Dying in Language: World Literature Through the Prism of Misreading and Mistranslation

ABSTRACT

Theory of world literature used to stand extensively on the premises of translatability and readability through which works of literature become recognized as world literature. However, one alternative avenue of theoretical investigation for the ways literatures achieve global avowal is through the other chances offered by “misreading,” “mistranslation” and “untranslatability.” Untranslatability is a relatively new means of inspection in literary studies and criticism, which revisits the act of translation by re-considering the moments of failure, resistance, and impossibility of translation. If translatability has been regarded as the only and secure road to synthesize globally recognized literature, yet untranslatability might also enhance the possibility of supplementing literary worldliness. The article tests and investigates the chances of universalizing and canonizing literature through the spectrum of misreading and mistranslation by applying such notions in the cases of Borges and Kafka.

摘要

世界文学理论一度坚持认可可译性和可读性，由此文学作品才能被公认为世界文学。然而，另一种使文学获得全球声誉的途径是“误读”，“误译”以及“不可译性”。“不可译性”是文学研究和批评中一种相对较新的检查手段，它通过重新考虑翻译的失败、阻力和不可能的时刻来重新审视翻译行为。如果“可译性”被视为综合全球公认文学的唯一而安全的途径，那么“不可译性”也可能增加补充文学世俗性的可能性。本文通过对博尔赫斯和卡夫卡的误读和误译，分析文学普遍化和经典化的可能性

KEYWORDS:

• Dying in language
• world literature
• misreading
• mistranslation
• untranslatability

关键词:

• 在语言中消亡
• 世界文学
• 误读
• 误译
• 不可译性

1. Borges dies in language

In his memorial book “With Borges” published in 2006, the Argentinian author and literary critic Alberto Manguel recounts his childhood encounter with the prominent Argentinian poet Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) as his book aloud reader. In what seems to be like “memories of memories,” the book illustrates in an autobiographical style what remains in Manguel’s memory of the days he was the special and fortunate reader of Borges between 1946 and 1968. Because of his blindness – settled in him gradually from the age of thirties – and his obsession with reading, Borges asked a sixteen-year-old boy to work for him as a part-time reader. At first, Alberto Manguel was not fully aware of the upcoming privilege of being the reader of a canonized world literary figure as Borges.

During his recounting of the moments with Borges, Alberto Manguel stopped at his last encounter with Borges, that was in 1985 in the basement of the breakfast room at l’Hotel in Paris. What comes is an illustration of that last meeting:

He talked – says Manguel- ‘about the cities he thought of as his – Geneva, Montevideo, Nara, Austin, Buenos Aires - and wondered (he wrote a poem about this) in which one he would die. He discarded Nara, in Japan, where he had “dreamed of the terrible image of Buddha, whom I had not seen but touched.” “I don’t want to die in a language I cannot understand.”¹

Borges’s frightening sentiment of dying in a language he cannot understand manifests as a rhetoric expression over the problematic positionality of dying in literature and language by translation. It also sets out the possibilities of interpreting the death and rebirth of literature through translation as a process of transgression and reincarnation. Of course, Borges is not afraid of being translated into a foreign language as he himself admired being read and interpreted in different languages. The literary interpretation of city of Nara as an understandable language is representative though; it symbolizes Borges’s view of cities he visited as some sort of languages, which by their assembly create an open book that belongs to the universal book. The universe according to Borges is but an already settled book written with such thoroughness whereby the human being plays the role of a bad reader. Borges’ thought also symbolizes the dying author who struggles with his dissipating shadow having no ultimate authority over his master; he is but a reader of an already written book that belongs to the library of Babel.

In his essay “La busca de Averroes,” Borges traces the reason why Averroes has missed the real meaning of “Tragedy” for “panegyrics” and “Comedy” for “satires” while translating Poetics of Aristotle. Having been known as the father of the Untranslatable for mistaking the translation of these two artistic concepts, Borges wonders how could it be that Averroes did not consult works such as Alexander of Aphrodisia, Nestorian Hunain ibn-Ishaq and of Abu-Bashar Mata, or Abensida’s Mohkam. Borges tries different possibilities that could explain Averroes’s faulty translation to finally admit that Averroes’s interpretation is just like Borges infinite narration.

I felt that Averroes, wanting to imagine what a drama is without ever having suspected what a theater is, was no more absurd than I, wanting to imagine Averroes with no other sources than a few fragments from Renan, Lane and Asín Palacios. I felt, on the last page, that my narration was a symbol of the man I was as I wrote it and that, in order to compose that narration, I had to be that man and, in order to be that man, I had to compose that narration, and so on to infinity. The moment I cease to believe in him, “Averroes” disappears.²

Building on this analogy, Borges excuses Averroes for not having enough background and sources to consult regarding the meaning of drama and theater in Greek philosophy. He also sympathizes with Averroes’s unexpected mistake and views it as the moment where only philosophizing within language and interpretation is possible. For Borges, Averroes succeed in transcending the very obstacles of these two untranslatables by opting for interpretation as a strategy of cultural domestication. Borges’s reader, Alberto Manguel, comments on the Averroes affair by reminding us of the idiotic ambition of authors to write a mediocre book. For the beautiful one is already written there in the library of Babel, which is governed by the muse of impossibility. In other words, every author is but a mediocre copyist of an already existing sacred book. Hence, Averroes’s failure is according to Manguel “not just the only possible outcome of a literary endeavor, but its goal, its supreme achievement.”³

Translation is another name of a rhetorical death in a language, but it could also be asymmetric to real death. In her Against World Literature; In the Politics of Untranslatability, Emily Apter recounts the story of the theologians John Wycliffe (1330–1384) and William Tyndale (1494–1536) who translated the Bible into English and considers their case as “death-by-translation.” Wycliffe translated the New Testament from the Vulgate into Middle English in 1382 and had been judged by the clergy circle as a heretic. The same has happened to William Tyndale who explored his linguistic knowledge of Hebrew and Greek texts to translate the New Testament into English in 1526. Viewing him as a political threat to the biblical institution, Tyndale was condemned for heresy and sentenced to death in 1536.⁴ Interestingly enough, Apter interpreted the problematic death in these cases as related to the

sanctity of the language of holy writ that is freighted with the oldest authorization claims and questions of Judeo-Christian and Islamic hermeneutics: In what language did God originally speak? Did Adam speak the same language before and after the fall?⁵

The vernacular translation of holy text is therefore a violation of the sacred text and its holiness, and a threat to the holy right of the church over the Bible. In a sense, translation of the sacred text is a synonym of sacred sin, and a sort of blasphemy. In the Islamic hermeneutical traditions, the holy Quran is an untranslatable text that loses its spiritual meaning in translation. In this regard, Hassan Wail’s introduction of his translation of Abdelfattah Kilito’s book Thou Shalt Not Speak my Language relocates the word “tarjama” to its grammatical origins that signifies a meaning of death by beating. The word “tarjama” ‘shares the root “rajama,” which means to stone to death, and “rajm” which means killing, beating, battering, and revealing. Also there are other linguistic derivations such as “rajam” (well, cavity, hole in the ground, oven), “rajeem” (cast with stones, damned, an epithet of Satan…). Therefore, “tarjamah” (translation) “carries connotations of alienated speech that have the flavor of falsehood, damnation, and death, but also possibilities of survival, narration and understanding.”⁶

Alternatively, living in language is one such possibility that alienates the phantom of death away from the necks of writers, as far as they master the art of owning a language. Edward Said highlights this problem in his essay Living in Arabic⁷ while he traces the word “Eloquence” in the Arabic tradition and explores the defiant failure of owning a language while knowing it without living with it. In an autobiographical style, Said narrates his linguistic journey with classical Arabic as his mother language, with which he needs to revive its presence in his linguistic life. He reviews the prestigious status that Arabs allocate to speaking eloquently (“Fusha”) to the extent that it exemplifies a sort of “living with dignity.” Living in Arabic is, therefore, a philological return to a lost language that Edward Said portrays as an essential element in his dual identity as an insider and outsider alike.

Narrating and storytelling is another possibility of controlling one’s own death, of putting it off, and postponing it. As portrayed in One Thousand and One Nights, Scheherazade succeeded in stopping the misogynist and the long-standing crimes by the king Shahryar. After discovering his wife’s betrayal, the king decided to diverge a girl every night only to kill her by morning. Using the tales-within-tales technique or the strategy of framing, Shehrazade manage to solve her “predicament.”⁸ Knowing that her survival and womanhood is dependent on her “narrative performance,” Scheherazade “lays a perfect narrative trap for her dreaded auditor.”⁹ Contrary to classical literary traditions of the medieval era, the “Arab Nights” reveals a post-modernist sense of storytelling as it surpasses the axiomatic structure of “beginning-ending,” which is considered the basic style in any work of fiction. As such, the beginning has no end and remains unfinished until decided otherwise by the narrator.

The act of translation is also a declaration of war between the authors and their translators. The reason lies in the fact that writers are normally keen to secure an eloquent translation of their works, and that they do not tolerate any manipulation of their crafts. On the other extent, translators are also sensitive toward their co-brothers; they do not resist seeing them alive in their translation, as Abdelfattah Kilito describes in his Le Cheval de Nietzsche:

Les traducteurs, dit-on, détestent leurs confrères, mais ils ne s’en prennent pas, que je sache, aux auteurs qu’ils traduisent. Si, quand même, ils malmènent a leur façon. Des traducteurs de Millan Kundera, à titre d’exemple, lui ont fait du tort en prenant des libertés avec ses textes, à tel point qu’il les a fustigés dans L’art du Roman.¹⁰

Not only do translators hate their co-brothers for owning the privilege rights of their properties, but they also seek any opportunity to eliminate them and terminate their presence. In his What is World Literature, David Damrosch opens the book with Goethe Coins a Phrase referring to Goethe’s inventing of the word Weltliteratur. The chapter tells the story of Johann Peter Eckermann and his relationship with Goethe, whom he met and published a book about his titled Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens. Eickermann admired Goethe and his poetry when he published his first book Contributions to Poetry, with Particular Attention to Goethe and sent a copy to Goethe for review, but without any reply. Surprisingly, Goethe finally contacted his new disciple and invited him to settle in Weimar and introduced him to his highly close network of literary scholars and poets, something like “the invisible society.”

The goal of Damrosch, beyond recounting the history of Eickermann with Goethe, is to demonstrate how a work of literature achieves global recognition by circulation in the world out of its place of origin. For this sake, Eckermann’s book provides an “interesting example of a work that only achieves an effective presence in its country of origin after it has already entered world literature; in a movement that would hardly have surprised Goethe, the book’s reception abroad set the stage for its subsequent revival at home.”¹¹ The importance of the circulation of literature through translation explains the reason why authors are keen to write potential translating works, that is to say, to write a work that can be easy to translate into world languages.

Goethe is constantly among those categories of writers who like to read their works in translations. Indeed, Goethe expresses his desire to transcend the German literary space toward other European and non-European spaces. In other words, he desires alternative lives in different languages:

I do not like to read my Faust any more in German,” he remarks at one point, but in a new French translation he finds his masterwork “again fresh, new, and spirited”—even though the translation is mostly in prose.¹²

Yet, what is at stake in the story of Goethe and Eckermann is the fact that an emerging author, as a newcomer to the market of writing, can become the center of intention by eliminating or being close to his noticeable master. The conversation originally published as Gespräche mit Goethe becomes Conversations with Eckermann. In the first edition, it seems that “Eckermann’s authority over his text diminished along with his authorship.”¹³ However, as I argue, Eckermann had in fact gained a new positionality and sovereignty by becoming the center of interest as a noticeable reference in Goethian poetry and tradition.

Untranslatability serves also as another possibility of surviving from dying in translation. Abdel Fattah Kilito depicts untranslatability as a linguistic strategy that the medieval Arab writers used to follow in order to escape the gluttonous translators of the era. In his Al-Maqamat,¹⁴ widely known as the sequences or assemblies of Al-Harīrī,¹⁵ the Islamic medieval author Al-Harīrī complicates his writing and shows his fear for being easily translated thus making it more challenging.¹⁶ The reason beyond using this strategy lies in the desire for surviving against the brutal overrun of translators. Late English translators of the assemblies, such as Thomas Chenery, tried to explain Alhariri’s enclosed language by relating that to the poetic rhyme of Arabic literature. In the opening of his translation, Chenery relates the sequences’ linguistic identity to Alhariri’s engaging with the “philological discussions all his life, and having audiences equally zealous, was led naturally and almost unconsciously to insinuate into his work the subtleties which were uppermost in his mind.”¹⁷

The habit of making texts untranslatable by the Arab medieval authors reflects their egoist desire to write unique pieces of writing. This intent is derived from their resentment against the encroachments of the copyists and translators who used to translate extensively only to show their mastery to decode any untranslatable text. Contrary to the Medievalists’ ethnocentrism, modern authors are seeking global circulation of their works by permeating its translation and facilitating its transplantation from the very moment of writing. In other words, they are writing a translating works already in the making.

2. Kafka untranslated

Kafka’s legendary case exemplifies a significant literary figure who has been canonized and universalized through successive translations, interpretations, and mistranslations of his works. The process of interpretation and re-interpretation of Kafka’s legacy is, in fact, driven by the far-ranging and ambiguous world of Kafka, which some would call the “Kafkian system” or the “Kafkaesque” to suggest the literary, artistic, social, and political contexts within which he was raised and canonized. The richness of Kafka’s context, as shown in his texts, sets forward a multitude of possible readings from different perspectives be the Freudians, Marxists, existentialists, and others.

The global reception of his texts has set in motion Kafka’s untranslatable language and its strangeness that reinforces a broad range of interpretations and translations seeking to untangle and recodify what rests behind Kafka’s language. The untranslatability of Kafka’s texts stems also from his multilingual status, within which many languages cohabit and bear the situation of minor literatures expressed in the German language. Yet, an attempt at a full comprehension of Kafka’s texts and world is in vain without the consideration of three crucial pillars. Kafka’s transcultural background (system), his language as a fulcrum for understanding the power of multilingualism in shaping the canonization of an author, and finally the translations of his works whereby his untranslatability becomes the drive for an infinite translational movement.

Kafka has a complex multicultural background as a German Jewish intellectual with linguistic links to Yiddish. He was born in Prague and grew up in the nineteenth century Austro-Hungarian Empire. Such multiculturalism necessitates the examination of these different spaces as major external drives toward the canonization of Kafka. Pascale Casanova considers Kafka a “cult figure,” whose paroles and quotations have been used widely. Yet, she also thinks that his biography still lacks attention especially in terms of his relation to politics. In Kafka Angry Poet, Casanova calls for a new biography that will build on special literary history, reconnecting different contextual spaces and major transformations that has shifted Kafka’s literary production and helped him construct his powerful literary space:

It is possible to work on developing another kind of history by using the instrument of the literary field or space - a history that reconstructs all the components of a universe of thought, of positions adopted and of literary and political productions; a history of the relations maintained by coexisting and contemporary works within a given space, an archeology of commitments, ruptures, friendships, likes and dislikes; a reconstruction that is written not on the basis of an individual (as traditional literary history has it) but a collective entity to which the writer belongs whether or not he likes it, and whether or not he is aware of it. It is about renewing and extending the notion of biography by reconstructing the intellectual world to which the creative artist in question belongs.¹⁸

The new biography suggested by Casanova is something like a sociology of the Kafkian world in a broad sense, or what she calls “the universe of thought,” where every small detail or far-off relation can help in grasping the world republic of Kafka. It covers more than Kafka’s system,¹⁹ constituted by the totality of his writings not only in German originals, but also in their multilingual renderings, striving to reach an enlarged canon, or what Franco Moretti called distant reading where much larger tropes, devices, systems are necessary for the “condition of knowledge.”²⁰ Building on such a project, Casanova draws a new map of Kafka’s world by connecting three significant spaces: Prague, Berlin and New York:

Kafka found himself at the precise point of intersection of three overlapping intellectual, literary, and political spaces: Prague, at once a seat of administration within the Austro-Hungarian empire and the culture capital of Czech nationalism, to be sure, but also a city where the Germanized Jewish intellectuals who made up the Prague Circle still affirmed their identity; Berlin, the literary and intellectual capital of central Europe as a whole; and, finally, the political and intellectual space of eastern Europe, a world in which nationalist movements and Jewish workers parties emerged and Bundist and Zionist ideas clashed - not forgetting New York, the new city of Jewish immigration, center of politics, literature, drama, and poetry for the populations that had come to America from Russia and Poland.²¹

The circulation of Kafka within these three spatial spheres permits a manifestation of their literary systems in his writings. It exemplifies, not only capitals of literature and politics, but also spaces of aesthetics and poetics with which Kafka interacted and from where he emerged as a world figure. In fact, Casanova theorizes world literature, that is, those globally recognized works, by returning them to the imperial history of their nations where “the construction of national literary space is closely related to the political space of the nation that it helps build in turn.”²² In the case of Kafka, it would be difficult to locate him within a specific national history or heritage since he embodies within his own person multi-national and multilingual spaces. All of which have played out, to a certain degree, in the formation of his worldliness. Yet, such efforts of locating Kafka within a wide and complex context and system should also overturn many myths surrounding his fame as encapsulated, for example, in the notion of the “Kafkaesque.”

The reflection of such complexity, however, is best embodied in Kafka’s language characterized by its untranslatability and ambiguity. Part of that ambiguity stems from the fact that Kafka often uses “multivalent words; thus Process in German means not only ‘trial,’ but also ‘process’ or ‘procedure,’ while Schloss means ‘lock’ as well as ‘castle’.”²³ Some would describe it as symbolic, imaginative, figurative or else a “fluid language,” as described by Gilles Deleuze, a kind of “German language in Czechoslovakia intermixed with Czech and Yiddish, and which will only allow Kafka the possibility of invention.”²⁴ Deleuze has developed a crucial theory of Minor Literature on the strength of the particularity and the ambiguity of Kafka’s language, which was constructed within a major language and “affected with a high coefficient of deterritorialization.”²⁵ Deleuze went on to describe the process of deterritorialization underwent by Kafka as an impossibility of not writing in German:

Kafka marks the impasse that bars access to writing for the Jews of Prague and turns their literature into something impossible—the impossibility of not writing, the impossibility of writing in German, the impossibility of writing otherwise. The impossibility of not writing because national consciousness, uncertain or oppressed, necessarily exists by means of literature (“The literary struggle has its real justification at the highest possible levels”). The impossibility of writing other than in German is for the Prague Jews the feeling of an irreducible distance from their primitive Czech territoriality. And the impossibility of writing in German is the deterritoralization of the German population itself, an oppressive minority that speaks a language cut off from the masses, like a “paper language” or an artificial language; this is all the more true for the Jews who are simultaneously a part of this minority and excluded from it, like “gypsies who have stolen a German child from its crib.” In short, Prague German is a deterritorialized language, appropriate for strange and minor uses. (This can be compared in another context to what blacks in America today are able to do with the English language).²⁶

According to Deleuze, the Prague German is a deterritorialized language cut off from the masses as a result of living in an “irreducible distance” from the motherland and language. Deterritorializing the language is the first and crucial condition of forming what Deleuze calls Minor Literature, which also combines “the connection of the individual to a political immediacy and the collective assemblage of enunciation.”²⁷ Kafka was aware of his unique linguistic privilege as he embodies within himself many literary and linguistic spaces, yet he has succeeded in constructing his own minor literature in proximity with the German world language. Kafka’s linguistic mixture, where all degrees of territoriality and deterritorialization are played out, is accordingly, a language where “each sentence says, ‘interpret me,’ and none will permit it. Each compels the reaction, ‘that’s the way it is,’ and with it the question, ‘where have I seen that before?; the déjà vu is declared permanent.”²⁸

Adorno took everything in Kafka’s language literally without any metaphorical coverage when he stressed the need to interpret the Kafkian text directly against what he called “the short-circuit” of a work of art:

Kafka’s works protected themselves against the deadly aesthetic error of equating the philosophy that an author pumps into a work with its metaphysical substance. Were this so, the work of art would be stillborn; it would exhaust itself in what it says and would not unfold itself in time. To guard against this short-circuit, which jumps directly to the significance intended by the work, the first rule is: take everything literally; cover up nothing with concepts invoked from above.²⁹

Yet, his nuanced description of Kafka’s multivalent words bears, not only the status of allegory and symbolism, but also an impossibility of an exclusive interpretation, which makes every word says, “interpret me, and none will permit it.” In this sense, the text is both open and closed, soft, and rigid; a linguistic enigma that fits with the enigmatic aspect of Kafka’s subjects and style. Confronted by this situation, readers are tentatively faced with the “resistant materiality of language,”³⁰ which makes the task of discovering the meaning more challengeable than it seems. Even in the process of interpreting and translating Kafka’s words, one will soon fall in the trap of misinterpretation if not complete distortion as happened to many of his translators.

One essential argument that can explain the incommensurability and untranslatability of Kafka’s language is formed around the hypothesis of his multilingual tongue and its trace on the paper. Usually, the multilingual tongue embodies translational spaces, within which continuous practices of inner translation and interpretation take place from one language into another, from one poetic system into another, making the final product of the speaker a combination or an amalgam of languages in parole. Casanova builds on Kafka’s inclination and glory of Yiddish as a crucial catalyst beyond his unique deterritorialized language to implicitly suggest the power of Yiddish and its poetics performed in the German expression:

… one might in fact describe Kafka’s whole literary enterprise as a monument raised to the glory of Yiddish, the lost and forgotten language of the Western Jews, and his work as consisting in a despairing practice of German, the language of Jewish assimilation and the language of those who, by encouraging this assimilation, succeeded in making the Jews of Prague (and more generally of western Europe as a whole) forget their own culture. German was a “stolen” language whose use Kafka persisted in regarding as illegitimate. In this sense his work can be considered as entirely translated from a language that he could not write, Yiddish.³¹

Kafka’s linguistic capital and his literary enterprise are built on the assumption of the “impossibility of writing German” by the Jews of Prague and advocate strongly the positionality of writing as a translator. Kafka’s German is therefore but a Yiddish language translated into a “stolen” world language; something that may explain the fragmented and dispersed features of his language. Kafka himself recognizes his status of “in-betweeness,” or a “circus rider on two horses” as he described himself when a reviewer calls Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis, 1912) a decidedly German story and Max Brod characterizes it as a quintessentially Jewish tale.³² Suggestive as it is, Kafka’s multilingualism not only reflects his mastery of many linguistic poetics but also the embodiment of many traditions within his writings and his aesthetics, rendering his texts as world literature par excellence.

Given the uniqueness and ambiguity of Kafka’s language, the effort of translating him is doomed either to failure or to distortion. Yet, being untranslatable also provokes further attempts at interpreting him properly but not necessarily with success in terms of achieving a voice in the source language. In his What is World Literature? and under the rubric “Kafka Comes Home,” David Damrosch traces and recounts the role of translation and re-transcription in globalizing Kafka while crossing different literary and linguistic spaces. His main argument fits within the overall theory of circulation that he promotes, as being one of the main conditions that make a work of literature become world literature. While tracing the different translations of Kafka’s works either in German, English or in other languages, Damrosch argues for the role of this crossing and circulation through translation in the globalization of Kafka, as we know him today, as well as in interpreting his works as world literature.

Works that attain a lasting status as classics of world literature are ones that can weather a variety of tectonic shifts in the literary landscape. As they do so, their translations change along with their interpretations. Ours is an age of translation and also an era of retranslation, as translations are revised or replaced outright in order to bring works into conformity with new standards of translation and new interpretations of the works themselves.³³

Kafka has been one of the major literary figures to undergo such major transformations through new and different translations and interpretations of his works. The crossing and movement of Kafka’s works, from within the same language (German) or across new languages, as well as the revisions created along this journey are “noteworthy because they reflect the broad movement in literary studies toward cultural context, a shift that is especially significant for many works of world literature.”³⁴ Having been considered as a “culture-transcending figure,” Kafka’s linguistic and cultural background makes his literary experience significantly rich and complex at the same time. He belongs to the Jews of Prague, spoke German and learnt other languages including Czech, Yiddish and Hebrew. This multilingual and multicultural experience has enriched Kafka’s artistic creativity and affected, in another instance, his prose drafted in the local German of Prague while absorbing other multicultural voices embedded in it.

The first translations of Kafka into English were done by two Scottish translators Willa and Edwin Muir who have been considered the most influential names in the universalization of Kafka and who made him famous in the Anglophone world while his works were banned in Nazi Germany. In the United States he was perceived as an “early existentialist,” as can be seen in the collection titled Existential Imagination³⁵ edited by Frederick Karl and Leo Hamalian, in which Kafka is presented as being isolated and displaced from his origin. The shifting interpretation of Kafka, however, came this time from textual scholars such as Malcolm Pasley, who produced a new German Kafka and who criticized the Muirs’ English translations for not doing justice to Brod’s standardized first editions.³⁶ It is not until the new retranslation of Kafka’s The Castle, done by Mark Harman, that another new, different edition of Kafka in English has been available. This version breaks with the many insertions of new elements into the original source and “reflects the new and genuinely more accurate understanding of the novel’s situation.”³⁷

Much of the Muirs’ stardom as the notably famous English translators of Kafka rests, in fact, on the influence of Max Brod’s distinguished editions and their own? remarks on their perception and interpretation of Kafka. Brod is not only a close friend of Kafka, with whom he continuously conversed and corresponded prior to any publication and for any arrangement, but also the first translator, interpreter and co-editor of Kafka who took much freedom and power in refining most of his texts:

As Kafka’s editor, Brod found himself lumbered with a monumental task. The majority of Kafka’s prose texts are unfinished, and in many cases, the manuscript situation is ambiguous, making it difficult to decide what constitutes the text proper, or in what order its parts should be arranged. This is particularly true of The Trial, which appeared in 1925. Here, and elsewhere, Brod took many liberties in his editions. In the case of The Trial, he changed the order of chapters and omitted the unfinished sections to give the impression of a polished, complete work; he give titles to unnamed, unfinished stories and changed the name of Kafka’s first novel from the cryptic The Man Who Disappeared to the snappier Amerika.³⁸

The influence of Brod on Kafka’s final editions is crucial in the sense that his additional touches have overdetermined the allegorical meanings and symbols whereby in many cases what Kafka really intended to mean has been – literally – lost in translation. In his close reading of Kafka’s letters to his wife Felice, Elias Canetti put special focus on the very authority of Max Brod when he pressed on Kafka to publish his book Meditation even when the latter was not satisfied enough with the manuscript:

The compiling of short prose pieces from his diaries, for the book Meditation, had been keeping Kafka very busy. He was hesitant; the pieces did not seem to him good enough. Brod pressed him and kept the pressure up; eventually the book took shape, and on the evening of August 13 Kafka brought the final selection with him, intending, as has already been remarked, to discuss the arrangement of them with Brod.³⁹

Equally noticeable is the fact that Brod entitled the majority of Kafka’s works that the author himself left untitled, and to which he subsequently added a religious tone. Patrick O’Neill traces the translation of Kafka’s earliest work Betrachtung (1912) translated by the Muirs as Meditation (1948) to different European languages and demonstrates how these translations have been “strongly influenced by Max Brod’s propagation of Kafka as an essentially religious writer.”⁴⁰ In order to prove the effect of the titles issued by Brod with their heavy religious charges, O’Neill argues:

The title of Die Verwandlung (the metamorphosis), published in book form in 1915, potentially implies not only a physical transformation but also, among other possibilities, a psychological change of personality or a theatrical scene change. The term Verwandlung can also imply the conversion of water into steam for a physical or bonds into cash for an economist; in a legal context it can imply the commuting of a person’s sentence; and in the context of Christian belief, the transubstantiation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. While Kafka’s title was Die Verwandlung rather than Die Metamorphose, and despite his vigorous efforts to forbid any illustration depicting any physical transformation, mythological resonances are much in evidence - including especially on the titles of translations.⁴¹

As titles play an important role in introducing works to readers or sometimes summing up the work’s main theme, they shape the readers’ reception and influence the overall meaning of the text. In assigning titles to Kafka’s texts, Max Brod preferred those that have mythological resonances, full of allegory and metaphor against Kafka’s original names that are lucid in meaning. After the first English translation, all other European translations followed Brod’s example without any attempts to create new titles. Even those who tried to escape the mythological tones and resonances of the English translation have failed mainly due to commercial preferences dictated by editors. Malcolm Pasley’s translation in 1992 chose to translate Die Verwandlung as Transformation, yet the title appeared as The Transformation (“Metamorphosis”) and Other Stories, a mid-way solution between the preference of the translator and that of the editor.⁴² Therefore, the literary networks and systems have preferred the Muirs’ translations, which have been influenced by Brod’s major interference in Kafka’s production. Even when new translations of Kafka in recent decades have marked a decisive turn in Kafka scholarship, the first English translations still maintain their remarkable influence on the world readers of Kafka who could not dismantle that domination.

The circulation journey of Kafka across different linguistic and cultural spaces has marked an unprecedented tension between the ability to translate his texts and the possibility of mistranslation and misinterpretation. Starting with self-multilingualism, one can note how Kafka was experiencing a continuing inner-translation from Yiddish and Hebrew into German, and from the Jewish tradition into the German tradition thus allowing him to reach across many spheres with different origins. This positionality coincides also with the impossibility of writing in Yiddish, the language he could not speak yet remained in him as a voice that shapes his imagination, and in German that the Jews of Prague had deterriteriolized as a foreign language cut off from the masses. Max Brod’s powerful authority over Kafka’s textual editing also generated a series of mistranslations when he put allegorical symbols on Kafka’s texts and consequently influenced the overdetermined interpretation of the Muirs’ through their prevalent translations into English.

Yet, such frequent mistakes, mistranslations and misinterpretations of Kafka’s original texts are what opened Kafka’s space for an accumulation of new translations, by virtue of trying to revisit the inaccuracies and propose new receptive experiences. The will to uncover the “errance” of Kafka’s language – that “Reine Sprache” or “pure language” as once described by Walter Benjamin, which does not exist except as a permanent disjunction⁴³- is what also engenders new theories and approaches that try to explain the legendary status of Kafka. The Untranslatability of his language, in this sense, is the prominent drive behind his canonization. Each new approach assumes its objectivity and appropriateness to what Kafka intended to say, but none has really reached the ambiguity and mastery with which Kafka produced his works.

This aesthetic approach to Kafka’s oeuvre projects in fact only the thematic essence of Kafka’s texts, which folds – as Kundera recapitulated – the labyrinthine social institutions that one can neither escape nor understand, the platonic ideas of illusion, the absurdity of punishment, and the tragi-comic nature of the character’s life.⁴⁴ Yet, Kafka’s world is open to a larger scope of interpretation that can also include the state of incompleteness and non-achievement. For instance, in The Castle and The Trial, the experimentalism that invokes an overlapping present and future and the manipulation of its language means exactly what it fails to say. It is this liberal possibility of an infinite practice of interpretations that enables Kafkian scholarship to still offer fertile grounds for a critical novelty through either translation or interpretation. Therefore, canonization of Kafka has occurred and is still happening, thanks to the precedent overlapping causes, namely, the complex multicultural background and milieu of what we call “Kafka’s system,” the multilingual richness of Kafka’s tongue, Max Brod’s significant initial canonization of Kafka, and the role of linguistic untranslatability in engendering unfinished translations and retranslation movements. Those prominent factors have also opened many directions toward perceiving and reproducing Kafka in other fields of the humanities, especially in theater, cinema, and art, creating other channels for his canonization.

Yet, literary translations and their auxiliary notifications, notes, reviews, and essays have a crucial influence on the canonization and iconization of Kafka in global literary spaces. In Czech, the translations of Milena Jesenska, an intimate lover and translator of Kafka, enabled Kafka’s text to enter the Czech literary world space in a time when translation was a duty for the Czechoslovak nation. As a journalist who belonged to the new Czechoslovakian educated and emancipated women, Milena paved the way for Kafka to return to his homeland Czechoslovakia and to be spoken in another major language of his own, Czech. At the time, Czechoslovakia was building a national literary heritage and translating contemporary world literature was regarded as a means of introducing a “cosmopolitan view to the writing of the new Czechoslovakian republic, and women were at the forefront of the respected profession.”⁴⁵ Kafka’s relationship with Milena was a turning point in his introduction into the Czech public and his canonization in the Czech literary sphere. In this regard, Kafka’s beautiful Letters to Milena⁴⁶ could be read not just as romantic letters between two lovers but also as a “discourse on translation” and as an experimental practice of translation failure. Kafka knew the limits of Milena’s knowledge of German, so did Brod, but he was also aware of Milena’s beautiful German when she fails to understand or write in it. He understood the limits and possibilities of the act of translation, of the “inevitability of the untranslatability, of the intense and tough labor involved, and was acceptant and excited about the idea of the new life translation could bring to the original version of the work.”⁴⁷

Therefore, Kafka needed those transformers of his texts, those who could give his works life in different linguistic and cultural contexts and traditions, and those who would mistranslate and misinterpret him. Like the Muirs and Milena who still made it possible for his works to join the ranks of interpretation that he could have never imagined. This movement and circulation of Kafka’s texts will engender a proliferating string of readings again, thanks to which Kafka’s literary authority will continue to survive in different spaces and literary systems, as an essentially metatextual movement. Borges’s aesthetical readings and translations of Kafka is an excellent example of that “metatextual” presence and crossing when Kafka in return influenced Borges’s fictional style whereby the latter even imitates some aspects of the former’s work. Moreover, Borges payed a special tribute and homage to Kafka when he named one of his stories “The Sacred Latrine” in the Lottery of Babylon as “Qaphqa” which phonetically reproduces the word “Kafka.”⁴⁸ The figure of Kafka here is omnipresent; once as an influencer whose poetics has been revived in a Borgesian context and once as inspirational when his writing style inspired Borges to follow the same path as exemplified in some of his stories like The Library of Babel, which resembles Kafka’s The Great Wall of China.

Borges is not only a talented and attentive reader of Kafka, but also the person who helped him become a world literary figure through his translations, readings, and reviews. He has almost single-handedly revived and reproduced Kafka in the Latin American and Spanish literary world. In his article Kafka and His Precursors, Borges embarks on a rhizogenic reading of Kafka when he traces what seems to be the voice of Kafka’s aesthetic in different philosophical and literary ancient sources. Borges recognizes Kafka’s uniqueness by connecting him to various ancient traditions and renowned figures such as the pre-Socratic philosopher Zeno, the 9th-century Chinese author Han Yu, the Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard, the poet Robert Browning, the late 19th-century French novelist Léon Bloy, and the 20th-century English writer Lord Dun.⁴⁹ Through this manifold reading, Borges invested much more figurative greatness on Kafka’s idiosyncrasy and eccentricity, which might seem exaggerated in certain cases given the fact that Kafka could not possibly have had the chance to know or read one of those figures. Yet, Borges is in fact canonizing Kafka in different and foundational ways by matching him with far-off traditions, poetics, and aesthetics, thus constructing a kind of genealogy of his precursors. Consequently, Kafka remains a universal figure and his works are acknowledged as being world literature.

3. Conclusion

As elaborated so far, world literature can be reached, not only through the pathways of translatability and worldwide circulation, but also via the different channels of misreading, mistranslation, and interpretation. Furthermore, the theoretical implications of the sophisticated debates of untranslatability transcend the limits of literary theory and criticism toward the humanities at large. As such, the impossibility that rests in languages and its transplant also makes reference to the relation with language, to its possession, its friendship and alterity. Jacques Derrida introduces such questions in a completely different way by highlighting the possibility of owning a language, and of translating it into another language. For language exists in multiple shapes and does not exist in a monolingual status, and thus it becomes impossible to translate. Derrida highlights further insights around the concept “Aporia” that “involves a language that is impossible, unreadable, and inadmissible, an untranslatable translation.”⁵⁰ This speaks of the language and its multiple meanings that might be ungraspable especially during the conflict between rhetoric and thought, or between what the text means to say and what it is constrained to say. And yet, Derrida forms a dialectical analogy between the act of translatability and of untranslatability: “rien n’est intraduisible en un sens, mais en un autre sens tout est intraduisible, la traduction est un autre nom de l’impossible.”⁵¹ (In a sense, nothing is untranslatable; but in another sense everything is untranslatable, translation is just another name of the impossible). Thus, there is always a possibility of interpreting the impossible, and this is thanks to translation itself.

Similar to Derrida’s Aporia, Michael Foucault introduces the concept “Heterotopia” as an unthinkable space that projects the “utopia” as a “placeless place” and makes an interpretation of other possibilities of capturing reality. For Foucault, there exists always, and in any culture, a duality of spaces; one that represents reality and its inversion at the same time. He describes “Heterotopia” as places that are “outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality.”⁵² It refers to the reflection of images, figures, and people in an untouchable space where reality is merged with its unreal aspect. Foucault takes the example of the mirror as a type of “Heterotopia” to reveal the dual positionality of being “here” and “out there.”

The mirror functions as a heterotopia in this respect: it makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there.⁵³

This heterotopia, this unthinkable space of dual reality, is considered another facet of untranslatability in so far as it presents an untouchable space of imagination and thought. It refers also to the virtual and transcendental space that cannot be measured following the standards with which other material spaces are captured. Therefore, it cannot be translated as such since it exists in a “no-where” placement. However, the danger that rests in such philosophical discussions is the fact that the “untranslatable” – as Emily Aper remarked while referring to Barbara Cassin’s Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles - might be used as an “epistemological fulcrum for rethinking philosophical concepts and discourses of the humanities.”⁵⁴Cassin’s purpose is to test the possibility of what she calls “philosophizing within languages” during the moment of untranslatability; when concepts bear and hold their own perspective of the world. And as Cassin says:

The perspectives constitute the thing; each language is a vision of the world that catches another world in its net, that performs a world; and the shared world is less a point of departure than a regulatory principle.⁵⁵

On this basis, Cassin intends to problematize the act of translation and its constraints, especially regarding some very influential ontological concepts. And by doing that, she wants to “de-westernize” philosophy and knowledge production. Such epistemological intention of philosophizing within languages is a “rethinking of universalism in all its forms, or what Cassin calls ‘compliquer l’universel’ (complicating the universal).”⁵⁶ This endeavor questions the foundational aspects of sciences that assume to be worldwide and universal and proceed therefore to model their logic of thinking as the most humanist, and the most universal. It challenges also “what we think we knew to be etymologically ‘true,’ and, by extension, challenges the presumed epistemological authority of etymology as linguistic science.”⁵⁷ This way, untranslatability can be explored further to think of revisiting the current logic of the humanities that stands in an ethnocentric pattern.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Manguel, Alberto. With Borges. (London: Telegram Books, 2006), p. 71.

2. Jorge Luis Borges. Labyrinths; Selected Stories & Other Writings. Edited by Donald A. Yates & James E. Irby. (New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1964), p143.

3. Alberto Manguel. “The Muse of Impossibility.” In The Threepenny Review, No. 123 (FALL 2010), p. 9.

4. Apter, Emily. Against World Literature, on the politics of untranslatability. (New York: Verso, 2013), p. 285.

5. Ibid, p259.

6. Kilito, Abdelfattah. Thou shalt not speak my language. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2017.

p. X

7. Edward Said. Living in Arabic, in Al-Ahram Weekly, 12–18 February 2004. Issue No. 677, seen on http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/archive/2004/677/cu15.htm

8. Benaziza, Lahsen. Romancing Scheherazade; John Barth and The One Thousand and One Nights. (Agadir: University Ibn Zohr, Serie: Theses et Memoires, 2011), p7.

9. Ibid, p11.

10. Kilito, Abdelfattah. Le Cheval de Nietzsche. (Casablanca : Edition de Fennec, 2007), p162.

11. David Damrosch. What Is World Literature? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), p32.

12. Ibid, p7.

13. Ibid, p33.

14. Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopaedia. “maqāmah.” Encyclopedia Britannica, August 26, 2010. https://www.britannica.com/art/maqamah.

15. Al-Maqamat is the title of a book written by Abu Muhammad al Qasim ibn Ali al-Hariri (1054–1122) containing fifty relatively short stories (maquamat = “settings” or “sessions”), each one identified by the name of a city in the Muslim world of the time. https://www.omifacsimiles.com/brochures/maq.html

16. Kilito, Abdelfattah. Thou Shalt Not Speak my Language, p24.

17. Abo Mohammed al Kasim ibn‘Ali ibn Mohammed ibn ‘Othman al Hariri. The Assemblies of Al Hariri. Trs from Arabic by Thomas Chenery M.A. Vol. I. (Edinburgh: WILLIAMS and NORGATE, 1867), p68.

18. Casanova, Pascale. Kafka Angry Poet. Trans. Chris Turner. (New York: Seagull Books, 2015), p7.

19. O’Neill, Patrick. Transforming Kafka; Translation Effects. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), p8.

20. Franco Moretti, Distant Reading. (London: Verso, 2013), p49.

21. Casanova, Pascale. The world Republic of letters (Harvard: Harvard university press, 2004), 269–270.

22. Ibid, p85.

23. Duttlinger, Carolin. The Cambridge Introduction to Franz Kafka. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p124.

24. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka; Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p20.

25. Ibid, p16.

26. Ibid, p17.

27. Ibid, p18.

28. Theodor W. Adorno, “Notes on Kafka,” in Prism, Trans, Shierry Weber and Samuel Weber (Cambridge, MA: Mit Press, 1983), 243–71, p245.

29. Ibid, p246.

30. Marjorie E. Rhine. “Untangling Kafka’s Knotty Texts- The Translator’s Prerogative?” Monatshefte, Vol. 81, No. 4 Winter, 1989, (447–458), p447.

31. Casanova, Pascale. The world Republic of letters, p269.

32. Harman, M. (2017). “Translation.” In C. Duttlinger (Ed.), Franz Kafka in Context, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (302–309), p302.

33. Damrosch, D. What Is World Literature? (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013), p187.

34. Ibid, p187.

35. Karl, Frederick R. & Hamalian, Leo. The existential imagination. London: Pan Books, 1973.

36. Damrosch, D. What Is World Literature? p198

37. Ibid, p199.

38. Duttlinger, Carolin. The Cambridge Introduction to Franz Kafka, p123.

39. Canetti, Elias. Kafka’s Other Trial; The Letters to Felice, Trans. Christopher Middleton. (London: Penguin Books, 2012), p7.

40. O’Neill, Patrick. Transforming Kafka; Translation Effects. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), p140.

41. Ibid, p142.

42. Ibid, p124.

43. Benjamin, W. “The Task of the Translator” in his Illuminations. Trans. H. Zohn, New York: Schocken, 1969, (69–82), p. 82.

44. Milan Kundera. “Kafka’s World.” The Wilson Quarterly (1976-), Vol. 12, No. 5 (Winter, 1988), pp. 88–99, Wilson Quarterly, p92.

45. Michelle Woods. Kafka Translated: How Translators Have Shaped Our Reading of Kafka. (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), p14.

46. A correspondent Letters between Franz Kafka and Milena Jesenska during 1920–1923.

47. Ibid, p6.

48. Butler, Rex. “RE-READING ‘KAFKA AND HIS PRECURSORS.’” Variaciones Borges, no. 29 (2010): 93–105. Accessed April 16, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/24881285.

49. Borges, Jorge Luis. The Total Library: Non-Fiction 1922–1986. Ed. Eliot Weinberger. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999, p89.

50. Derrida, Jacques. The Monolingualism of the Other, or the Prosthesis of Origin, p66.

51. Derrida, Jacques. Monolinguisme de l’autre (Paris: Galilée, 1996), p97.

52. Foucault, Michel. « Des espaces autres » Conférence au Cercle d’études architecturales, 14 mars 1967, in Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité, no 5 (1984): 46–49. Retrieved and accessed on 8May2022 from https://foucault.info/documents/heterotopia/foucault.heteroTopia.fr/.

53. Ibid.

54. Apter, Emily. “Untranslatables: A World System.” New Literary History 39, no. 3 (2008): 581–98, p31. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20533103.

55. Cassin, et al, ed, Dictionary of Untranslatable; A Philosophical Lexicon, p xix

56. Michael Syrotinski, Translation and the Untranslatable. ;(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 144.

57. Ibid, 264.