The Mitteleuropean writer owes much of his fame to the gifted translators who took his words out of German and into the world
Hruska’s opening correction is brisk: “The crucial event of the year 1924 was not Kafka’s death,” she writes, “which was met with almost total indifference. It was the fact that, in the aftermath of his death, ten writers around the world felt a new sense of mission: to translate him.” Hruska shifts the light from the author to the emissaries. Her cast of translator-protagonists includes anonymous Soviet samizdat hands; Eugene Jolas (English); Jorge Luis Borges (Spanish); Paul Celan (Romanian); Melech Ravitch (Yiddish); Primo Levi (Italian); Alexandre Vialatte (French); Bruno Schulz (Polish); the makers of Hebrew Kafka; and Milena Jesenská, Kafka’s lover and first intermediary into Czech. Kafka’s first translators, Hruska says, were his “discoverers”, his “prophets”, his “messengers”. Her interest lies in first encounters, those early acts of importation which remain, in her phrase, “impregnable to criticism”. Hruska is drawn, too, to the dark rhyme between Kafka’s fate (he succumbed to tuberculosis at age 40) and that of his first carriers, who were “swept along by Kafka’s words before their life was swept away by something else”: blindness (Borges), exile (Jolas), murder (Schulz), the concentration camp (Levi and Jesenská) or suicide (Celan).
