Willa and Edwin Muir's Alternative Kafka: Translation, Imitation, and the Fable

Abstract

Willa and Edwin Muir's Alternative Kafka:Translation, Imitation, and the Fable Gregory Ariail (bio) During the 1930s and 1940s, the New York literati, as Anatole Broyard put it, "would rush in [to bookstores] wild-eyed, almost foaming at the mouth, willing to pay anything for Kafka."1 Perhaps no foreign language writer of the late modernist period was more read, written about, and imitated from the 1930s to the mid-1950s than Franz Kafka (1883–1924). The publication of his short stories in The Great Wall of China (1933) and The Penal Colony (1948), along with his novels The Castle (1930) and The Trial (1937), translated into English by the accomplished Scottish writers Willa and Edwin Muir, caused such a storm among contemporaries in Britain and America that it was recognized as an event—the "Kafka rage" (Broyard, Kafka Was the Rage, 3). Those swept up by the Kafka rage rarely engaged with his works in the original, since few Anglophone mid-century writers could read German competently. Even those who had some command of the language professed their struggles with reading Kafka in German. Samuel Beckett echoes the contemporary sentiment when he writes: "All I've read of [Kafka's], apart from a few short texts, is about three-quarters of The Castle, and then in German, that is, losing a great deal."2 In a 1932 letter, Aldous Huxley writes to a friend: "I have only read The Castle and some of the short stories in German. Can't face The Trial in German, so am waiting for the translation."3 Paul Bowles elaborates on the same theme of an initial bilingual engagement and then capitulation in the face of Kafka's difficulty and a language barrier too substantial to overcome: "I loved [Kafka] even then, in translation. And then I tried to read him in German, but I didn't [End Page 693] really know enough to stay with it very long. Then I forgot what little German I had learned. I was never able to read anything in the original German. But I have read Kafka in English, again and again."4 The majority of late modernists from both sides of the Atlantic relied heavily on the translations of Willa and Edwin Muir, who produced a steady diet of English translations over a twenty-year period. Many little magazines, such as The Partisan Review, New Directions, The Quarterly Review, and others, carried English versions of various stories, translated by a wide range of writers such as the art critic Clement Greenberg and Sophie Prombaum. These publications certainly contributed to the intense creative and critical interest in Kafka's work, but the Muirs' translations got much wider circulation and were touted at the time by cultural darlings like W. H. Auden, who called Edwin Muir the "best translator" in English (Willa, sadly and typically for women translators, was often forgotten in critical discussions of the time).5 The Scottish couple was close to Kafka's inner circle, as well. They were friends with his last lover, Dora Dymant, who "arrived in London as a refugee" before the war; she, too, championed the Muirs as English translators of Kafka.6 The Muirs' translation practices involving Kafka's novels helped proliferate theological (and specifically "Kierkegaardian-Calvinist") readings of Kafka, as well as political (prophetic of the bureaucratic horrors of the Fascist state) readings that had theological undertones.7 This apparent conceptual filter in the Muir translations, which is curious given their otherwise anti-Calvinist stances, has been analyzed at great length by contemporary Kafka scholars and translators such as Ritchie Robertson, Joyce Crick, and Mark Harman.8 Yet the Muirs' approach to translating Kafka's fables—his short stories about animals and hybrids—has received very little critical attention, though these "minor" works were as influential, in their own right, as Kafka's novels; it shows them invested in ambiguity and thinking outside political-theological paradigms. By turning away, to a large degree, from The Trial, The Castle, Amerika, and novellas like "The Metamorphosis," to examples of an array of short fables translated during the 1930s and 1940s in contemporaneous little magazines, and setting them beside the Muirs...