The forgotten Scots who gave Kafka his voice

Kafkaesque: Ten Great Writers Translate the Twentieth Century, Maïa Hruska, translated by Sam Taylor, William Collins, £16.99

In 1995, a zanily inventive Scottish film won the Oscar for best live-action short. Two decades before his stint as the 12th incarnation of Doctor Who, Peter Capaldi wrote and directed Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life. Richard E Grant, as the tormented author in his Prague garret, struggles in the face of endless interruptions to decide the kind of metamorphosis to inflict on his hapless hero, Gregor Samsa. A banana? A kangaroo? The arrival of a (misdirected) joke-shop costume, and a squashed cockroach, show him that it has to be a giant ‘insect’.

The joke works because everybody knows that Kafka – modern prophet of alienation and victimisation, invoked even when unread – converted poor Gregor into a big bug. That ‘insect’, however, owes its existence to two other Scots – except that neither exactly fitted that description. Willa and Edwin Muir – Willa born in Angus to parents from Shetland, Edwin a proud ‘Orkneyman’ who called himself a ‘good Scandinavian’ – published their translation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung) in 1933. The couple’s pioneering advocacy of Kafka’s works began with The Castle in 1929. It would continue until an edition of In the Penal Colony, with other stories, in 1948.

Thirty years of literary wandering, from 1919 to 1950, took the Muirs to new-born Czechoslovakia, Germany, Italy and several short-term British homes. They wrote (fiction, poetry and criticism as well as translations), taught and – in Edwin’s case – held senior British Council posts in Edinburgh, Prague and Rome. In addition to translations – not only from Kafka, but such landmark modern German novels as Hermann Broch’s The Sleepwalkers – Edwin built up a body of visionary, myth-inspired verse. Seamus Heaney would later praise his poetry for its unique ‘stand-off with modernity’, and rank it with the great ‘tragic ironists’ of postwar Europe. Willa wrote formally ambitious satirical novels (Imagined Corners, Mrs Ritchie) and, a stalwart if eccentric feminist, saw her treatise Women: an Inquiry published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press in 1925.

The pair sometimes regretted becoming a ‘translation factory’, first of all to pay their modest expats’ bills. Edwin’s 1954 Autobiography laments that the craft ‘began as a resource and hardened into a necessity’. Willa, a prize-winning classicist at the University of St Andrews, was the finer linguist of the two. She had spells of resentment at the assumption that she had served as a sort of technical assistant to her creative husband, and at the ‘whole current of patriarchal society’ that made her invisible. ‘Edwin only helped,’ one journal entry complains in 1953, although other accounts testify to a process of complete equality. They reportedly tore books in half, tossed a coin to pick a portion, and later revised each other’s labours.

However they split the job, the results proved solid and durable. The Muirs gave Kafka a distinctive voice in English for half a century: fluent, formal, enigmatic and mesmeric. They worked from the – now-amended – texts that Kafka’s friend Max Brod edited, after he had declined to honour the author’s dying request in 1924 to destroy all unpublished manuscripts. In the 1980s, a team led by the Oxford scholar (and friend of Kafka’s niece, Marianne Steiner) Malcolm Pasley began to issue revised editions. Only then did a fresh wave of English translations start to supplant the Muirs’. But it was Willa and Edwin who ventriloquised the writer that I (and countless other readers) first encountered; who chose, for example, a ‘gigantic insect’ for Kafka’s sinister ungeheueres Ungeziefer. Does the creepily non-specific ‘monstrous vermin’, or something similar, do a better job? The Muirs’ successors think so. They seldom hold back in denunciations of the work of the impecunious, vagabond not-quite Scots, as too ‘faulty, too domesticated, too in sync with Max Brod’s Messianic vision of the texts… and too lacking in humour’ (a summary verdict from Michelle Woods’s valuable 2014 study Kafka Translated).

According to their detractors, the Muirs conveyed to the Anglosphere a Kafka who sounded too smooth, too sombre and too saintly. Still, their achievement deserves loud hosannas. Almost by chance, they ran across the uncanny, disorienting and inexhaustibly strange works that would help define the culture of the century, and fought against stiff odds to make them common coinage in every Anglophone domain. In 1936, in a letter to Stephen Spender while translating The Trial, Edwin writes that Kafka’s ‘fascination is simply endless’, and that ‘a feeling of greatness comes to me in every sentence’.

He and Willa transmitted that greatness to several literary generations. They did so in the teeth of penury, insecurity and prejudice. In the early 1940s, the self-taught Orkney smallholder’s child tried to find a teaching role at St Andrews. Although TS Eliot and John Buchan submitted testimonials, the professor of English swatted Muir away as ‘a crofter’s son who has never been to university’. So he stamped ration books in Dundee instead. Now tenured academics with hefty grants can bask in the celebrity of Kafka and pass judgment on the near-penniless strivers who first made him known.

At least Kafka’s English translators from the post-Pasley era grapple with the Muirs, if only to usurp them. Breon Mitchell, for example, who translated The Trial in 1998, allows that the duo managed a ‘readable and stylistically refined’ version, albeit one that smoothed over the idiosyncrasies of the German text. But that very ‘domestication’, so deplored by the Muirs’ heirs, helped inject this unsettling author into our literary bloodstream. Most readers confronted, then or now, with a literary personality as singular and baffling as Kafka’s would very happily settle for ‘readable and stylistically refined’. The Muirs – marginal itinerants uneasy with the dominant Scottish, never mind British, literary culture – did not enjoy the luxury of institutional radicalism.

Now, in a Kafka-like twist, their vilification has led to total erasure. Just published in the UK and US, in Sam Taylor’s translation from French, Kafkaesque is the prize-winning debut of the Czech-French writer Maïa Hruska. Subtitled ‘Ten great writers translate the twentieth century’, it traces Kafka’s impact on a selection of authors who directly translated, or otherwise interpreted, his work. They include Jorge Luis Borges (responsible for 18 Kafka translations into Spanish), Bruno Schulz (who, with his fiancée Józefina Szelińska, translated The Trial into Polish), Paul Celan, and even Primo Levi. The Auschwitz-surviving author of The Periodic Table embarked on an Italian Trial in 1982, commissioned by Italo Calvino. Levi, whose own death-camp experience seemed to ratify Kafka’s status as the arch-prophet of deadly bureaucratic inhumanity, found it a ‘pathogenic book’ and felt tainted by his work.

Hruska has written an engaging, often moving, work, more aphoristic personal essay than systematic study. She understands why Kafka appealed to homeless and displaced creative minds, around Europe and beyond, amid the storms of 20th-century history. And she explains that their involvement with this most unsheltered of writers formed part of a quest for an impregnable pokoj: a Czech word for private dwelling-place, or inner sanctum, which she glosses as ‘the elementary cell of the self’. Hruska (whose grandmother’s name was Ludmilla Kafka) eloquently grasps that Kafka’s early champions navigated an era of genocide, dictatorship and total war, with ‘the possibility of a theft, a crash, an expulsion, a disaster’ forever at their doors. Pretty often – as with Schulz, murdered by a German officer in 1942 – that possibility smashed through into actuality.

Yet, in a rather Kafkaesque act of obliteration, the Muirs appear nowhere in the body of this work (they do merit three citations in the bibliography). It’s not as if Hruska, as a Francophone, chooses to ignore English translations. She has a section on Eugene Jolas, the avant-garde Franco-American editor who translated a few stories, and shows how Jewish academic exiles made Kafka ‘a mainstay of Ivy League curricula’ in postwar America. She says not a word, though, about the ubiquitous English versions – the Muirs’ – that originally embedded his fiction in Anglophone literature courses everywhere.

Neither does Hruska dismiss ‘flawed’ translations, nor treat Kafka’s foreign reception as a story of progress towards glitch-free comprehension. Quite the contrary: she respects early versions as artefacts of their age and makers, and – channelling Borges – finds that: ‘Each translation leaves behind a space for the next one, as if the Tower of Babel was being built as it collapsed.’ Outsiders translating the ultimate outsider, the Muirs would slot neatly into the thesis and the mood of Kafkaesque. Hruska applauds, for instance, the work of Alexandre Vialatte: a charmingly irreverent Auvergnat maverick who brought Kafka into French as a labour of love. After Vialatte’s death in 1971, he suffered the indignity of having his translations publicly, pompously ‘corrected’ in the canonical Pléiade edition. ‘Perhaps’, as Hruska puts it, ‘the most important thing was to bring this unknown, uneducated nobody from the Auvergne down a peg or two.’

Since the Muirs faced a parallel devaluation, it’s sad that this account of literary occlusion and forgetting should itself rub out their memory. More approachable, less analytic, than Woods’s Kafka Translated, Hruska’s book may become the go-to volume for lay readers who want to know how Kafka made his way from the far fringes of German-speaking Jewish culture in late-Habsburg Bohemia into the universal currency of literature. Regrettably, it effaces one crucial stage of that journey, and the writers who enabled it.

In later life, Willa Muir feared just such erasure. ‘Edwin’s poems will live,’ she confided to her diary – ‘But of himself only a legend. Of me, only a very distorted legend.’ Not entirely: Faber does keep Edwin’s poetry in print, while Canongate has a portmanteau anthology (Imagined Selves) of her fiction and essays. Yet their Kafka translations still circulate, still introduce newcomers to a spirit and a style that, once read, will stay with them forever. Often scorned, now ignored, the pair have not quite yet endured the fate of Gregor as Metamorphosis ends, reduced to a dry husk to be swept out with the trash. ‘You don’t need to bother about how to get rid of the thing next door,’ their charlady tells the Samsas (in the Muirs’, still supremely involving, translation): ‘It’s been seen to already.’