Translating Kafka: Will Self, Anthea Bell, Joyce Crick, Karen Seago and Amanda Hopkinson

you know I read Kafka as one does in my teens and early 20s perhaps not entirely as one does because I think looking back on it now I read Kafka as somebody who wanted to write fiction himself so I tended to read him rather schematically and to read him as a pattern book for certain specific ideas that a fiction writer looks for how do you get people to suspend disbelief in the fantastical how do you sustain fantastical narrative how do you create credible muse on scene within the context of the fantastical you know so a lot of of the reading I think that tyro fiction writers tend to do is not quite the kind of reading that people who certainly are translators and certainly a critical thinkers try to do is in my acquaintance with Katherine's from a different direction so when I was reading meta morphosis and other stories in the Hoffman translation I read a country doctor and some that went in somewhere and then I was reading a book by the critic who sadly died recently pull through sell the Great War and modern memory and who sells theses for those of you not familiar with it is that the first few months of the First World War were a sort of machine for the production of irony a machine for the production of dramatic irony the juxtaposition between the great powers going off to war essentially in a 19th century mode with conceptions of valor and honor with flags and flashing caresses and horses and the hell of static warfare on the Western Front and rather more mobile warfare on the Eastern fronts and the Italian fronts with nonetheless all of these fronts being turning into sort of production lines of death you know was a tremendous moment of ayran izing in Western civilization I found through cells idea by compelling and one of the examples he uses of the way that that irony then rippled out through literature is actually from Joseph Heller's catch-22 in relates to if you like the signature an empathetic moment that turns the protagonist to serían against war in catch-22 when he discovers this young tailgunner snowden who seems to have a wound on the front of his body and Yossarian attempts to kind of deal with this wound and to kind of treat it but the young man still continues to whimper and say I'm cold I'm cold and Yossarian then realizes he's bleeding from his armpit this young man undoes his flak jacket and it turns out that he has been disemboweled by shrapnel from behind and that in fact the wound on the front of his body is the exit wound and that were called to my mind the wound in Kafka as a country doctor which was written in the winter of 1916 17 now as he may be familiar many a cursory look at Kafka suggests that there's a notorious comment about him damning all the combatants of both sides to oblivion there's one of the things that I suppose seals the ethereal reputation of Kafka's writing certainly from the period at 1914-18 is the complete lack of a mention of the First World War or any seeming registration of the impact of the first world war on Kafka's worth so the wound in a country doctor which was written in the winter of 1916 17 and through sells theory of irony and the wound in Heller's catch-22 came together in my mind and it occurred to me was in fact Kafka registering in some sense the impact both literal and metaphorical of the first war and is it in some sense present in a country doctor so that's the the material I wanted to deal with as a miserable I and incidentally I may say that in the process of writing this introduction to Hoffman's translation and reading I think his very fine introductory essay in that translation I swore off writing about writers who write in in languages lie don't read I actually thought in the process of writing that piece that in all honesty I should stop writing about bull cares or Kafka or Zabel - we have a very respective translator of here and that really it was time to shut up on the subject because I you know I've started to seriously work on my French a few years ago and more I worked on it and the worse I became at it the more I became conscious of the yawning gulf between my perception of writers in translation and what was going on with writers in their own language so one of the that's to give you a little bit of the background to all of this and I thought perhaps the most interesting or the the the point to get inside the discussion and to start examining some of these questions in detail about the difficulties involved in translating at all translating from the German and specifically translating Kafka would be to read this passage this description of the wound and I'm going to promote from calf as a country daughter I'm going to read it in Joyce Crick's recent translation for Oxford Worlds classics and then Karen's Iago is very kindly going to read it in the German original and as I say there are sheets distributed around if you want to have a look I'm afraid there's not perhaps quite enough for all of you but maybe you'll be generous or maybe you'll become curiously and unsuspectingly intimate with one another in the process of trying to crane over necks and shoulders and that would be a way into the subject for us I'm then gonna ask a few questions having got these very distinguished people translators here of them and then we very much want to throw the discussion open because I'm aware that there are professional translators here students of translation people who are interested in German literature and I'm sure you've all got very interesting things to say and regard me as a sort of suitably Czech or Prague like golem of stupidness that can be animated by your insights because it's a selfish exercise frankly I need to be told so here we go here translated by Joyce Crick here is an extract from a country doctor by Franz Kafka in his right side in the region of the hips a wound as large as the palm of my hand has opened rose red in many shades dark in the depths growing light towards the margins delicately crusted the blood Welling intermittently wide as an open cast mine that is how it looked from a distance close up it shows further worsening who can look at it without whistling softly worms as thick and long as my little finger colored rose from their own blood but also bespattered caught fast in the heart of the wound with little white heads and many little legs arrived towards the light poor boy there is nothing to be done for you I have discovered your great wound you will be destroyed by this bloom in your side the family is happy they can see me at work the sister tells the mother the mother tells the father the father tells some guests who come tiptoeing in through the moonlight from the open door balancing without stretched arms will you save me whispers the boy through his sobs quite dazzled by the life in his wound that's what the people in my region alike always demanding the impossible of their doctor they have lost their old faith the priest sits at home and picks his Kasich's into shreds one by one but the physician is supposed to do everything with his delicate surgical hand generations later and a hefty agent Patsy Hanahan telecourse of wonder of catan hos are in feeling chatty yeoman Dunkel in dirt ether halvard ensued and Rendon sat carnac made only like me sixty of salmon dilute oftenly unpack back Erbitux though austere and Farnam in there near succession of ina hv honk via condors unseen analyzed surprisin Verma and stacker all any man implying fingered like all the asylum owned all set am bluefish past Lindsey I'm in and I wonder fester hidin mattress and caption met feelin by nation and slaved are my younger dears nice to heaven a habit anak also wonder al kufan and easie bloomer and anna zeta case to tuck under the familiars clerkly CC magenta - cut this Vestas axe demoted demoted him father the father I didn't Gaston the often foosh witson but a sketch like an Armin balance Eiland Justin moonshine the often and pure Hawaiian common yes to me Latin twisted flotsam Toyama danske blended just leave him in Zanna wonder so Santa Lord and my leg ain't a modest anomaly - artists fell on the Knighton cloud in happens if alone their father sits the Hauser on Satsuki miss Govinda ein snap demandin Alberta artist so Alice listen it's an odd certain here August in hunt thank you very much I wondered whether I could just ask the panel a very for a very kind of preliminary snapshot of their conception of what translation is in general somewhat inevitably I was reading Valtor Benjamin's essay on translation in the last few weeks and he has this very ERISA resting image of the translate a says that the the the writer or the artist is in the middle of the wood listening to all of the sounds of the wood but the translator is at the edge of the wood shouting into it and listening for the sound of the echo and I wondered whether that idea resonates with you and whether it speaks to you of what the task of the translator is maybe I could come to choice first I was afraid you were going to mention well this is something we were talking about a little bit earlier many men has resort to well me know Kafka had enormous trouble with the metaphors he couldn't bear them and I suppose we are the echo we can give back the song but we're going to give back the sound with some distortion we can't avoid that because the match between the two languages syntactically as far as alexis is concerned neither will exactly fit or if it does happen it's a very very rare and happy accident so um the distortion will be there and I think you're aware of this before you ever start because we'll reach for silence metaphor now we'll talk in terms of a filter talk in terms of a grid that will at least have something through it keeps an awful lot back but something is coming through and that something is a kind of residue that has at least stimulated you to think in terms of the First World War and the Great Moon like that strike I'm not sure that I would agree with you and it sounds pretty associative to me but okay that's another question for later so we know before we start and with Kafka I think especially after we finished that we're not going to get it right on the other hand we will persist in doing it there's something important about that that picture of the wound that at some point has gone through to you and so somewhere along the line the filter has worked at least you've right now reached a residue and I think that's probably the best that we can hope we will read as closely as we can and you've got to be a good reader to translate and we will let as much as the English language and the resources and constraints that it has and that our skills can offer but don't expect the real thing what do you think auntie I mean do you think I mean again I'm using Benjamin because he just looms in this he speaks in terms of the translator discovering a meta language in some way and does that resonate with you do you think it doesn't everything Joyce says resonates with me because there is going to be distortion and I think one cannot describe the translation process without metal fur and for me the prime one is the translation is an illusion where illusionists we are trying to create an illusion that the reader is hearing the author's voice well there's going to be something of our voice isn't it - it is the distortion I've got two windows in the room where I sit working at him and one is obviously a pane of glass much older than the other and it's got little interesting floors in it the other is plain modern glass and one would try to reflect everything exactly but now it will come through was the little distortions Edith Grossman in her book what his translation for describes translation by many metaphors we can't do without it I once tried to describe it without it was in the discussion with them the winner of the German Booker Prize a very good Italian author they fluent in English and we were discussing the translation process and I said I have tried to describe it without metaphor internet the translators mind briefly after the reading that Joyce quite collecting mentions there is one description of translation as a particularly intensive form of reading which I give along with very much but some there are many different metaphors and I tried to say that the translators mind dwells somewhere for a little while in a place where there isn't any language at all and then with luck comes down with an English to draw there's only the eye general idea in the mind and the young Italian said to me all yes and where is this place you are talking about and I'd only made another metal term it is too true there's nothing more enjoyable for them to be asked to translate a book either one that you have loved for ages and it may be a new translation that's another can of worms actually new translations of books that have been translated before but maybe a new one and you are delighted to think you'll get a chance to have a go but you will be disappointed with yourself Edith in her book describes the various satisfying moment when sometimes sometimes the translator feels that he or she is on song and giving a reasonable version of what the author was saying oh and we are looking for the author's voice I've heard Michael Frayn speak of the translator as an actor and he's a man of the theater each good name many many metaphors and one of mine is that it's like walking a tightrope because you've got a duty to the author you've got a duty to the readers in the language of translation and somehow you've got to keep your balance which is not easy but if you come off that tightrope you've set up the illusion what you seem to be saying what you're you you seem to suggest is the the place you go to is somewhere where as a very close reader and an empathetic reader you are in some sense hearing the writers voice all of its contingent factors including its language so that would in some way connect with Benny means concept of the meta language and a version that is a convincing illusion you've got to find the equivalents in your own language hmm so you you're in a sense disengaging from the language in which it was written into a kind of verse prac of some kind or a kind of and then actually it's that that you're translating back into or forward into English absolutely we doing our language au levels and so you had to make sure to echo every last little dark and north of the German illness infants said the examiner would see you and missed anything but you can you can rephrase things I'm perhaps wells were three translator I didn't know but it's trying to find as close as possible a way to say what the author was saying in something like his voice the distinction between the kind of informational content translating the informational content and as it were translating the sense is that a false dichotomy for you Joyce or is it a real one I mean it it's usually the informational content that comes through and that's where you have the sense of the inadequacy when you've got a fine writer like Kafka where where the informational content is so much carried by the style and by hearing voice and by the tone and that's the tricky bit and that's what does evaporate I find in your you got a very good short note to your translation of The Hunger artist and the other short patients in which you say that the in some cases in Kafka all you can get is the rhythm isn't all you can take out is the rhythm into English in terms of voice and in terms of what he's doing stylistically you to attempt more and you mentioned some specific problems with Kafka so if we could get a go in through what you said into some more specific problems with character one you mentioned that's technical and you get I'd like you to explain this to me it's probably absolutely old hat to everybody else in the room apart from me but you mentioned in particular the subjunctive in Kafka and the subject in the subjunctive in the particular kind of German he writes and how it's obsolete in English and how we tend to it tends to be translated as though as a conditional in the wrong sort of sense and I wondered if you could enlarge on that because that seems to me to cut to the core of some of these problems well I don't think it comes up in this manner we haven't got time it's always easy to have something concrete to talk about but in general Kafka's world is a speculative world if you read sentence after stamp the samples of his it will begin with them if or he will I think he's very suspicious of how precise language can be very doubtful of that and so instead of comparing something I said he didn't like metaphor instead of comparing something specific it will say it's as if so again there's something speculative there huh and another trick of course which is built-in so many of his stories are simply told from the point of view of the protagonist then narrator is the protagonist so a kind of indirect speech is operating now these are all instances that are followed quite naturally in German by the subjunctive which is it isn't obsolete in English but it is falling out of use and so the insecurity the unsteadiness the built-in skepticism of the speech tends to get resolved into the indicative of fact I think that's the the best I can say about an example the problem is also surely that as if and conditional phrases and are used for metaphors in English well it often becomes collapsed into the melon bark and I believe you also say the problem is in translating is you're in danger of making it too heavy and presumably what you're also saying is that what we very much associate with the calf gas which is not simply the construction of you know bureaucracies of faceless people in the sense of their poor small individual in the oppressed world but is actually a surface to the prose style that suggests the uncanny in some way that that is much lighter in the original German it's more natural rather than it does come easier to German grammar yeah which it gets a rather clunky though if you turn it into I mean what I note is gum coming back for example from more recent translations such as your own or anthias translation to the Mules is how clunky their translation feels is that do you feel that way about some of the Mules translations or well I'm very fond of the mirror must say yeah and I think well this may pick up an answer as point about re translating or translating late they were the first to translate and for and they were tremendously excited about what it was they were translating and starting off you're introducing a translation of something very strange very new to an audience that is certainly going to be puzzled by it you are going to possibly make it a little bit easy you're going the the introductory listen to this amazing writer impulse that you've all heard of or most of you may have heard in in in the journals and so one will here is I think that is almost the criterion one needs to judge a new translation of something very new I'm surprised you call them clunk it may be a matter of it's much older kind of prose well that sort of things maybe I'll direct this one to end this things and I'm only using benyamin as a yardstick for this because he lays a lot of this stuff out of course he says the thing about great works of literature is that they have to wait for their translators and I think he thinks that because he thinks that you need the necessary period of time away from the work to understand what its own impact is in its native language and how that native language has developed in a sense to find a trigonometric point in time from which to a say you know because he also says that you know the responsibilities of the task of the translator is in the sense to record the after echo of the work in language as well I wondered what your kind of view on that is and at what point you want to translate a writer whether it's more helpful to have some decades between you and then if it's a writer who is worth three translation he or she will certainly have been translated before and I for one and never look at an early stage at a new translation I am doing already translated when Joyce and I both doing volumes in the new penguin Freud and the legal side penguin syndrome warnings saying that the state was treaty estates additions they had lost their license of penguin publish they said they were doing and this the street editions lawyers were going to look very closely at all our translations they are of plagiarism well my response was I never read my cycle except in German I wasn't look at anything else en but people vary and my friend Michael Henry said I'm asked to do a new translation of man's death in Venice read every single version there was a bit before deciding if there was room for another so your your inclination is never to read other translation and it's very interesting in the end to go back and look now I don't want to drag in too many authors other than the Kafka because this is strictly Africa but I found visa they're doing a new translation of Stefan's wife's one and only definitely full-length novel but he let out of his hands as such it's called the where of pity and English which is a long long way from the German which is all the doctors have since impatient so far and the people push compress who had the rights to publish the old one and republishing the new one kept on saying to me Lord the first translator said something different and I said I'm saying what the German text says and I came to the conclusion that strike had been he was so anxious for reasons of the imminent second world war because he had been so struck by the horrors of the First World War and he really wanted to get that book out and he must have sent his translators bits of it in chunks in just the same way as I translated Max's Ebert's Austerlitz in chunks and so the first translators never got to see the full version with changes that the author must himself was made of dates of names of hotels but there are minor things but yes style of style does date it's odd the folio society once asked me to look through the new porter translation of wooden blocks and make about 50 small revisions when I had to make more than that they are notoriously inaccurate because man was so keen to have his books in English but apparently he turned a blind eye to the inaccuracies but it was the style and mainly there's a passage where the girl I'm just speaking of the little girl turned 11 this eternity was a dinky little need that I've been modeling you will say a charming child or something like this exactly so when I was gonna ask you about specifically that question and say that possibly these problems are of not such a great plan j'en see with kefka's prose which i imagine from is relatively uh Nydia Matic in that way I'm Kennie supernaturally favorite too late mmm the seasons only win in the castle Frida suggests the lens are there oh we could go off we live in the South of France it's a shock of course my good girl you do it because you're not in a realm that is coextensive and in Sumy he uses remarkably few temporally specific terms or things that so in a way he's giving an open invitation to free a translation in that way interesting to read all these which I can I ask you Anthea about something else specific that is exhibited certainly in a country doctor though I'm not quite sure in this passage and then maybe come to Joyce on it which is tense Kefka plays around with tense and it's difficult in English and it's it's difficult and it often seems I mean some translators are reverent it seems to me to his tense shifts some are high the irreverent sort of questions about what's going on with kefka's tense shifts how does it feel in German does it feel as odd in German as it might do in English to shift from the simple past to the historic present in the space of a couple well in two sentences not to me because so many German and French authors indeed do it yes very unusual in English well I think it's getting to be more acceptable now I have several times recently said to editors at a publisher look the original has a shift between the simple past and the historic present and I'm happy to go along with this you better read it and see if you think it's all right but the passages there were passage listen that's right no they were a case in point when the young narrator hopelessly mixed-up idealistic young man gets all confused he slips into the historic presence and it ends immediately do you think that's something you've introduced choice you as translators by translating from languages in which it's more I mean it was acceptable to Kafka writing in the late teens and early twenties of the last century to use that shift is it from you that it comes well we have our predecessors it's probably happened before that for the music do you discover that nowadays novelists write in the historic present tremendous it's really absolutely currently taking for granted where's our sweat ten years ago it wasn't there the effect is different though it is a sense of going into the dark and not knowing what's coming next and that of course is very Kafka you also mentioned in your introduction again about this this submerged you know sort of narrative figure and the disjunction between the thinking eye and what's going on there in German there's a again there's more naturalness to that distinction it's almost I mean I can only think of it in terms of French where you use var to indicate a very near future you say in cafe he's indicating a very near past that's what it is which we don't have in English again in quite the same way it's not so much that tense he uses it's all the little words of he had just finished breakfast when they broke in an arrest and it's all these little garden so it's Express you know and and the other thing of course is I mean we've sort of touched on is the enormous number of qualifiers there are yeah yes everything is almost or some variation on almost again there's this built-in suspicion of the security of the statement that he's writing down if it's not precisely that it's almost an and there all sorts of court qualifiers you know practically practice positively and the best from this literally furnish is what he uses and it's a dreadful do you translate that as literally I translate that as literally and I know that's really a bit of a challenge because it's a teaser services but it's become a nonce word in content you know some people say literally when they mean figuratively figuratively when they mean it does with Phil nish that's no it just means of what you're saying is deeply uncertain and please be suspicious no but what I mean is it's a disaster of periodicity you know you're dealing with something which now may sound mm-hmm really kind of quite unpleasant and kind of a sort of and like a nonce word in contemporary English and yet that's the sense of of what he's saying he's the other thing I wanted to ask you though is I think it's me Len Kundra and an essay on translating remarks on and I think his particular but here is the news on a tendency to smooth out repetition and how important repetition is for Kafka and we certainly see it in this it's a notable in this passage the use of read for the serving maids named Rosa and the cover of the blood is there a you reverent about reproducing characters repetitions I am when I see them see it and I didn't see so did I yeah but I did it yeah but I don't think well maybe I did see it I don't know it it depends I think if you're reading too much man who makes great play with repetition and variation in the surly vaghn Aryan way I supposed to watch out for the repetitions with Kafka it's more discrete and then the question of as it were purity of German prose which is a phrase of course that is absolutely meaningless to somebody who doesn't read German so whenever you read about descriptions of German writers when they're people write about their style they will talk about purity of German post in Kafka's case there's you know Goethe is banded about as a model for his prose there is the influence of his particular product German on the way that he writes German some people say that he writes a particular form a Hofmann for example says that he writes a kind of universally understood demotic gentleman of his period that is particularly lean probably because he comes from a more dialect background in terms of spoken German what's your view on this oh it's so difficult I mean I know I'm not a native German I'm not an it Park speaker Prague speakers old people that I've asked about this literate we talk perfectly good German very firmly and so no I know the whole descriptions of power direction and the input of Czech and Yiddish do I really do not know the best I can say is that he writes a beautiful German for his purposes I'm not sure I record it go to you but I'd have difficulty I think in describing good as brothers well maybe I could just ask you briefly entered then maybe we should go to Karin on this one and see what she has to say but what do you think I mean a pure German what does the German this is very difficult and I'm sorry to go back to Mexia but he's something's been said to have written an old-fashioned kind absolutely had very defined earlier models naturally but it was his own and now the repetitions in him well they're a very important and he repeated things to convey a sense of melancholy of vagueness of the imminence of death from the other world and ghosts and so on I've just been translating a very modern novel completely utterly different which the author uses his repetitions for the seek of gentle irony and it works very well and I have written a note to the editor saying do not let the copy editor follow the manual which I'm sure says strike out all repetitions because some authors use them for style it is that I mean the information content is as nothing to trying to reproduce or get something even ferjeen on style and you were mentioning the subjunctive earlier and this is a great loss to us in English we ever used the subjunctive in indirect speech but the Germans do it the whole time by simply putting all the verbs in them in the subjunctive they can go on in reported speech for long long periods at a time in English after a little while you think they were forgotten it's indirect speech by now the readers will at this point we've got to put in that he continued she went on or something like that just to remind them if only we had that use of the subjunctive also because it removes it creates a kind of side stream to the narratives in English to have that much in direct speech would seem to be detaching from the narrative at that point and that's that problem doesn't exist in German what do you think Karen about this question of kefka's pure German I think I'm off that generation which reacts quite problematically to the term pure German because it's been afraid of term used in quite different ways just looking at Kafka and and reading Kafka I think on the one hand it is an incredibly masterful way of using every single word that counts every single expression every single word every single syntactic construction whether it is a normal construction or quite an unusual construction contributes to creating the meanings that that you were talking about earlier and then there's that shift to the Dometic demotic and we've got a couple of examples in this excerpt here it just moves over and you have that almost everyday speech but it's not signposted very obviously just it's just sort of that immediate transition and then he moves back again to the more narrative style and and I think that is what strikes me as a reader most strongly in in reading Kafka that you always stumble across the way he uses words the combinations of words and the sentence constructions that he has and they're all beautiful but they are also often quite unusual and make you think so can you give us one of the examples you picked up on in there yeah I'm just give it to us in German and then maybe we could look at what Joyce do with did with it rather mainly one one of the things that struck me in this particular passage was the use of the adjective Sartre which occurs in the first description of the of the wound it's at kearney and it's a very it's it's delicate or yet delicate and it's used in describing the wound and it's quite an unusual word to use in that context and then towards the end when the doctor is talking about he goes off on his slight rant where he's a bit unhappy about the situation and he talks about all the things that are demanded of the of the top debts the last line in fact it's the last three words Madonna talking here hawkish in hunt Estelle you've translated it as a Stella Kate yeah so Joyce's done the first two adjectives adjective adjective earlier so delicately yeah and then whereas it seems to be a noun in the German modifiers okay but it's the bits art is is quite an unusual collocation in that context you wouldn't necessarily use it to describe a wound or a surgeon's hand so you that sort of jumps out it doesn't to me we were chatting about it beforehand I couldn't remember I I was assuming I hadn't noticed and hadn't you know it was chance you better I'd noticed or not look as if I did or got more attention there's no possible way of indicating what the resonance of the particular word I mean why in German you're saying Karen that that stands out as a modifier in those contexts it might help towards an interpretation you know one of the readings of what does that it's possibly that this is where the doctor is discovering his own movement and if the surgeon's hand she has a characteristic with the wound itself like you know reinforce that kind of reading okay I think I think it's these kinds of strands that are established and illusions and repetitions of words which are used with one particular situation or concept ID or person and then used almost for the opposite which establishes connections throughout the text and we don't have so much subjunctive in this text or the as ifs or very little explicit metaphor but we have these these opposition's of formal opposition's between the the doctor and the patient and thee and alls either made and ORS are the wound and the mace wound on the cheek and the boys wound on the on the side and that wound is described as a as a bloom as a flower and all that of course as a is a as a flower of rose as a flat so you have these sort of patterns going through forgive me if a belaboring the point and I may be being stupid but that's what I am I said at the outset I thought you were saying that the use of the the expression delicately in relation to the surgeon's hand and in relation to the wound seemed a little bit strange in German whereas I'm what I'm saying is it doesn't seem strange to use that particular modifier in English you might well say of a surgeon's hand that is delicate and indeed you might well say over the shading of a wound that it was delicately shaded it doesn't to me as a native English speaker seem strange as a modifier and it wouldn't in German okay fine I just got the wrong in the stick you also in Karen had said when we were discussing it before we started you said something about because I wanted to talk a little bit about humor and I'm conscious of time so I think if we could speak a little bit about humor I mean there's a lot more I wanted to ask you about but there you go maybe it'll come up in the general discussion and one of the things that is said repeatedly about Kafka starting with max broad and moving on and on and on time after time after time is his humor and and you know there are countless anecdotes recounted that they may all be the same initial scene of in reading the opening passages of the trial and everybody falling about incontinently laughing I find this utterly perplexed reading English I am not satisfied by any of the examples that are offered to me of Kafka's great wit I can see a sort of certain mordant laughter in the dark that's occurring at the end of an extremely long dark and dank passageway but I laugh out loud funny I think not Karin immediately said that when you've actually missed off the last two lines are after the passage that's on these sheets that we've been discussing and they're quite funny so would you would you like to expatiate on there and I'm sure everybody will start falling about well I don't think it's rolling in the aisles funny but it's that it's that sense of the absurd which is evident in the story throughout with all these sort of weird transitions and the the horses coming out of the pigsty and then the horses putting their heads through the windows so I find this absurd occurrence quite quite funny because it it's it's presented in such a deadpan straightforward way it's just there and then the horse is sort of intervene with or speak to God or that's quite funny I find but then the that that I once I once discussed with English friends and jokes and their relation to the unconscious and we were reading it in English translation and all my friends were saying none of the jokes in if that's how it gives her funny and I said oh yeah very funny and explained nothing but anyway so I think in the in the excerpt that we have here that that moved from the from the narrative from the description of the wound to the to the reaction and the complaint and the more explicitly pronounced voice of the doctor while he starts complaining about well he starts talking about suddenly how the family is happy if I mean it's clicks is it contagious cried you did give us like humorous chuckle and there's a kind of onomatopoeia in those words in German that they're chuckling words in German is that right they said do they have any I mean there are some words the sound of which is humorous in a language would that be true of those no no funny in English no look like it's a happy sound I mean coming alright go on but it's quite ironic I mean there's this contrast with the doctor finally finding the wound after he declared the patient to be well - and he finally finds the wound and it's a horrific wound and it's quite disgusting and so it's what flips over to this description of the family being happy because finally the doctor is doing his job and he's being active and they they see him doing what they called him to do so the family doesn't seem to be particularly concerned that their little boy is or that boy is lying in bed with a potentially fatal wound they are concerned that the doctor does its job so there is that ironic element there and the the whole description of how it's passed on how they are the narrated how they talk to each other how it's reiterated that makes it quite funny and then I think the description of this is like a spectacle that you know something is finally happening in this village the guests are coming and they are balancing on their tiptoes through the door and they get told about this as well that's weird I I can see all of them and it strikes me when I hear you discuss it I can see how it could be funny but I venture to suggest that the problem is is what we would call timing that it doesn't work in English as a piece of comic timing precisely because of the difficulties of Catco style and in presumably you know because the elisions it doesn't go the boom-boom Shh in English and there must be an element of boom-boom in German no there must be an element of setting it up and then deflating it in some way undercutting the statement must undercut so you wanted to be okay okay so can we extract from it in fact a right twist of the lid rather than a deep and throaty kaathal is a right twist of the lip in you know ^ true german community of the 1920s very very funny I mean I again I'm struggling to find I mean I know obviously the example I've drawn is from the beanie of the trial and I'm not discussing that particularly maybe I haven't chosen that particularly and one of the few passages in caf-co I can think of that made me get close to laughing is in the judgement where the father leaps up out of bed right and I could see that that was a startling juxtaposition that was kind of funny in the context of the protagonists neuroticism is trying to get the father to bed is trying to vanquish the father and the father you know rather like his own father being in his such rude good health but he leaps up in bed and holds on to the ceiling that's one of the few points in Caprica where I think I've gone by there you know and that's not rolling around in the aisles laughing well try to visualize it and think in terms of a cartoon mmm and don't say you were in there I was just thinking in the introduction I think it's to metamorphosis but they written another introduction for the new book he says that Kafka is his humor is like that of the silent film and just as there are people who don't get Buster Keaton or don't all about when they see Chaplin they're probably people who don't see what Kafka is on about and I think part of it has to do with the tenses that you're talking about because when he removes the subjunctive that's so familiar you get well away from metaphors so you have Gregor Samsa waiting waking up and he is an insect he's not like an insect he just has become one and this happens repeatedly and it said the boy becomes his wound you know which has been completely invisible until that point so what do you think in German it feels more more conditional and more metaphoric and so it's it's funnier or it's morbid sure I believe the metaphorical thing I think if you look at Kafka stream Diaries you know what a dream does is remove the metaphor that becomes literal so you know something inscribed in your flesh what making a mark on your body can turn into and talk to machine in the penal colony becomes absolutely which it itches your sins on your back until you die it writes it on you and it's imprinted on the flesh and that's what a dream does and that seems to me you almost have to reverse the whole thing out again and say this isn't a metaphor this is actually what he sees as happening and that's why the narrative voicing Kafka is so extraordinarily unique and you get all these people as unlikely as you know Auden and kami and Bob has old saying that he is the writer of the 20th century will always be remembered just as you know good right they're not reading him in Germany no almost certainly not but I thought I took your old first point more when you say if it's thinking in terms of slack slapstick and montage and Johnson positions as in silent films the period which he undoubtedly would have seen it's a gentle Chaplin esque slapstick in that sense rather than a vigorous Keaton esque but it's also satirical because it's satirizing this doctor who's suppose unlike the priest in this cassock to come and heal all ills and I get that in this passage as well I can see again this line in Joyce's translation this transition will you save me whispers the young man sobbing quite blinded by the life inside his wound again this intensely graphic image of the wound and then the doctor follows on that's how the people are in my region now that's I can see the irony there and the court the comedy working there but is it more emphatic in German that transition between the two between the kind of you know incredible kind of painful dizzle donna of the of the young boy and the kind of you know well that's how the people are in in my region does that resonate more in German than it might in English okay we've been touching for the Kings evil and the doctors remarking he's saying you know these carrot crunches that's what they're like he's also saying that the boy thought when the doctor first arrived that he you know and the doctor failed completely to see the boy was wounded that he was going to let him die so he first you know fear was the doctors going to let him die now he's got a moment of Hope saying how are you going to save me now and it's extraordinarily prescient because on Kafka's own deathbed he apparently told his doctors his two doctors was written down at the time it you don't kill me you're a murderer and throughout the ice pack with which they were trying to soothe you know but isn't the irony there oh I mean I take the the CLI kafka thing with a pinch of salt but isn't this isn't the irony more in the pattern in the in a country doctor the doctor the doctors done his job when he's almost produced the wound himself you know he's a failing as a doctor when he arrives and fails to diagnose and it's that connects with the remarks about the old faith you know they've lost their old faith what they want out of medicine is not just medicine to be efficacious but medicine almost to produce wounds so that they can be healed anyway I'm going slightly off the point unconscious that was a hand up over there but it's timing might vary the discussion open and welcome really any input whether in the form of statements questions objections dissensions that people may have to make on translating translating from German translating Kafka and Kafka and humor and thanks very much to the panel okay there was a question I think you've said it in the meantime really I just wanted to say that I did think Kafka was funny and that it is it's pantomime and slapstick and when you've made the connection to an early silent film then that that's what it is it's it's visual and it's not metaphorical its bodily its physical any needs almost and when you mention the scene with the father in the judgment it's families that comport a sort of engagement and physical moving around right funny and and that's also with the doctor here it's a sort of pantomime okay confidence are you are you the sort of person who laughs at pratfalls right but I mean if somebody tripped over and burnt beer do you laugh or if somebody somebody what's taking a sip of a drink and misses their mouth and it goes down would you find that amusing I'm not the nominee I think the world's divided into people who do and my wife finds these things in areas and those sort of programs on TV where families have videoed their children on their tricycles sort of falling over and banging their head well so no you're not right now I only raised that because it would solve the whole enigma for me and one because I don't find that sort of stuff remotely amusing from the start of the finish if you ever that may well be near I couldn't see what anybody was going on about the humor in Khafre I four years ago I was with a bunch of translators of Yulia Frank's German novel it's demitasse crying German I dislike the English title so much I can't bring myself to say it not my choice but um and I was listening to you year's Eastern European translations all saying how funny how funny Africa is and I thought to myself well poor things until 1989 they didn't have much to laugh about and then I actually got down to the castle I didn't let on some of us I was just beginning to castle and my astonishment it reminded me varies from me not so much a veil is limited in Wonderland as Alice Through the Looking Glass the the landlady of what in my version I called the fridge in gardena she is a dead ringer for the Red Queen she is practically shouting off with her head to everybody within stuff and I could see that there is absurdity which is not so far from hmm he shift registers so rapidly he does yes so that there's a moment anticlimax or when yes the you laugh for no or contrariwise of course you will have a sudden moment of exalted speech is this going to be significant our proposed slapstick I do recommend bloomfeld and which i think is is yes visualize it as you're going along I'm going to anymore about it I need the pleasure to you and if you can hold forth moment because it came as a complete surprise to me when I was translating the story a little woman told by I would say a rejected suture retrospectively on the whole relationship and it begins it there's a little woman who is always annoyed at me and so it goes on and for once I think it's for once this focusing on the single narrow point of view and believe me it's tunnel vision means by the end you couldn't see absolutely why that little woman is annoyed at him and was like finally it's getting to ending in a party I I do remember there was a passage in it I wasn't sure how to I didn't understand it took it to a German speaking friend of mine said can you one practice for me and she looked at it and she smiled and I picked up her smile and by the end we were both of us roaring with laughter at it and truly truly it may be just a woman's way of reading this exceedingly self-centered man's account of wealth those who shouldn't have been seeing each other and I must say I find it very very funny and unexpected again recommended I'm only really talking about metamorphosis when I described this but it seems to me that in that story which I was rereading recently in the mirrors version what can be funny is precisely the earnestness of it as long as there's as long as the background scenario to that if you like I realize it but once you've set up that situation I think you can refer to it you can bounce off at any number of times and it's funny there's a moment before the pin has dropped for Gregor where he's charging around the house with all his little legs saying that the chief Clark can't possibly be allowed to leave before I've made my explanations otherwise it will endanger my position at the firm and he's a sort of giant bug feeling terribly worried about his position at the firm so he hasn't caught up with where we are and to me that's very funny because he's a very warrior giant bug also reread in their translation quite recently and have reread and other translations so grindingly horrible and disturbing that I question your sanity young man because for me and I was thinking about this and what struck me about metamorphose is when I first read it and maybe again I'm missing something completely or maybe dare I raised the awful spective is in some sense for this reader at any rate untranslatable because it relates to what you say you think I was funny about it to me the most horrible thing about meta morphosis and this relates to again to movement and the relationship in Kafka always between posture of the individual gesture of the individual and the movement of the individual through space which he constantly writes about his constantly moving his characters around much more so than relative to a lot of other writers a totally static with their characters they'll say basically they put their character in a chair and they stay there so the same things for a while and then they'll put them to beds do that quite a lot I'm probably guilty of it a great deal the kefka's characters are constantly an interplay between gesture and where this becomes horrible and meta morphosis is you think because it's so well described the practical problems of being an enormous verminous probably insectoid creature that I believe it's never actually defined I suspect he's a bedbug often translates it as vermin and I think it is vermin in the German isn't it it's no cockroach is not insect interesting that it always does get translated way anyway to get my point is that the predicament is they're practical it's that practical and bodily then there should be a practical bodily solution to it and why it's so tormenting to hear Gregor suffer in this way is you think is you you're with him you think yes if only you could get your little legs to work together or if only you could somehow figure out a way of doing this or if only you could get the Apple that's embedded in your back and out of it everything would be okay and that's not funny no but I think I think maybe the the central point is with humor and with the funny is that there is a moment of the incongruous and incongruity can be achieved in a number of different ways and it can be that that our chicken oh it can be a sudden shift in register it can be pulled up through repetition until you which it becomes funny because of that repetition and I wonder whether the description of Gregor running around on his little legs this this sort of repetition and building up and building up creates that incongruity which then needs release through laughter and I think maybe in Congress is our solution for Kafka's humor because what we would be perceived as in Congress may be may be culturally specific because of what we consider is normal and but we do have funny strange as well as funny huh is there more of an information in the german-speaking world to laugh at funny peculiar then there is in the english-speaking world I only draw one back again to the idea not just of Kafka reading these stories aloud to his friends and then Reilly smiling and occasionally letting out the odd you know kind of explosion of kind of the darkness of this Healy era tea but actually laughing do we believe this well one account has him laughing hysterically at certain points right we know a trial allowed and I think that's because it was his you know his own experience and it was a response to that this sort of fear that there were in the trial yeah I just wanted to say that I think it's a bit I always felt it was a bit of everything because I always thought that Kafka sense of humor was quite cruel and I always always thought that um the bits and the text were I thought it was funny it was kind of a laughter that stuck in my throat it was it's part slapstick but in such unexpected situations where you really don't expect to be laughing and and I think that that always had a certain cruelty and that's why I think it also makes sense that Kafka himself was laughing when he was reading the text out loud because he was very aware of that perhaps is it that he's allowed to laugh he has permission or license to laugh at cruelties that he feels have been enacted on him it is your what is your native language German German so you're talking about obviously reading him in German and funny but I mean I again from my you know sadly one-sided perception of German culture German culture seems rich in irony and and many forms of irony they don't seem to be you know just one kind of humor in Germany at all but it seems as layered and preoccupied by the ironic as a culture as English language culture is would that be fair can you characterize the difference I mean irony in in England not that strikes me as strongly situational it's strongly allied to class discourses and to situations of you know the classes being thrown into propinquity with one another people you know people being in the know and people not being in the know is that true of Germany or are we talking about a difference of a sense of irony and hurry are already accused me of associative thinking I think so I think the only thing I can say about that is my own experience the party of what I enjoy so much about English is that it allows you to make a joke out of everyday speech as you go along as it's its situationally tied and you can you can turn that into a little comic remark and it's it's tied into into discourse hmm and whenever I try to do that in Germany when I go back and and talk it always falls flat it just doesn't work and so that is one difference that I've noticed so that's always the disjunct between us it word the dictionary meaning of the word and the demotic use of the word you can play upon there all the time you can reverse you can extract irony from a semantic disjunction in the spoken language the whole time you don't do that in German in the same way well we must have forget the word Kafka was in one sense the demotic language was Czech and he was a fluent Czech speaker unusually insisted on speaking Czech but there's this confusion where German was the language of education but also the language of the Jews in the region which created no doubt huge inner conflicts as well as external conflicts in the First World War when German speakers supported Germany against all the other leagues of Nations and then of course look what happened in the Second World War so you've already got not so much a class system going on within the language but different languages operating in different ways right does kefka's german prose allude to that though i mean i know he's you know he will reference yes his name for example as a motif but are there other resonances the existence his name was an invented name yeah there wasn't an are there are other references within the text to this check straw I'm wondering about the peasants in the right and the guy and the pigsty and all the rest of it I don't know Austrian or not necessarily Bavarian I think but but austro-hungarian rather than German you see sometimes platform and when he puts language into the mouths of the father figures that Corson's rather and to that extent I think it has a kind of speech melody this not pure right but it's not he's not referencing Czech necessarily he would be referencing maybe well the the kind of Germans but by austro-hungarian provincial just one other thing it struck me as significant you but the famous story about the the friends falling about laughing they were actually listening to the to the works being read aloud I think that connects with something that you said the very beginning of the discussion about about trying to mimic and that there's a question of voice here as well which is is very important to the humor and perhaps very very difficult one of the the most difficult translation tasks to actually capture the voice right certainly the tan bra and the Annunciation and the extent to which he would have modulated it in reading but I can't help but feeling its timing surely there must be an element in in the timing with which the phrases are uttered that must create humor I'm missing I think there is in that line that Karen picked up just before which the expect finishes and there is timing in the freezing they have it's different from the one the the one just after yes yes well yeah I was thinking that in that last paragraph I we were talking about that shift over to to the doctor complaining how they demand the impossible it's that sort of country voice almost we talked about it that that goes on and it actually builds and the the next two lines he goes on complaining and I'm putting forward in the German it is movie is believed and that's this really quite fussy but also pompous impersonal way of saying well if you demand this of me then of course I do whatever and and it so the phrase goes on and builds and becomes more annoyed and and that that is I think timing in terms of building up okay hi so I've got a question about translation in a slightly different sense by which I mean the reception of Kafka by English novelists in the 1930s and I suppose there are two parts the question one is an interest which I having in asking will whether or not he's read people like Edward upward and Rex Warner who were using Kafka that kind of certain elements of Kafka know I think an interesting way in the 1930s as that would seem to me to be some kind of missing link in the literary history which might might go from it from Kafka to your own work and the other part of the question is to ask the panel I mean what what they think about the importance of this legacy and and the extent of it and its importance okay well I can be brief no I'm not familiar with their work no that was a good answer I feel I think I really covered it so I can hand it back to I think I could say something there because I didn't have a look at them in the light of Edwin Muse introductions to his translations he constantly refers to Africa Kafka's novels in terms of what he calls good allegory picking up from mark spots introductions and I think that's the dimension which is is force is a kind of consistency of reading on the novels but that is reading about the introduction to yeah translation yes but I mean notes I'm not pressing right and I had two crowns broad mystery princess broad max blurred once it both ways he wants both to dismiss the idea that Kafka is an allegory stand of course that's probably because kefka's told him flat-out personally that he is not but he also wants to reclaim him for allegory and to his own essentially zionist program at the same time so in a mural mills doing the same sort of thing in a way is new but more programmatically for yes dimension and again as an early translator looking for a familiar model and finding it in Bunyan the reverse of Bunyan how difficult it is to be the modern pilgrim now well he won a series a God's image yeah interpretation comes in there there was one I'm sure you know one famous reader who of course was not impressed by all this allegory and everything else and Thomas Martin gave Albert Einstein Kafka novel and Einstein handed about him a couple of days later and said the human mind really isn't that complicated anyway I had a very proficient tutor at University German tutor at University who was after the war going to Nuremberg and he was a quote an officer and he was sitting on a train officer two British squad II and the squad he bought a book out of his bag already my tutor was a bit shocked and the book was teach yourself check and he took him probably up to cologne to say to the guy what why do you why do you want to read jack why you learning check that because I want to learn I want to read Kafka in the original and my my tutor then spent most of the journey thinking do I tell him that he might read a few letters but he can't and he opted not to read to tell them that calf cracks she wasn't written in check oh is it nature why because I suppose he didn't want to burst his illusions and he found it very difficult to believe that anyone could see this as being a that isn't that precisely you chose about the boy thinking the doctor is the one person who's going to save him and the one person is actually not going to be able to save him is in fact the doctor isn't that the Kafka situation that it is indeed incongruity that the letters of the Father is the one person you want love from is the one person you're never going to get love from other people see it as someone who actually you've characterized your tutor as patrician and he's being he was being deeply patronizing to imagine that it would burst the it was you wouldn't do it to appear you would not say if you seal your peer making that egregious an error you would help them out of it yeah but we all laughed and then we laughed at the laugh no I think no we were laughing at class class condescension what the Kafka life is a cruel laugh isn't the hunger artist or the letter to your father cruel laughs I had no inhibitions when I'm a few years ago I was on TV panel program before the book on BBC Four and the producer Peter Kessler is a friend of mine said would I be one of the panelists for the year it was first publication of the tribal and various other books and I said I thought somebody ought to back for trial who not only couldn't read it in German but Henry in German and it was a great surprise to my friend Peter the producer that it was in German it was in the air I fed vegetation and telling you and what's more I was rather pleased we gotten the file it was never deign to win in that year against the Greeks gets it but it ki got it up to second okay can we just backtrack on this for a minute because it's fascinating and Amanda really raised it and I should have raised it earlier and I you both of you Joyce and Anthea have to have must have more to say about this the particular status of being a little island of German speakers cut off even from the rest of the sedation Germans on on the border this little sort of isolated kind of lager of German speakers in Prague does that not and something to kefka's German does it not add something that we've taught here we have a country doctor but it does you actually if the country the country wasn't inspired by zero which is in saran which is in bohemia' what's going on there what is really going on there what are other people in kefka other than the protagonists speaking what are the country people speaking is there some registering in the german original of this other language community encircling refers to ters and pianist dodge right the desired dissatisfaction with his own style because he's perpetually annoyed yeah what I think you said either you were and they said was kind of and you find it in all of the notebooks is a kind of rage both at languages in precision and its precision you know you feel he's always feeling that language either takes him too far or not far enough and the irritation with his own lips release anybody else in the audience Kefka was a dispossessed person in a way in terms of language I'm wondering whether it's possible to convey that in any translation that sense of his of him thinking in one language perhaps and writing and speaking in another whether that that sense could be can be conveyed in a translation in German German language I understood his ocean yeah check yeah I I think if you read the dyers in the letters something much clearer comes out simply from the life he was leading in his for helping in his father's shop the assistants who were check and Kafka out of the tip civility he learns check to get on with them similarly in his grown-up job he as an insurance adjuster he is meeting people who've been damaged in accidents they had the check check to them but it was learnt it was acquired it didn't come naturally his father's Yiddish had his father simply didn't speak Yiddish any longer but had done and he's in a strange situation because as I understand it check itself was a debatable tongue in the sense that under the influence of the absorption into the austro-hungarian Empire check itself that it needed to be revived in the night to the century I think it has been under threat and indeed was in a reciprocal relationship when the nationalism - prior to that not so long before it had been a dwindling tongue so what we have is a picture of a very contested linguistic area indeed the foundation of Czechoslovakia at the end of the First World War Czech nationalism was on the rise which Kafka supported and the Czech language was more widely disseminated and he actually chose to work I mean most Jews worked in Jewish businesses that was the easiest way to operate and spoke German and all the rest of it but he chose to work in this industrial compensation or claims insurance claims building where he was one of only two Jews on a quota working so his colleagues would have spoken French check bet anyway so he was putting himself in a check right and when he was in the office speaking and he would have spoken check yeah just going back very quickly to something that anthias said earlier on about perhaps the sort of responsibility to the reader and responsibility to the writer when when when translating and and how and we talked about voice if you like all kind of music things that we we hear and perhaps sort of a space of of nothingness of no language before sort of a transformation into the other language and which I find fascinating and perhaps can relate to a lot more than some of the ideas in in for example and Benjamin or in anbar tears even and I was wondering how you felt about that certainly in my reading of the task that translator the sort of the reader seems to fall away and equally that the writer seems to fall away we're probably closer to some sort of but has an idea of the intention of the the text could you discuss it's something that I'm trying to trying to get my head round in reading that and reading also metamorphoses in in in German and in English and by the way I'm with my friend over there and their things hilarious the first few bits that sort of that sort of conflict I think Benjamin comes across to me as a lot more of a theorist and then we went when I've read what practitioners and what I've heard what you've just now said doesn't seem to quite work in practice well you started off with my point it is very difficult for the translator herself or himself to say how successful he or she has been it's up to the reader and and it is a great gift to have good editors I've been a little rude about copy editors sometimes because if we're not and then I get the feeling that they think oh well this woman may know the language is translation from but she needs me was my shiny new degree in English but oh right and then they get me wrong and quite often you know mixing up the verb to lie as in the lie down and the verb to lay you do not need on yourself and you wouldn't believe how many people get this all mixed up my son writes a column in The Times entitled the pediments and all the stuff he complains about I agree with but copy editors will commit to these things if you get a really good copy editor oh there was a way to go penguin have a wonderful month I don't know if she's in house or freedom that's all well and good but you're meant to be discussing the extent erection I guess the reader is very much alive for you and you're thinking of the writer and you are thinking of the reader when you're when you're translating well it's the text is what we have in common isn't it and we are in fact substituting one takes for another and we have to deal with the encounter between the two texts immediatey using III I mean for my penneth then you mean in his essay definitely believes that the texts voice is the one that should be heard and is not interested certainly in the reader at all I mean he says explicitly that he's not interested in the Rideau or indeed the complete as it were recipient of any what he's looking for is some kind of great tintinnabulation of the aesthetics fears the carries on ringing down the ages he says that it would not he says that the the aim of good translation is to create something that would be heard perfectly even if there were no one to hear it because the situation is not dependent upon whether or not anybody registers in and and he's talking and actually coming out of a German fellow logical tradition he's particularly interested in the evolution that as it were the natural organic evolution of language in its own terms so he tends to view language as being an organism in that way it doesn't he which is so that's my take on it thank you if you don't care about the reader who you are you're not going to translate any books because nobody's right but he's trying he's trying to rescue you as translators from what he calls with a marvelous word which I hadn't heard before the idea that is somehow been I'll stick to be a translator in other words artisanal in some sense so he's trying to rescue you from your sight he wanted to tell you that you're not crossed when they're in fact your philosophers that's whatever that's that's the aim of his aspect is to establish translation as being on a par and of course I think he was a professional translator himself so you know obviously he was bigging it up for the Benjamin Posse as we might say in a contemporary demotic language and the other part of your question just very briefly was on column Bart I think and I mean he's written the shortest and the densest essay there is on Kafka including his language in his translation but at least he ends by quoting Kafka and he quotes CAFTA saying in the duel between you and the world always back the world which kind of puts paid to everything we've just said about man in a narrative voice and synchronizing it into the target language because it contradicts it completely the questions actually links to what you've just been saying and I'm it's a question to the translators and given what we spoken about which benjamine and and the echo and trying to it sounds like you're trying to create the perfect to move as closely as you can towards what is could be the perfect translation of a text but but stepping back from that and looking at perhaps the constrictions of German versus English or vice versa have you ever felt in your translation you've created a more perfect phrase or more funny and funnier threat phrase or for you know a fairies that has surpassed the language of the original author because English has a better way of expressing that that idea and and if that has happened have you have you chosen your second best to equal I don't think it would be a pretty pretty poor translation well then that may just be a function the caliber of the words that you translate I mean surely it's perfectly possible to imagine you know again back to Benjamin he means that he says that precisely the books in which it's possible to translate an informational e with exactitude are not really worthy of translation it says but by linking to the humor side you things aren't funny but sometimes you might translate a sentence and find it hilariously funny English and have to pull the humor back that's all well three years ago the Oxford Veda felt prize which was won that year by such as Tennessee Chism how the soldier repairs the gramophone which is a book for the video award was a very strong strand of humor and also shortly there was translated by a young man and it was very good I listened to his reading and I said to him afterwards that was marvelous funny as difficult isn't it and he said very very truthfully yes you're wondering all the while have I gone too far if I tipped over into being facetious I would also add an anecdote there of a friend of mine who years ago had he had the task of translating the memoirs of Queen Juliana of the Netherlands into English laughs out loud stop by the magical wasn't a matter of jokes but but now simplicity of the good lady's observations on life I can't do this but I think he did it was quite good but there I think he did her wrong well perhaps on that rather regal know something we may have to close I think yes we well close we can migrate just outside tomorrow there's going to be some wine and there can be further conversation and so on and so forth but first of all I'd like to thank all of you for coming to thank colleagues at city including Karen who's put a lot of work into this evening as well and Sophie coven and Spencer Belle who arranged everything you see around you all the technical stuff the room and all the rest of it two professors Steve cultural head of school and Howard tumba who's our Dean this whole event and of course to our translators who not only have in common that they translate Kafka but they also happen each of them quite coincidentally to be translators of Freud and of the Brothers Grimm which seems again to be very much encapsulated with what we've been talking about to do with Kafka and fairy tales and the subconscious and I really do think that in response to the question about improving on the original and humor and here was too modest I tried to persuade her to say something about translating aesthetics and she wouldn't but honestly anyone who gets the dog into dogmatix I think has done very well indeed and of course thank you to - well who's also been over modest who not only invented a whole language in the book of Dave and to prove his linguistic interests and credentials but has also written just a few introductions here and there - two books by the Russians we have book a cough and yevgenii Sun Yat in and also two books by Jacques battalion phenol saline among others so we're delighted to have this multinational cosmopolitan discussion between all of us here we have to leave the room now but do let's continue it outside thank you for coming you

Channel: London Review of Books (LRB)

Views: 18,741

Rating: 4.9390864 out of 5

Keywords: Franz Kafka (Author), Will Self (Author)

Id: ZEoChoEDtZc

Length: 102min 3sec (6123 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 24 2015