he is not a political novelist in the way of Orwell or Dickens. He writes from insight, not, as people like to say, from premonition. He is often taken for a metaphysical, or even a religious, writer, but the supernatural elements in his fables are too entangled in concrete everydayness, and in caricature, to allow for any incandescent certainties. The typical Kafkan figure has the cognitive force of a chess master—which is why the term “Kafkaesque,” a synonym for the uncanny, misrepresents at the root. The Kafkan mind rests not on unintelligibility or the surreal but on adamantine logic—on the sane expectation of rationality. A singing mouse, an enigmatic ape, an impenetrable castle, a deadly contraption, the Great Wall of China, a creature in a burrow, fasting as an art form, and, most famously, a man metamorphosed into a bug: all these are steeped in reason; and also in reasoning. “Fairy tales for dialecticians,” the critic Walter Benjamin remarked. In the two great zones of literary susceptibility—the lyrical and the logical—the Kafkan “K” attaches not to Keats but to Kant.

Illustration by Triunfo Arciniegas

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 Everything infused with life … a still from the Brothers Quays’ film Street of Crocodiles.

T

he story of man trying to compete with the gods in creating a living being is one of the earliest tales. These narratives about effigies brought to life, homunculi, golems, reanimated corpses and sentient robots invariably end in death and disaster. Still, they profess our sincere hope that if we can invent the formula for life, we might also cheat death. It might even be argued that in the end this is really the only story there is to tell of our species. If only there will be someone left to tell it. 

No one grows up without being exposed to this story in one form or another. So when I set out to write CoDex 1962, a novel about a dying man trying to find a place for himself within the grand narrative of human history, I immediately thought of the treasure trove of these tales. His need to be something new leads him to the story of the golem and the rabbi who created him, and even to the brink of awareness of the real author of the book he thinks he is creating. For, after all, a novel is made of ink-and-paper automatons.

Here are some of the other great stories that we will never learn from.

1. The Tale of Thorleif, the Earl’s Poet, translated by Judith Jesch 

The poet/warrior Thorleif and his dealings with the evil Earl Hakon is the subject of this short Icelandic saga – which boasts of one of literature’s nastiest artificial hitmen. After Hakon has robbed Thorleif and burned his ship, the poet takes revenge by composing a curse so powerful it makes the earl lose his hair. In turn, the miserable earl enlists two witches to help him fashion a man’s likeness out of driftwood and bring it to life by putting a fresh human heart in its breast. Then they send it off to Iceland where the wooden killer hunts Thorleif down and cuts his stomach open with a halberd. The poet recites a poem about his own killing before he literally spills his guts.

2. The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz, translated by Madeline G Levine One of the 20th century’s true masterpieces. Originally named The Cinnamon Shops, it is a string of stories taking place in the Jewish community of Drohobych in what was then Polish Galicia. It is a magical text where everything is infused with life. Things, creatures and natural phenomena constantly blend as they are used as metaphors for each other. At the book’s heart is the narrator’s father, Josef, slowly retreating into a world of his own within the large family house. He becomes the spokesman of tailors’ dummies and mounts a passionate defence of these silent, still beings. The book ends with a mysterious image of a giant homunculus merging with the universe and the index cards it is written on.

3. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley 

With this novel, the mythic tale of man’s limited authority in creation becomes a modern story. Like all the best stories, it makes us face the failure of our ambition and the damage we can do. Claimed by each new age as the perfect mirror, Frankenstein has been rewritten, retold and reinterpreted in every narrative medium, just like the antique Greek myth of Prometheus that inspired Shelley in the first place.

4. The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi, translated by Ann Lawson Lucas 

Collodi’s tale about the rascally boy marionette has it all and all too much of it: loneliness, the fear of dying, treachery, the corruption of youth, violence towards the weak, devious humans and talking animals, sexy spirits, ominous landscapes, man-to-beast metamorphosis, hopes fulfilled and quashed, humanity gained through trial and error, and a strangely elastic nose. It is a children’s book of the best and darkest kind. Most of us get to know the Disney film at an age when we are still raw material like the wooden boy. To read the book as an adult is even scarier.

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 A mirror for every age … a still from James Whale’s 1931 film of Frankenstein. Photograph: Universal/Sportsphoto/Allstar

5. A Cyborg Manifesto by Donna Haraway

“The cyborg would not recognise the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust.” Animal, human, cyborg; Haraway put humans in their place with her 1984 manifesto, arguing for a post-humanist stance based on affinity and kindness. Her thinking is challenging and in dialogue with radical feminist body and identity theory. It is not an easy text to decipher but it has brought me much inspiration over the years and I think it contains a seed for our survival.

6. The Puttermesser Papers by Cynthia Ozick

Ozick gives us a female golem in the second “paper” in her book of Ruth Puttermesser, a busy feminist lawyer in mid-20th century New York. What Puttermesser needs is a helper (a wife, really) and one night while sleeping she makes a golem from the earth in her apartment’s flower pots. This creature grows so powerful that Puttermesser is able to become city mayor. She uses her golem to clean up the city, but as in every well-told automaton tale, the creature gains dangerous independence.

7. On Dolls, edited by Kenneth Gross 

Gross brings together in one beautiful volume key texts about the uncanny world of inanimate beings, by authors including Walter Benjamin, Marina Warner, Sigmund Freud (on ETA Hoffman’s The Sandman) and Heinrich Von Kleist. The latter’s On the Marionette Theatre makes the unsettling case that the marionettes’ experience is superior to man’s bondage in living flesh.

8. He, She and It by Marge Piercy 

In 2059, Shira Shipman is living in a changed North America. Her young son has been taken from her by the “multi” that runs her zone, so she returns to Tikva, the Jewish “free town” where she grew up. Here, she meets an extraordinary cyborg, imbued with intelligence, feeling and the ability to kill.

9. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

Told in the past, the present and possible futures, Cloud Atlas’s most tragic and human character is Sonmi–451, a future clone designed to have no self-awareness – and thereby no survival instinct – so she can be worked to death in a diner only to end up reprocessed as food. As her name implies, she finds her strength through reading and her own story becomes a cornerstone of a civilisation even farther in the future.

10. The Golem by Gustav Meyrink, translated by Mike Mitchell

When I was 17 and had just met my mentor in all things strange and marvellous, the Icelandic surrealist artist Alfreð Flóki, he gave me a copy of this novel and told me we could have no further conversation before I had read it. It is a fever dream of a book. The protagonist’s mind melds with the legend of the Golem of Prague, the original artificial man of clay created by rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel in the 16th-century ghetto. And my mind melded so thoroughly with the novel that 13 years later I decided to bring the golem story into the folds of Icelandic literature by any narrative means neccesary.

THE GUARDIAN

2011 / Books of the year

2011

Books of the year

From SF to politics, cartoons to history, Guardian readers choose their favourite reads of 2011

29 December 2011

 John Madeley, Let Live: A Bike Ride, Climate Change and the CIA

Jeff Alderson, Oxford

Let Live: A Bike Ride, Climate Change and the CIA by John Madeley (Longstone Books). John Madeley is a well-known author and broadcaster on issues relating to development and social justice. This his second novel focuses on climate change as it has affected small farmers and others in Africa. He bases it on the experiences of a British journalist who sets out to bicycle through six countries. It is truly a thriller, with so much relevant to what is already having severe, indeed crippling, consequences for millions in rural Africa. The interplay with the powers-that-be, often of a dastardly nature, adds to the drama. It deserves to be read by those who remain unmoved and cynical about the reality of climate change, and too by those committed to mitigating its effects. 

 Kate Anderson Sheffield

Penelope Lively's How It All Began (Fig Tree) is honest but not mawkish about being elderly, and the frustrations of being physically more dependent. One expects the supreme prose, but this book has depth with a lightness of touch. In hardback it has one of the loveliest covers, epitomising for me an ideal retirement.

Kenneth Baker, Lord Baker of Dorking, House of Lords

Death in Florence: the Medici, Savonarola and the Battle for the Soul of the Renaissance City by Paul Strathern (Jonathan Cape). This is a brilliant history of how the wealth and power of Florence was challenged by a radical monk so successfully with the Bonfire of the Vanities that they had to burn him at the stake – Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Lorenzo the Magnificent, Ludovico Sforza, and Alexander VI, the Borgia Pope, are in the premier league of Italian politics and make Berlusconi seem a mere pot boy. My second book is The Case for Working with Your Hands: Or Why Office Work is Bad for Us and Fixing Things Feels Good by Matthew Crawford (Penguin). This bestseller in America is the bible for those who work with their hands. Crawford, a philosophy don, also runs his own motorcycle workshop in Richmond, Virginia, and that is his inspiration and his satisfaction. Practical, technical, hands-on learning is behind the new University Technical Colleges.