By nature, a translator must be flexible and approach each work as a separate challenge, although there are larger principles that guide translation in general. The foremost of these is to stay true to the text. This entails adhering to the author’s intentions, insofar as the translator can discern them, and being able to view the text as a distinct entity while not losing sight of the context in which it was written. The translator must decide how best to serve the not always compatible demands of the author, the reader, and the text. He or she must choose what to stress and what to sacrifice; some authors are noted for their particular use of language—Henry James and Ernest Hemingway come to mind; some are known more for the content of their work, the historical moment that they chronicle—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Harriet Beecher Stowe might be examples; and some, like Jorge Luis Borges and Franz Kafka, for creating a new kind of story altogether—familiar yet strange, rich in its specifics yet timeless in its reach.
There is always compromise in translation because every language affords different possibilities and imposes unique limitations. Still other problems arise when dealing with texts that were written long ago or in circumstances alien or unfamiliar to the contemporary reader or translator. If one completely modernizes a text, one risks losing the delicious essentials of time and place; if one adheres strictly to the language and knowledge of an earlier time, one may obscure the reader’s access to the timeless appeal of the original work. Although great literature often outlives its author, it is written at a specific time and in a specific place, and this must be taken into consideration when translating.
The stories of Franz Kafka largely address the human condition and are therefore timeless, but Kafka was also a German-speaking Jew in early twentieth-century Prague. One way that I have attempted, in this translation, to make his work accessible to the modern reader is to update his language, particularly in the dialogue, where modern idiom and phrasing have been employed with some regularity. On the other hand I’ve also maintained some of the vocabulary of the time in which Kafka lived. For example, the furniture, money, and clothing of his time and place are very different from those of ours, as are the words used to signify them. Using the English equivalents for the original European terms for these things, rather than convert them into their modern, American incarnations, helps to establish the actual historical time and setting in which the events take place and thus allows the reader to savor the ambience of the original instead of merely surveying its outlines. In this case it seems to me that this is an aspect of these texts that the reader need not and ought not be excluded from.
This translation attempts to present the stories of Franz Kafka in as readable a version as possible and in much the same way as they would be read and understood by the German reader. The singular situations Kafka’s characters find themselves in, the turns these situations take—at times uncanny, at times all too frighteningly routine—the sensation of being pressed to the existential brink without knowing how one got there (or whether one will be permitted to return) all have far more immediate impact than his diction. His language is, in fact, quite simple and straightforward; it is his verbal structure that is often complex. This is due, in part, to the structure of the German language, which builds sentences—often of astounding length—in modular units. Kafka did make diligent and sometimes amusing—and subversive—use of this aspect of his native tongue. But some of the older English translations have become mired in those structural complexities. As a result, the stories have been made less available to the reader than they might otherwise have been.
In an effort to cope with such difficulties, a proclivity has developed in contemporary American translation for rendering the original text as it might have been constructed if written by a contemporary American. Toward that end, modern idioms and rhythms are introduced. Sentence lengths and even paragraphs are restructured to embrace the American ear. Translators who employ this style feel this is the best way to bring the original across and keep it fresh.