Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts

In "The Castrating Shadow of Saint Carta," I quoted one of those Kafka sentences that seem to concentrate all the originality of his novelistic poetry: the sentence in the third chapter of The Castle where Kafka describes the coition of K. and Frieda. To show precisely the specific beauty of Kafka's art, instead of using the existing French translations I decided to improvise my own most faithful possible translation. The differences between a Kafka sentence and its reflections in the mirror of translations have now brought me to the following remarks:

Translations

Let's review the translations. The first is by Alexandre Vialatte, from 1938:

"Hours passed there, hours of mingled breaths, of

Literal English versions of the three published French translations of Kafka's sentence are given here with the aim of enabling monolingual readers to understand the authors argument. These are followed by the German original with an exact English translation. For Vialatte, David, and Lortholarys translations, as well as the author's own translation into French, see the end of this part (pp. 119-120). (Translator.)

heartbeats in common, hours in which K. never ceased to experience the sensation that he was getting lost, that he had thrust in so far that no being before him had gone such a long way; abroad, in a country where even the air had none of the elements of his native air, where one must suffocate from exile and where all one could do, amid insane enticements, was to continue walking, continue getting lost."

It was recognized that Vialatte was a little too free with Kafka's text; that is why the publisher, Gallimard, decided to correct his translations for the 1976 publication of Kafka's novels in the Pleiade series. But Vialattes heirs opposed this; and so an unprecedented solution was arrived at: Kafka s novels were published in Vialattes faulty version, while the editor, Claude David, published his own corrections of the translation at the back of the book in the form of an amazing number of notes, such that, in order to reconstruct in his mind a "good" translation, the reader must constantly turn the pages to look at the notes. The combination of Vialattes translation with the corrections in the back of the book actually constitutes a second French translation, which for simplicity's sake I'll simply refer to as "David":

"Hours passed there, hours of mingled breaths, of merged heartbeats, hours in which K. never ceased to experience the sensation that he was going astray, that he was thrusting farther than anyone ever had before him; he was in a foreign country, where even the very air no longer had anything in common with the air of his native country; the foreignness of this country choked him, and yet, among its mad enticements, one could only walk still farther, go still more astray."

Bernard Lortholary deserves great credit for having been radically dissatisfied with the existing translations and for retranslating Kafka's novels. His translation of The Castle dates from 1984:

"There hours passed, hours of mingled breathing, of hearts beating together, hours in which K. had the constant feeling of going astray, or of having advanced farther than any man into foreign lands, where the air itself had not a single element one could find in the air of one's native country, where one could only suffocate from the force of foreignness, yet without the power to do otherwise, in the midst of these absurd enticements, than to continue and go further astray."

Here now, the sentence in the original German:

"Dort vergingen Stunden, Stunden gemeinsamen Atems, gemeinsamen Herzschlags, Stunden, in denen K. immerfort das Gefuhl hatte, er verirre sich oder er sei so weit in der Fremde, wie vor ihm noch kein Mensch, einer Fremde, in der selbst die Luft keinen Bestandteil der Heimatluft habe, in der man vor Fremdheit ersticken miisse und in deren unsinnigen Verlockungen man dock nichts tun konne als weiter gehen, weiter sich verirren."

Of which this is an exact translation:

"There hours went by, hours of mutual breaths, of mutual heartbeats, hours in which K. continually had the feeling that he was going astray, or that he was farther inside the strange world than any person before him, in a strange world where the very air had in it no element of his native air, where one must suffocate from strangeness and where, in the midst of absurd enticements, one could do nothing but keep going, keep going astray.'"

Metaphor

The entire sentence is one long metaphor. Nothing requires more exactness from a translator than the translation of a metaphor. That is where we glimpse the core of an authors poetic originality. Vialatte's first error occurs with the verb "s'enfoncer" ("thrust" or "drive into"): "il s'etait enfonce si loin" ("he had thrust in so far"). In Kafka, K. doesn't thrust, he "is." The word "s'enfoncer" deforms the metaphor: it ties it too visually to real action (a man who makes love does thrust or drive) and thus deprives the metaphor of its level of abstraction (the existential nature of Kafka's metaphor does not seek to evoke- physically or visually-the act of love). David, in correcting Vialatte, keeps the same verb: "s'enfon-cer." And even Lortholary (the most faithful) avoids the verb "to be," replacing it with "s'avancer dans" ("advance into").

In Kafka, while making love K. is "in der Fremde" ("in a strange place"); Kafka uses the word "Fremde" twice and then a third time in its derivative "Fremdheit" ("strangeness"): in the air of strange places, one suffocates from strangeness. All three translators are bothered by this threefold repetition: this is why Vialatte uses the word only once and instead of "strangeness" uses another word: "where one must suffocate from exile." But Kafka never mentions exile. Exile and strangeness are different notions. While making love, K. is not driven away from some home of his, not banished (and so not to be pitied); he is where he is by his own will, he is there because he has dared to be there. The word "exile" gives the metaphor an aura of martyrdom, of suffering-sentimentalizes and melodra-matizes it.

Vialatte and David translate the word "gehen" ("aller"-"go") by the word "marcher" ("walk"). When "alter" becomes "marcher," the expressivity of the comparison is increased and the metaphor becomes slightly grotesque (a person making love becomes a "walker"). This grotesque edge isn't bad in principle (I myself am very fond of grotesque metaphors and I am often obliged to defend them against my translators), but the grotesque is surely not what Kafka wanted here.

The word "Fremde" is the only one in the sentence that cannot tolerate simple literal translation into French. Indeed, in German "Fremde" means not only "a foreign country" but also-more generally, more abstractly-everything that is strange, "a strange reality, a strange world." When "in der Fremde" is translated as "a l'etranger" it is as if Kafka had used the term "Ausland" ("abroad"). The temptation to try for greater semantic exactness by translating the word "Fremde" into a two-word French term thus seems to me understandable; but in each of the actual solutions (Vialatte: "a Fetranger, dans un pays ou" ["abroad, in a country where"]; David: "dans un pays etranger" ["in a foreign country"]; Lortholary: "dans des contrees etrangeres" ["into foreign regions"]), the metaphor again loses the element of abstraction it has in Kafka, and its "touristic" quality is heightened rather than suppressed.

Metaphor as Phenomenological Definition

The idea that Kafka disliked metaphors should be corrected; he did dislike metaphors of a certain kind, but he is one of the great creators of the sort of metaphor I call existential or phenomenological. When Verlaine writes: "Hope glimmers like a wisp of straw in the cowshed," it is a superb lyrical flight of fancy. It is, however, unthinkable in Kafka s prose. For Kafka certainly disliked the lyricization of prose in novels.

Kafka's metaphorical imagination was no less rich than Verlaine s or Rilkes, but it was not lyrical: it was driven exclusively by the wish to decipher, to understand, to grasp the meaning of the characters' actions, the meaning of the situations in which they find themselves.

Let us recall another scene of coition, the one between Esch and Frau Hentjen in Brochs The Sleepwalkers: "His seeking mouth had found hers, which was now pressed against his like the muzzle of an animal against a pane of glass, and Esch was enraged because she kept her soul imprisoned behind her set teeth, to prevent him from possessing it."

The words "muzzle of an animal" and "pane of glass" are here not to evoke by comparison a visual image of the scene but to get at the existential situation of Esch, who even during the amorous embrace remains inexplicably separated (as by a pane of glass) from his mistress and unable to get hold of her soul (a prisoner behind set teeth). A situation difficult to catch-or, rather, uncatchable except by a metaphor.

At the beginning of Chapter Four of The Castle there is the second coition of K. and Frieda; it too is expressed in a single sentence (sentence-metaphor): "She was seeking something and he was seeking something, maddened, grimacing, heads thrusting into each others chests as they sought, and their embraces and their tossing bodies did not make them forget but rather reminded them of the necessity to seek, as dogs desperately paw at the ground they pawed at each others bodies, and, irremediably disappointed, to catch one last pleasure, each would from time to time sweep his tongue broadly across the other's face."

Just as the key words of the first coition's metaphor were '"strange" and "strangeness," here the key words are "seek" and "paw at." These words do not express a visual image of what is happening but rather express an ineffable existential situation. When David, in his French translation, renders the passage above thus: "as dogs desperately dig their claws into the ground, they dug their nails into each other's body," he not only is being inaccurate (Kafka speaks neither of claws nor of nails that dig) but is also transferring the metaphor from the existential domain to the domain of visual description; by so doing, he places himself in a different aesthetic from Kafka's.

(This aesthetic discrepancy is still more evident in the last fragment of the sentence: Kafka says: "each would from time to time sweep his tongue broadly across the other's face"; in David, this precise and neutral observation turns into an expressionist metaphor: "each whipped the other's face with blows of the tongue.")

Observation on Systematic Synonym izing

The need to use another word in place of the more obvious, more simple, more neutral one (have-experience; go-walk; sweep-whip) may be called the syn-onymizing reflex-a reflex of nearly all translators. Having a great stock of synonyms is a feature of "good style" virtuosity; if the word "sadness" appears twice in the same paragraph of the original text, the translator, offended by the repetition (considered an attack on obligatory stylistic elegance), will be tempted to translate the second occurrence as "melancholy." But there's more: this need to synonymize is so deeply embedded in the translators soul that he will choose a synonym first off: he'll say "melancholy" if the original text has "sadness" and "sadness" if the original has "melancholy."

We concede with no irony whatever: the translator's situation is extremely delicate: he must keep faith with the author and at the same time remain himself; what to do? He wants (consciously or unconsciously) to invest the text with his own creativity; as if to give himself heart, he chooses a word that does not obviously betray the author but still arises from his own initiative. I am noticing this right now as I look over the translation of a small text of mine: I write "author," and the translator translates it "writer"; I write "writer," and he translates it "novelist"; I write "novelist," and he translates it "author"; where I say "verse," he says "poetry"; where I say "poetry," he says "poems." Kafka says "go," the translators, "walk." Kafka says "no element," the translators: "none of the

elements," "no longer anything," "not a single element." This practice of synonymization seems innocent, but its systematic quality inevitably smudges the original idea. And besides, what the hell for? Why not say "go" when the author says "gehen"? O ye translators, do not sodonymize us!

Richness of Vocabulary

Let's look at the verbs in the sentence: vergehen (went by-from the root gehen, go); haben (have); sich verir-ren (go astray); sein (be); haben; ersticken mussen (must suffocate); tun konnen (can do); gehen; sich verirren. Thus Kafka chooses the simplest, the most elementary verbs: go (twice), have (twice), go astray (twice), be, do, suffocate, must, can.

Translators tend to enrich the vocabulary: "never ceased to experience" (for "have"); "thrust," "advance," "go a long way" (for "be"); "walk" (for "go"); "find" (for "have").

(What terror the words "be" and "have" strike in all the translators in the world! They'll do anything to replace them with words they consider less routine.)

That tendency is also psychologically understandable: what can the translator get credit for? For fidelity to the authors style? That's exactly what the readers in the translator's country have no way of judging. On the other hand, the public will automatically see richness of vocabulary as a value, as a performance, a proof of the translator's mastery and competence.

Now, richness of vocabulary is not a value in itself. The breadth of the vocabulary depends on the aesthetic intention governing the work. Carlos Fuentes' vocabulary is nearly dizzying in its richness. But Hemingways is extremely narrow. The beauty of Fuentes' prose is bound up with richness, the beauty of Hemingway's with narrowness of vocabulary.

Kafka's vocabulary too is relatively restricted. That restriction has often been explained as one of Kafka's asceticisms. As his anti-aestheticism. As his indifference to beauty. Or as the cost exacted by Prague German, a language withering from being torn away from its popular roots. No one was willing to grant that this bareness of vocabulary expressed Kafka's aesthetic intention, that it was one of the distinctive marks of the beauty of his prose.

A General Remark on the Problem of Authority

For a translator, the supreme authority should be the author's personal style. But most translators obey another authority: that of the conventional version of "good French" (or good German, good English, etc.), namely, the French (the German, etc.) we learn in school. The translator considers himself the ambassador from that authority to the foreign author. That is the error: every author of some value transgresses against "good style," and in that transgression lies the originality (and hence the raison d'etre) of his art. The translator's primary effort should be to understand that transgression. This is not difficult when it is obvi-

ous, as for example with Rabelais, or Joyce, or Celine. But there are authors whose transgression against "good style" is subtle, barely visible, hidden, discreet; as such, it is not easy to grasp. In such a case, it is all the more important to do so.

Repetition

Stunden (hours) occurs three times-repetition preserved in all three translations;

gemeinsamen (mutual) twice-repetition eliminated in all three translations;

sich verirren (go astray) twice-repetition preserved in all three translations;

die Fremde (strange) twice, and then once die Fremdheit (strangeness)-in Vialatte: "a l'etranger" (abroad) once, "strangeness" replaced by "exile"; in David and in Lortholary: once "foreign" (as an adjective) and once "foreignness";

die Luft (the air) twice-repetition preserved by all three translators;

haben (have) twice-the repetition exists in only one of the translations;

weiter (farther) twice-this repetition is replaced in Vialatte by repetition of the word "continue"; in David by the (weak) repetition of the word "still"; in Lortholary, the repetition has disappeared;

gehen, vergehen (go, went by)-this repetition (admittedly difficult to preserve) has disappeared in all three translations.

In general, we see that translators (obeying their schoolteachers) tend to limit repetitions.

The Semantic Meaning of Repetition

Twice die Fremde, once die Fremdheit: with this repetition the author introduced into his text a term with the quality of a key notion, a concept. If the author develops a lengthy line of thought from this word, repeating the word is necessary from the semantic and logical viewpoint. Suppose that, in order to avoid repetition, a Heidegger translator were to render "das Sein" once as "being," next as "existence," then as "life," then again as "human life," and finally as "being-there." Never knowing whether Heidegger is speaking of a single thing under different names or of different things, we would have not a scrupulously logical text but a mess. A novel's prose (I am speaking, of course, of novels worthy of the name) demands the same rigor (especially in meditative or metaphorical passages).

Another Remark on the Necessity of Preserving Repetitions

A bit farther on the same page of The Castle: "… Stimme nach Frieda gerufen wurde. 'Frieda,' sagte K. in Friedas Ohr and gab so den Ruf weiter."

Literally, this means: "…a voice summoned Frieda. 'Frieda,' said K. in Friedas ear, thus passing on the summons."

The French translators want to avoid the triple repetition of the name Frieda:

Vialatte: "'Frieda!' said he in the maid's ear, thus passing on… "

And David:"'Frieda,' said K. in his companion's ear, passing on to her…"

How false the words replacing Frieda's name sound! Note that in the text of The Castle, K. is never anything but K. In dialogue, others may call him "surveyor" or perhaps other things, but Kafka himself, the narrator, never refers to him by the words "stranger," "newcomer," "young man," or whatever. K. is nothing but K. And not only he but all the characters in Kafka always have just a single name, a single designation.

Thus Frieda is Frieda; not lover, not mistress, not companion, not maid, not waitress, not whore, not young woman, not girl, not friend, not girlfriend. Frieda.

The Melodic Importance of Repetition

There are moments when Kafka's prose takes flight and becomes song. That is the case with the two sentences I have been considering. (Note that both of these exceptionally beautiful sentences are descriptions of the love act; this says a hundred times more than all the biographers' research about the importance of eroticism for Kafka. But let's go on.) Kafka's prose takes flight on two wings: intensity of metaphorical imagination and captivating melody.

Melodic beauty here is connected to the repetition of words; the sentence begins: "Dort vergingen Stunden, Stunden gemeinsamen Atems" gemeinsamen Herzschlags, Stunden…" ("There, hours went by, hours of mutual breaths, of mutual heartbeats, hours … ") In nine words, five repetitions. At the

middle of the sentence: the repetition of the word "Fremde" ("strange") and the word "Fremdheit" ("strangeness"). And at the end of the sentence, yet another repetition: "… weiter gehen, weiter sich verir-ren" ("… keep going, keep going astray"). These multiple repetitions slow the tempo and give the sentence a yearning cadence.

In the other sentence, K.'s second coition, we find the same principle of repetition: the verb "seek" repeated four times, the word "something" twice, the word "body" twice, the verb "paw" twice; and lets not forget the conjunction "and," which, against all the rules of syntactic elegance, is repeated four times.

In German, that sentence begins: "Sie suchte etwas und er suchte etwas …" Vialatte says something entirely different: "She was seeking something and was seeking something again…" David corrects him: "She was seeking something and so was he, on his part." How odd: preferring to say "and so was he, on his part" rather than to translate literally Kafka's beautiful and simple repetition: "She was seeking something and he was seeking something…"

Repetition Skill

There's a skill to repetition. Because there certainly are bad, clumsv repetitions (as when, in the description of a dinner, the words "chair," "fork," and the like appear three times in two sentences). The rule: a word is repeated because it is important, because one wants its sound as well as its meaning to reverberate throughout a paragraph, a page.

Digression: An Example of the Beauty of Repetition

The very short (two-page) Hemingway story "One Reader Writes" is divided into three parts: 1) a brief paragraph describing a woman writing a letter "steadily with no necessity to cross out or rewrite anything"; 2) the letter itself, in which the woman speaks of her husbands venereal disease; 3) the interior monologue that follows it, quoted here:

"Maybe he can tell me what's right to do, she said to herself. Maybe he can tell me. In the picture in the paper he looks like he'd know. He looks smart, all right. Every day he tells somebody what to do. He ought to know. I want to do whatever is right. It's such a long time though. It's a long time. And it's been a long time. My Christ, it's been a long time. He had to go wherever they sent him, I know, but I don't know what he had to get it for. Oh, I wish to Christ he wouldn't have got it. I don't care what he did to get it. But I wish to Christ he hadn't ever got it. It does seem like he didn't have to have got it. I don't know what to do. I wish to Christ he hadn't got any kind of malady. I don't know why he had to get a malady."

The entrancing melody of this passage is based entirely on repetitions. They are not a device (like rhyme in poetry), but they come out of everyday spoken language, thoroughly unpolished language.

In addition: this very short story, it seems to me, is a unique instance in the history of prose fiction where the musical intention is primordial: without that melody the text would lose its raison d'etre.

Breath

By his own account, Kafka wrote his long story "The Judgment" in a single night, without interruption, that is to say at extraordinary speed, letting himself be carried along by a practically uncontrolled imagination. Speed, which later became the surrealists' programmatic method ("automatic writing")-allowing for the liberation of the subconscious from supervision by reason, and making the imagination explode-played roughly the same role in Kafka.

Roused by that "methodical speed," the Kafkan imagination runs like a river, a dreamlike river that finds no respite till a chapter's end. That long breath of imagination is reflected in the nature of the syntax: in Kafka's novels, there is a near absence of colons (except for those routinely introducing dialogue) and an exceptionally modest number of semicolons. The manuscripts (in the critical edition: Fischer, 1982) show that even commas seemingly required by the rules of syntax are often lacking. The texts are divided into very few paragraphs. This tendency to minimize the articulation-few paragraphs, few strong pauses (on rereading a manuscript, Kafka often even changed periods to commas), few markers emphasizing the text's logical organization (colons, semicolons)-is consubstantial with Kafka's style; at the same time it is a perpetual attack on "good German style" (as well as on the "good style" of all the languages into which Kafka is translated).

Kafka made no definitive version of The Castle for the printer, and one could reasonably assume that he might still have brought in this or that correction, including punctuation. So I am not enormously shocked (not pleased, either, obviously) that Max Brod, as Kafka's first editor, from time to time should have created a paragraph indentation or added a semicolon to make the text easier to read. Actually, even in Brod's edition, the general character of Kafka's syntax still shows clearly, and the novel preserves its great long breath.

Let's go back to that third-chapter sentence: it is relatively long, with commas but no semicolons (in the manuscript and in all the German editions). So what disturbs me most in the Vialatte version of this sentence is the added semicolon. It represents the end of a logical segment, a caesura that invites one to lower the voice, take a short pause. That caesura (although correct by the rules of syntax) chokes off Kafka's breath. David then even divides the sentence into three parts, with two semicolons. These two semicolons are all the more incongruous given that throughout the entire third chapter (according to the manuscript) Kafka uses only one semicolon. In the edition established by Max Brod there are thirteen. Vialatte reaches thirty-one. Lortholary twenty-eight, plus three colons.

Typographical Appearance

You can see the long, intoxicating flight of Kafka's prose in the text's typographical appearance, which is often a single "endless" paragraph, over pages, enfolding even long passages of dialogue. In Kafka's manuscript, the third chapter is divided into just two long paragraphs. In Brod's edition there are four. In Vialatte's translation, ninety. In Lortholarv's translation, ninety-five. French editions of Kafka s novels have been subjected to an articulation that is not their own: paragraphs much more numerous, and therefore much shorter, which simulate a more logical, more rational organization of the text and which dramatize it, sharply separating all the dialogue exchanges.

In no translation into other languages, to my knowledge, has the original articulation of Kafka's texts been changed. Why have the French translators (all, unanimously) done this? They must certainly have had a reason for it. The Pleiade edition of Kafka's novels contains over five hundred pages of notes. Yet I find not a single sentence there giving such a reason.

And Finally, a Remark on Type, Large and Small

Kafka insisted that his books be printed in very large type. These days that is recalled with the indulgent smile prompted by great men's whims. Yet nothing about it warrants a smile; Kafka's wish was justified, logical, serious, related to his aesthetic, or, more specifically, to his way of articulating prose.

An author who divides his text into many short paragraphs will not insist so on large type: a lavishly articulated page can be read rather easily.

By contrast, a text that flows out in an endless paragraph is very much less legible. The eye finds no place to stop or rest, the lines are easily "lost track of." To be read with pleasure (that is, without eye fatigue), such a text requires relatively large type that makes

reading easy and allows one to stop anytirne to savor the beauty of the sentences.

I look through the German paperback edition of The Castle: on a small page, thirty-nine appallingly cramped lines of an "endless paragraphe": it's illegible; or it's legible only as information; or as a document; in any case not as a text meant for aesthetic perception. In an appendix, on some forty pages: all the passages Kafka deleted from his manuscript. They disregard Kafka's desire (for thoroughly justified aesthetic rea-sons) to have his text printed in large type; they fish out all the sentences he decided (for thoroughly justified aesthetic reasons) to destroy. In that indifference to the authors aesthetic wishes is reflected all the sad-ness of the posthumous fate of Kafka's work.

FRENCH TRANSLATIONS OF THE SENTENCE

Des heures passèrent là, des heures d'haleines mêlées, de battements de coeur communs, des heures durant lesquelles K. ne cessa d'éprouver l'impression qu'il se perdait qu'il s'était enfoncé si loin que nul être cirant lui n'avait fait plus de chemin; à l'étranger, dans un pays où l'air même n'arait plus rien des éléments de l'air natal, où l'on derait étouffer d'exil et où l'on ne pouvait plus rien faire, au milieu d'in-sanes séductions, que continuer à marcher, que continuer à se perdre.

– Alexandre Vialatte

Des heures passèrent là, des heures d'haleines mêlées, de battements de coeur confondus, des heures durant lesquelles K. ne cessa d'éprouver l'impression qu'il s'égarait, qu'il s'enfonçait plus loin qu'aucun être avant lui; il était dans un pays étranger, où l'air même n'avait plus rien de commun avec l'air du pays natal; l'étrangeté de ce pays faisait suffoquer et pourtant, parmi de folles séductions, on ne pouvait que marcher toujours plus loin, s'égarer toujours plus avant.

– Claude David

Là passèrent des heures, des heures de respirations mêlées, de coeurs battant ensemble, des heures durant lesquelles K. avait le sentiment constant de s'égarer, ou bien de s'être avancé plus loin que jamais aucun homme dans des contrées étrangères, où l'air lui-même n'avait pas un seul élément qu'on retrouvât dans l'air du pays natal, où l'on ne pouvait qu'étouffer à force d'étrangeté, sans pouvoir pourtant faire autre chose, au milieu de ces séductions insensées, que de continuer et de s'égarer davantage.

– Bernard Lortholary

Là, s'en allaient des heures, des heures d'haleines communes, de battements de coeur communs, des heures durant lesquelles K. avait sans cesse le sentiment qu'il s'égarait, ou bien qu'il était plus loin dans le monde étranger qu 'aucun être avant lui, dans un monde étranger où l'air même n'avait aucun élément de l'air natal, où l'on devait étouffer d'étrangeté et où l'on ne pouvait rien faire, au milieu de séductions insensées, que continuer à aller, que continuer à s'égarer.

– Milan Kundera