Published on December 25, 2024 at 7:33 p.m.
4 mins. reading
Ten versions of Kafka starts from an observation: “The year 2024 does not mark the centenary of Kafka's death, but that of his birth.” Indeed, the day after his death, Kafka will be translated by writers and poets in the most disparate languages. In Romanian by Paul Celan, in Italian by Primo Levi, both survivors of the camps and suicides; in Polish by Bruno Schulz, shot by an SS man; lovingly in Czech by Milena Jesenská, who died in deportation; in Spanish by Jorge Luis Borges; in English by Eugene Jolas in the review Transition; in Yiddish by Melech Ravitch; in Hebrew, by Yitzhak Schenhar, in French by Alexandre Vialatte from Auvergne. Its first Russian translators had to remain anonymous, under the regime of Soviet terror.
Throughout this labyrinthine journey into which she leads her reader, Maïa Hruska celebrates life through the exploration of History, which endlessly tells of languages, borders and literature. She could endorse this statement by the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin: “A good translation has a single author who bears two names: that of the author and that of his translator.”
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