Reassessing Willa Muir

Abstract

The critical elision of Willa Muir's influence on her and her husband's translations of Kafka's work (the first English-language translations, made in 1930–1948) raises the question of whether this results from her gender and the gendered, feminized role of translation and the colonized translator. Muir's archive, including her journals, private writings in Scots and an unpublished novel, Mrs Muttoe and the Top Storey, about a female translator translating a fictionalized Kafka, reveal a translator acutely aware of sexual, cultural and linguistic asymmetry. Employing Luise von Flotow's notion of the “translator-effect”; Steven Yao's notion of the modernist, gendered symbiosis between writing and translation; and recent writing on Scots vernacular translation, this article argues that Willa Muir was the predominant translator in the couple, that her feminism and her status as a native Scots speaker influenced the Kafka translations, and that the translations should be reassessed accordingly.