Translation right or wrong

Czech Republic, suspended at the time between its totalitarian past and uncertain capitalist future. The short, concluding chapter, ‘Interpreting Kafka,’ braids an analysis of the ways Kafka has been iconised with a reading of sound repetition in Kafka’s story ‘Josefine the Singer, or The Mouse-People’. Here, Woods delves into ‘Kafkology’ and the mythologies already created by his friend and first hagiographer, Max Brod. It was in the face of a very limited pre-war readership and in response to his departed friend’s work that Brod took it upon himself to imagine Kafka as a religious thinker. Woods reminds us that this is also a translation: from a human, warm, comic writer into a pure and saintly figure forever squashed under the thumb of totalitarianism. This translation is evident in the iconic photo of Kafka that most readers carry in their minds, taken shortly before his death and ‘retouched by the German publishers, Fischer, in the 1950s “to give Kafka’s eyes the desired gleam” of prophesy’ (p. 252). Woods meditates here on Kafka’s own relationship to his Jewishness by a reading of ‘Josefine the Singer’ as both a stand-in for the incomprehensibility of his own art and as another representation of translation in his work. While the book is grounded in translation theory and provides detailed close readings, the greatest pleasure for any reader will come from whole sentences of deep, lyrical observations given in the strong confident voice of a novelist rather than (merely?) a literary critic. In the first chapter Woods writes, for example, ‘translation reveals the complexity of representing what we really mean and the accretions of associations of personal and cultural meaning to language’ (p. 35). Or consider the fragment which summarises Woods’s reading of Kafka’s main preoccupations, ‘the seams of language are constantly stretched to clothe the human in the human, baring in short glimpses the human animal’ (p. 143), or another, on his characters, who ‘are not heroes in a classical world doomed to, but elevated by, tragedy, they are fallible people in a fallible world’ (p. 99). This erudite book should find its way to the bookshelf of every lover of Kafka’s words, so it can be read alongside them and re-read accordingly to add nuance and draw attention to every beat, every repetition, and every measured word choice.