The current volume is a translation based upon the first unexpurgated German edition of the diaries, free of Max Brod’s editorial influence or (to put it unkindly) his distortion and censorship. This is vaguely, but also distinctly, ominous: a very Kafkaesque atmosphere. But the now-traditional view, that he is the prophet and poet of a nameless, shapeless, all-enveloping threat in modern life, seems to be borne out in this new translation of the author’s diaries: Is it possible that I at first discern the future in its cold outlines with understanding and desire and only when pulled and pushed by them gradually enter the reality of this same future?
If the translation of a single, not very complex sentence can give rise to such differences in meaning, imagine the cumulative effects of different translations over an entire book! When we say that something is Kafkaesque, do we refer to Kafka or to translations of Kafka-or, if they coincide sufficiently, to both? In his introduction to an edition of Metamorphosis, the novelist Adam Thirlwell suggests that we have misunderstood Kafka much as Magarshack said we had misunderstood Chekhov, and that Kafka is much more playful than we have hitherto given him credit for.
I think it reads better, though why they added fine to “one morning” I do not know-it is not in the original text-except that it emphasizes in advance the arbitrariness of the arrest. There is nothing in the original about the state of Josef K.’s knowledge of any wrongdoing, and to be arrested knowing that one has done no wrong is different from being arrested while innocent in the opinion of an omniscient narrator. These two versions obviously relate to the same original, but they are importantly different. This is how David Wyllie translated it seventy years later: Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., he knew he had done nothing wrong but, one morning, he was arrested. Here is the first English translation, by Willa and Edwin Muir, published in 1937, ten years after the book appeared in German: Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning. There are few more distinctive or familiar openings of a twentieth-century novel than that of Kafka’s The Trial.
An author can be utterly misrepresented in a language that is not his own: David Magarshack, for example, who translated Chekhov’s plays, argued that the entire Western approach to Chekhov was grossly mistaken and based solely on mistranslations that, especially in English, falsely emphasized the melancholy aspect of his work. The job of a translator is both difficult and one of great responsibility.
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