Kafka translated: how translators have shaped our reading of Kafka
The Translator, (2014)Abstract
Revisión del libro: Kafka translated: how translators have shaped our reading of Kafka, by Michelle Woods, New York and London, Bloomsbury Academic, 2014, 283 pp., US\$100 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-4411-4991-6; US\$29.95 (paperback), ISBN 978-1-4411-9771-9 In Kafka Translated, Michelle Woods has given the readers of Franz Kafka a magisterial engagement with the author’s iconic status in post-Holocaust and post-communist popular culture. Hers is a study that rereads his work through the lens of their translations and adaptations. By claiming that what stands between our moment in history and Kafka’s obviously influences how we see him, Woods also proves that one cannot possibly expect translators at distinctive moments in history, with particular life stories, to give us the same author. He has to be dissimilar now from who he was in the 1920s, and it is the translator’s job to make him so, rather than pretend they are giving us ‘the original’ Kafka