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Untranslated World of Kafka's Notebooks by Brett Robbins |
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Each new language we learn is an increase in
experience—and there are amazingly many languages....And all these languages are
essentially not translatable!
For some readers, Franz Kafka’s Diaries are every bit as valuable a literary legacy as his more popular novels and short stories. They provide a revealing glimpse into his imagination, insight into the creative influences and impulses shaping his fiction. It’s no wonder, then, that the 1991 English translation of Kafka’s Blue Octavo Notebooks took the English-speaking world by storm. Suddenly we had 100 pages of Notebooks at our disposal, to supplement the 500 pages of Diaries already available in our native tongue. What an embarrassment of riches! This new discovery was bound to reveal things about Kafka we hadn’t known before. Perhaps it would even somewhat alter the way we thought about him, his work, his methodology. This was indeed a literary event whose significance was incalculable. That is, unless you could read German. When the Blue Octavo Notebooks were first published in America, many were under the mistaken impression that they had been recently discovered, unearthed from a source other than the legendary pile of manuscripts which Kafka had requested that his friend Max Brod burn to the ground after his death. In point of fact, the Notebooks had been published in Germany at the same time as the rest of Kafka’s works and had therefore been available to the German-speaking world since 1948. This begs the question: If the Notebooks had been available all these years, why had they not been translated earlier? Quite simply because no publisher had been willing to commission a translator for the job, since there was (and is) very little demand in the English-speaking world for notebooks as a genre. For notebooks are unconventional in format—a series of short comments and observations that often have no logical connection to what precedes or follows them. Thus they are not as marketable as novels or plays or other self-contained, stylistically consistent works of art (although many would argue that the notebooks of strong authors exhibit both of these qualities). Furthermore, notebooks appeal more to writers, or at least to readers with an interest in the creative process, than to the general public at large, who tend to buy books to be entertained more or less passively. The reason we never find a "Notebooks" section in American bookstores is that the segment of the English-speaking population interested in such things is relatively small, with a correspondingly feeble demand for them. The situation in continental Europe, however, is markedly different. In France and Germany, for instance, the general public tends to be much more interested in the creative process of the writer. It is commonplace to find, mixed in with the novels, short stories, and plays of authors such as Camus and St. Exupery, Hesse and Handke, several volumes of notebooks—in mass-market paperback no less! With few exceptions, notebooks in America have a utilitarian purpose: they gather dust in our desk drawers until we use the ideas contained within them for a story or other "serious" work. We rarely share them with our public because our public wants finished product, not the spontaneous outpourings of creativity. They want to be entertained, not challenged. In Europe they actually publish and read notebooks as works of art in their own right—as though there were an audience for them—and there is. Case in point: all 1000 pages or so of Kafka’s Notebooks have been published in German. Of these, only the 100-page Blue Octavo Notebooks—which American publishers have been so successful at convincing us to be thankful for—have been translated into English. On the bright side, however, the 500-page Diaries have more or less been translated in their entirety. There is a method to this madness, however: American publishers felt that the dated-entry format of the diaries would at least give them the appearance of coherence and autobiographical relevance, while the random, amorphic Notebooks lacked a proper marketing pigeonhole to fit them into, and thus remained (and remain) untranslated. In other words, diaries are more marketable than notebooks, and for that reason alone we in the English-speaking world are familiar with Kafka’s Diaries but not his Notebooks. But why should we care in the first place? Why should we be interested in the notebooks of writers at all? Aren’t novels and plays and short stories enough for us? Well, there is more to it. It is not a matter of quantity but of quality. While notebooks lack the polish and belletristic glamour of finished literary works, they reveal a more spontaneous, unguarded, even solipsistic side of the author in question. As a result, we glean direct insight into 1) the mechanics of his creative process that we otherwise rely on interviews and letters to provide indirect insight into, and 2) gain a more complete understanding of his life and personality—the force behind the words—which we normally entrust to biographers (who tend to privilege only those details that compliment their overarching thesis and corroborate the stereotype of Kafka as the flawless literary craftsman who effortlessly towers over our feeble attempts to comprehend him in mere mortal terms—because this is the Kafka who sells books and spawns articles and keeps German literature departments well-staffed). But what about the Kafka we don’t know, the Kafka who slips through the cracks, the Kafka hidden in the 900 pages of untranslated Notebooks? This is the undiscovered Kafka, the true Kafka, the kindred artist who actually labors at his craft and does not hesitate to abandon an idea or direction if it proves unfruitful. For instance, consider the following short—albeit tantalizing and by no means uncharacteristic—passage, in which Kafka tries to shape a transitory impression into permanent form, then, unsatisfied, leaves off in mid-sentence and tries again, then, still unsatisfied, leaves off in mid-sentence and goes in an entirely different direction, eventually veering from this route as well:
He Looks out the Window He looks out the window. A gloomy day. It is November. It seems to him that each month has its own special meaning, but there is something even more special about November. There is for the time being nothing to reveal this: only rain mixed with snow. But perhaps that is just the external view, which always deceives. Because people as a whole adapt to everything the same way and one judges primarily from their view, it should never actually be possible for one to observe a change in public opinion. But one is also human, and although he too struggles to adapt and judges accordingly, he nevertheless knows how to learn from the experiences he has: that the traffic below does not stand still but holds its course, on road and off, with determined, untiring, impenetrable superiority. This power of adaptability,
A gloomy day. It is barely November. Each month naturally has its own special meaning, but there is something even more special about November. There is now nothing to reveal this: only rain mixed with snow. But that is just the external view which always deceives. Because people adapt to everything the same way and one judges primarily from their view The sick man had lain alone for many hours, the fever had come back a bit, he had only been able to begin a light half-sleep here and there, moreover his weakness had prevented him from stirring...
What a privilege it is to witness Kafka’s creative process in real time! And what a shame it is to limit ourselves to English and to pretend that this undiscovered world—this untidy, experimental, indeed vulnerable side of Kafka—does not even exist! It’s there alright, waiting for the reader willing to learn German, or the translator willing to take on the immense responsibility of introducing new, unfamiliar, perhaps even contradictory aspects of Kafka to the English-speaking world. Incidentally, of the 1000 pages of untranslated Kafka Notebooks, 20% of them consist of travel notebooks. Imagine that: 200 pages of Kafka’s travel notebooks! They will perhaps be the Blue Octavo Notebooks of the future. But how far into the future? And why wait if we don’t have to? Indeed, in these travel notebooks alone a whole world has been heretofore neglected unnecessarily by the English-speaking world. But there’s more: as if that weren’t enough, the notebooks of many other great European authors are just as voluminous—and revealing—as those of Kafka and remain similarly untranslated into English, crying out for discovery. The 4000 untranslated pages of Nietzsche’s posthumous notebooks, for instance. So the next time you wonder if you should bother learning a foreign language, and rationalize to yourself that your English translations are sufficient for your purposes, realize that it’s not only a question of how accurate the translations are, but of what has been translated in the first place.
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