kafka’s castle

by brooklyn

Posted to Utterances on 2003-06-02 08:07:00

Parent message is 460321
I’m not multilingual (unless you count Java, Perl, C++ and PHP) but I did have one incident with a book translation that really concerned me. Years ago I read “The Castle” by Franz Kafka in a blue paperback book that had a sort of surrealistic cover image of a castle floating in the air on a big rock. I loved this book even though it was literally falling apart (it was an old book) and by the time I finished it the binding was gone and I had to throw it out and find a new copy.

Right around that time, a new translation of “The Castle” was published with a lot of fanfare about this being, finally, a *good* translation that was faithful to Kafka’s original. I eagerly bought it (in hardcover, even, because it had just been published) and started reading it only to find that the charm of the book was somehow gone. Since my original paperback was also gone, I have no way to find out what exactly they changed with this “improved translation”. But it wasn’t an improvement.

— Levi