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Franz Kafka
Letter to my Father
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King James and Kafka
Howard Colyer's translation of Franz Kafka's "Letter to my Father"
Kafka was born in Prague, 125 years ago. He spent the greater part of his life in this city, where the majority spoke Czech. Kafka wrote in German. German was the language that shaped his thoughts and feelings. And he used the German language to create his own world with thoughts and feelings which so many readers today still want to share and understand.
In 1919 he had a row with his father who opposed the son's intention to marry Julie Wohryzek. Deeply hurt and angry, he decided to answer his father in the form of a letter. Naturally, he wrote it in German. Howard Colyer, novelist and contributor to London magazines, now presents a new English version of it. Although many publications concerning Kafka's life and work are still to come during this anniversary year, it is a safe bet to say that the "Letter to my Father" is an important one.
Kafka's letter is an outburst - and a clear, sharp, cold analysis of his relationship with his father. It is an act of despair - and results in a moment of tenderness and hope. It displays anger - and a deep longing for reconciliation. It is a son's liberation from his father's spell - and his ultimate surrender to it. It was never delivered to its addressee - and yet today is known to readers all over the world. It is one of the very few reliable sources for understanding Kafka's life and work - and thus it is a key text of 20th century literature. Viewing it as such, as a literary text in its own right, Colyer approached the task of transferring this letter into the English language.
Instead of closely following the particular and, to an English reader, often peculiar lines of German grammar, he carefully, yet with determination reshapes Kafka's thoughts as if they had been written in English. In a style consciously taking up the English of the King James Bible, he keeps the characteristic momentum of the original, the specific tempo which is the result of the author acting out his feelings. Colyer reduces the number of subordinate clauses, avoids hierarchical structures wherever possible, eliminates redundancies, and in doing so, yes, occasionally even improves on the original, as for example in this passage regarding the father and son's relationship:
"But we are as we are, and marriage is your domain and so it is forbidden to me. At times I imagine the map of the world laid out and you stretched across it. And all that is left for my life are the areas you don't cover or can't reach. And because I see you as a giant, my territory is miserable and small and doesn't include marriage."
Following this always fascinating and in some passages just beautiful text, the English reader may forget that there is a model in a foreign language. He follows Kafka's accusations against his father, probably one of the most influential mediocre persons in the whole history of literature. He tries to grasp Kafka's reflections about the impossibility to live and write - and about the impossibility to seriously regard anything as life which is not writing. And above all, the reader struggles to understand Kafka's idea of marriage, which in such depth may otherwise only be discussed in the work of the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard.
It is idle to speculate whether Franz Kafka would have liked this approach of transforming his letter into the English language. But if he hadn't like it, it is at least very tempting to imagine him formulating his dislike in a language similar to the one used in this translation.
© Roland Große Holtforth, Literaturtest
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