Facilitators

How does one choose texts from Kafka’s vast body of work for a unique exercise of translating them from the original German into several culturally distant and diverse South Asian languages simultaneously?

Kafka’s “prose […] has, with time, undergone its own metamorphosis… The words are unchanged; yet those same passages Kafka once read aloud, laughing at their fearful comedy, to a small circle of friends, are now markedly altered under our eyes—enameled by that labyrinthine process through which a literary work awakens to discover that it has been transformed into a classic.” (Cynthia Ozick in The New Yorker magazine, January 3, 1999)

Is it possible to keep aside pre-formed ideas about the Kafkaesque, to keep aside what we “already always know” about Kafka and his oeuvre – the strong father and the weak son; the perceived pessimism about human agency and destiny that apparently has its roots in the repetitive portrayal of failed and failing protagonists; the alienated German speaking Jew in Prague; the ‘failed’ lover and of course, the prophet of a totalitarian dystopia? The flip side of being “transformed into a classic” is the prejudice and pre-knowledge that condition the reading of the work. Across the world these ideas seem to have become tropes in Kafka reception itself!

An exercise in simultaneous translation into several languages brings together diverse minds who have made the choice of closely engaging with the texts themselves. Would such a going back to the text reveal the diversity of readings and perhaps help to “peel off the enamel” as it were and rediscover the cadences, the rhythms of Kafka’s language, its visuality, to reconnect with the mind that created these narratives – that range from a paragraph to hundreds of pages of unfinished work – and recreate them in another language?

It was – perhaps – with these questions in mind that I approached the task of curating a compilation for the translators. As Heinz Politzer points out, Kafka was able to “span the most disparate spheres of experience” through his language: from the most carefully and minutely described “non-thing” Odradek to the intensely close, almost intimate depiction of the “Fahrgast”, or Gregor Samsa’s progressive alienation from the familiar and the familial ending in what could easily be one of the most beautiful, ‘moving’ descriptions of the death of, well, an insect!

K.’s entry as a destabilising and itself ambivalent element into the village that is the property of “the castle” and Josef K.’s spirited counter against the “big organisation” whose sole purpose is to arrest innocent people and chain them to unending trials - excerpts from his two unfinished novels might give a sense of the overarching themes in the Kafkan oeuvre, but also help the reader reconsider and refigure the Kafkan world.

Tiny language-pictures, or rather sketches, mostly from the writer’s early period allow the reader glimpses into the creator’s mind: the bright and the grey, the highs and lows, the elation and the descent into melancholy. Short journeys for the participative reader-translator to take to explore the creator’s and their own (the trans-creator’s) mind, without the distraction of a destination.

Focusing on the surface, the syntax and the register, the journey itself; reflecting upon culture-specific topoi and the questions of carrying them over – transporting and transmuting them if required – into a different cultural space; helping the original undergo more metamorphoses, but creative ones: When one made the choice of texts to translate, these were some of the thoughts that lingered in the background, and which have now crystallised in the form of this brief note.

(Milind Brahme, Chennai, May 2024)