Kafka Translated
How Translators have Shaped our Reading of Kafka
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- $33.99
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- $33.99
Publisher Description
Kafka Translated is the first book to look at the issue of translation and Kafka's work. What effect do the translations have on how we read Kafka? Are our interpretations of Kafka influenced by the translators' interpretations? In what ways has Kafka been 'translated' into Anglo-American culture by popular culture and by academics?
Michelle Woods investigates issues central to the burgeoning field of translation studies: the notion of cultural untranslatability; the centrality of female translators in literary history; and the under-representation of the influence of the translator as interpreter of literary texts. She specifically focuses on the role of two of Kafka's first translators, Milena Jesenská and Willa Muir, as well as two contemporary translators, Mark Harman and Michael Hofmann, and how their work might allow us to reassess reading Kafka. From here Woods opens up the whole process of translation and re-examines accepted and prevailing interpretations of Kafka's work.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Woods (Translating Milan Kundera) fuses history, semiotics, linguistics, and literature onto the extensive record of Kafka translations. Here, translation is not presented as a dry or romanticizing enterprise of sacred texts, but as lively writing which restores the connection between the humans who translate and the texts they produce. Woods is a wonderful narrator for this admittedly dense scholarship. The scholar's creativity is matched by her contagious love of language. She shows us how a translator's cultural background and gender appear in both the texts they create and the reception of these texts. The book transforms existing notions of errors into exhibits on ways of seeing, on both the part of the translator and the critic. While this study is specific to Kafka, its ramifications are much broader. Woods' familiarity with other canonical writers often read in translation especially Kundera shapes her perspective on Kafka's translations, his response to them, and why a translator makes different choices about his work. Anyone interested in the craft and politics of translation, or fascinated by the movement of ideas between languages and mediums, will find "pleasure and humor" here, two traits Woods argues have been neglected in our understanding of Kafka's work.
