Kafka Lightens Up

The last 10 years have seen subtle but important changes in Kafka's American reputation. Until the late 1990s, our standard Kafka translations were those done in the 1930s by Edwin and Willa Muir. Then, in 1998, Schocken Books published vital new translations of "The Castle" and "The Trial." Not only were these based on restored German texts — and hence fundamentally more accurate than the Muirs' — but they sought to combat the Muirs' early and incomplete idea of Kafka, as printed in their old introductions.

Max Brod, Kafka's famous executor, not only saved his manuscripts from the fire; he also packaged them. Drawing perhaps on his own Zionism, Brod foregrounded a religious Kafka, and it was this Kafka that the Muirs translated for English-language audiences. Their Kafka was chiefly a religious allegorist, alienated from modern life and searching for something deeper and more secure. Modern life was a trial, and he wanted no part of it. It is this Kafka whose solemn eyes have looked out from Kafka paperbacks for generations.

But with the Schocken translations and Michael Hofmann's 2002 translation of "Amerika: The Man Who Disappeared," a wiser and more colorful Kafka may be taking hold, at least in the world of American publishing. This new Kafka is funny — as David Foster Wallace pointed out in his essay "Laughing with Kafka" (1998), he is often much funnier than American students give him credit for. "Amerika" is by the far the most vaudevillian of Kafka's three novels, and also the least read, and Mr. Hofmann's retranslation seemed to showcase a neglected facet of the writer's work.

Now a new volume, "Metamorphosis and Other Stories" (Penguin, 320 pages, $14), also translated by Mr. Hofmann, rounds out this generation of major Kafka translations. By positioning this volume as a collection of everything that Kafka published in his lifetime, Mr. Hofmann pokes another hole in the old image of Kafka as "someone we are encouraged to think of as a publication-averse recluse." Many of the stories collected here, especially the title story, are extremely well-known. But by packaging "The Metamorphosis" — which has lost the definite article in this translation — with 42 other stories and prose sketches in a Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, the publishers make a bid to change the way new readers are introduced to Kafka.

Like many recent Penguin Classics Deluxe Editions, the cover of "Metamorphosis" has been illustrated by a well-known graphic artist ("Candide" got Chris Ware, "Metamorphosis" gets Sammy Harkham). The stark, modernist faces of yesterday's Kafka paperbacks are gone. One of Harkham's drawings, for instance, shows a messy bourgeois scene: Three men sit grumpily at dinner, while a young woman plays a violin and an older man snores in his armchair. A preponderance of detail — armchair, side whiskers, grandfather clock — combines to give the illustration a 19th-century, rather than modern, ambience. And over the whole image looms what seems at first to be a giant willow tree, massing in wavy black bunches that somehow droop, dividing into tendrils, over the bourgeois furniture — until we realize that the black bunches are no tree but, quite sensibly, hordes of little black beetles.

The knowing question to ask about any translation of "The Metamorphosis" concerns the translation of "Ungeziefer [vermin]," the designation of just what Gregor Samsa has become, in Kafka's first sentence. Mr. Hofmann has "cockroach," a controversial choice. A cockroach, after all, is a very specific creature, with seismic connotations. Vladimir Nabokov devoted a lecture to this question (he, the butterfly collector, classified it a beetle), but he prefaces his deliberations with this caveat: "If Kafka's 'The Metamorphosis' strikes anyone as something more than an entomological fantasy, then I congratulate him on having joined the ranks of good and great readers." As a risk taken, the "cockroach" shouldn't matter much, but it does, because it's the kind of risk Mr. Hofmann always takes. He is an exceptional, perhaps masterful translator, but he is also a practicing poet, and often his translations are too inspired. His skill is especially apparent in Kafka's shortest sketches: Where other translators can only brick together an odd collection of sentences, Mr. Hofmann makes a single cast, and it works. But even in a short sketch like "The New Advocate," Mr. Hofmann overreaches. A simple word, such as "Bücher" [books], becomes "folios," perhaps because the context is legal. He over-translates — he takes context clues into account and selects a word that is too specific, that suits one very vivid interpretation, but closes out others, and, more significantly, changes the level of the author's diction. "Cockroach" will appeal to new readers; it is muscular, it is precise, but it is other than what Kafka says.

If the current round of Kafka translations is not just a routine update but, as I have suggested, an important change in consensus, one that colors in the black-and-white image of Kafka, then it makes sense that a translator would sometimes choose the more colorful word. Mr. Hofmann, in his many excellent translations from the German, always makes brave choices. But when the translated author has the classic status of Kafka, we habitually resent the translator's benevolent interference. This puts the translator in a difficult position — and in 99 out of 100 instances, Mr. Hofmann has extricated himself beautifully.

blytal@nysun.com