KAFKAESQUE
From Jorge Luis Borges to Primo Levi, Ten Writers Who Translated Kafka and Transformed Twentieth-Century Literature
by Maïa Hruska ; translated by Sam Taylor
An exploration of Kafka through the lens of early translators like Borges, Celan, and Levi.
In this debut, Hruska investigates the impact of 10 translators, all while aiming to recontextualize the “much-misused” titular adjective. She understands that Kafka’s ineffable essence is rooted in his liminality: He was a German-speaking Jew living in Prague in the early-20th century, and a broad sense of displacement permeates his oeuvre. But Hruska repeatedly attempts to present Kafka’s translators in a way that has their efforts echo the themes of their subject. “What Kafka’s translators have in common with his characters,” she broadly suggests, “is that they were all, one day, torn from the place that had nurtured their relationship with their language and with the world.” These arbitrary connections come at the expense of more in-depth investigations. Snappy lines attempt to overlay these translators directly onto Kafka’s fiction: She claims they worked like “K, the land surveyor, advancing towards the Castle, wide-eyed with surprise, wondering by which staircase, through which window or door, they might gain entry.” “Language is at once judge and jury; it’s a rigged trial,” she writes elsewhere to fold in another Kafka classic. A discussion of Kafka and Borges is weakened by a cursory search for parallels: Hruska claims “literature was their only source of tranquility. Their only habitable space; the only space in which they could find their way.” A chapter on French translator Alexandre Vialatte is more developed and one of the book’s highlights: Hruska illuminates an underappreciated facet of Kafka, noting that while writers like Camus “disguised him as some professor of despair,” Vialatte “saw the funny side of the Kafkaesque.” Alternatively, a chapter on Bruno Schulz spirals into a discussion of Schulz’s visual art and Nazism in Ukraine until Hruska awkwardly redirects: “So what does all this have to do with Kafka?” she asks. Readers will often find themselves asking the same thing.
An ambitious but meandering effort.