Mark Harman (translator)

Last updated

Mark Harman (born 1951) is an Irish-American translator, most notably of Franz Kafka's work, and professor emeritus at Elizabethtown College, Pennsylvania, United States, where he served as Professor of German & English and College Professor of International Studies. [1]

Contents

Life

A native of Dublin, Harman studied at University College Dublin and Yale University, where he took his BA/MA and PhD, respectively. He has taught German and Irish literature at Dartmouth, Oberlin, Franklin & Marshall, and the University of Pennsylvania. He is editor and co-translator of Robert Walser Rediscovered: Stories, Fairy-Tale Plays, and Critical Responses (1985) and translator of Hermann Hesse, Soul of the Age (1991, edited by Theodore Ziolkowski). He is also a freelance translator for many newspapers and scholarly journals.[ citation needed ]

Harman gained public recognition for his 1998 translation of Franz Kafka's The Castle, for which he won the Lois Roth Award of the Modern Language Association. As a translator, Harman wrote, "Translation is a complex issue, and retranslation doubly so," referencing the double challenge to confront both the text in the original and in other translations. Harman has characterized the current moment as a "great era for retranslation" to reexamine the versions through which generations of English-speakers have encountered important works from other tongues. [2] A detailed discussion of his work with Kafka's unfinished novel may be found at The Castle, Critical Edition, Harman Translation.[ citation needed ]

His translation of Kafka's Amerika: The Missing Person, more widely known as Amerika, was published in November 2008.[ citation needed ]

The New York Review of Books wrote that his translation of Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet was "likely to become the standard one". [3]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Franz Kafka</span> Bohemian writer (1883–1924)

Franz Kafka was a German-speaking Bohemian Jewish novelist and writer from Prague. He is widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature. His work fuses elements of realism and the fantastic. It typically features isolated protagonists facing bizarre or surrealistic predicaments and incomprehensible socio-bureaucratic powers. It has been interpreted as exploring themes of alienation, existential anxiety, guilt, and absurdity. His best known works include the novella The Metamorphosis and novels The Trial and The Castle. The term Kafkaesque has entered English to describe absurd situations like those depicted in his writing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rainer Maria Rilke</span> Austrian poet and writer (1875–1926)

René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke, known as Rainer Maria Rilke, was an Austrian poet and novelist. Acclaimed as an idiosyncratic and expressive poet, he is widely recognized as a significant writer in the German language. His work is viewed by critics and scholars as possessing undertones of mysticism, exploring themes of subjective experience and disbelief. His writings include one novel, several collections of poetry and several volumes of correspondence.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Max Brod</span> Bohemian-Israeli author, composer, and journalist (1884–1968)

Max Brod was a Bohemian-born Israeli author, composer, and journalist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Edwin Muir</span> Scottish writer (1887-1959)

Edwin Muir CBE was a Scottish poet, novelist and translator. Born on a farm in Deerness, a parish of Orkney, Scotland, he is remembered for his deeply felt and vivid poetry written in plain language and with few stylistic preoccupations.

<i>Amerika</i> (novel) 1927 novel by Franz Kafka

Amerika, (German working title Der Verschollene, "The Missing") also known as The Man Who Disappeared (Amerika), Amerika: The Missing Person and Lost in America, is the incomplete first novel by author Franz Kafka (1883–1924), written between 1911 and 1914 and published posthumously in 1927. The novel originally began as a short story titled "The Stoker". The novel incorporates many details of the experiences of his relatives who had emigrated to the United States. The commonly used title Amerika is from the edition of the text put together by Kafka's close friend, Max Brod, after Kafka's death in 1924. It has been published in at least three major English-language versions: as Amerika, translated by Edwin and Willa Muir (1938); as The Man Who Disappeared (Amerika), translated by Michael Hoffmann (1996); and as Amerika: The Missing Person, translated by Mark Harman (2008).

<i>The Castle</i> (novel) 1926 novel by Franz Kafka

The Castle is the last novel by Franz Kafka. In it a protagonist known only as "K." arrives in a village and struggles to gain access to the mysterious authorities who govern it from a castle supposedly owned by Graf Westwest.

Burton Pike was an American translator of Robert Musil, as well as a distinguished professor emeritus of comparative literature and Germanic languages and literature at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Michael Hofmann is a German-born poet, translator, and critic. The Guardian has described him as "arguably the world's most influential translator of German into English".

Erich Heller was a British essayist, known particularly for his critical studies in German-language philosophy and literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

<i>The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka</i>

The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka is a compilation of all of Kafka's short stories. With the exception of three novels, this collection includes all of his narrative work. The book was originally edited by Nahum N. Glatzer and published by Schocken Books in 1971. It was reprinted in 1995 with an introduction by John Updike.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Franz Kafka bibliography</span>

Franz Kafka, a German-language writer of novels and short stories who is regarded by critics as one of the most influential authors of the 20th century, was trained as a lawyer and later employed by an insurance company, writing only in his spare time.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rio Preisner</span> American poet

Rio Preisner was a Czech poet, philosopher, translator, and scholar of Czech and German literature.

Martin Greenberg was an American poet and translator.

The Kafka Project is a non-profit literary research initiative founded in 1998 at San Diego State University. Working on behalf of the Kafka estate in London, England, the SDSU Kafka Project is working to recover materials written by Franz Kafka, the widely acclaimed modernist author, stolen by the Gestapo in 1933. The search continues in Eastern Europe and Israel.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ventseslav Konstantinov</span> Bulgarian writer and translator (1940–2019)

Ventseslav Konstantinov was a Bulgarian writer, aphorist and translator of German and English literature.

Vladimír Kafka was a Czech literature professor and a noted translator from German to Czech.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Felstiner</span> American journalist

John Felstiner, Professor Emeritus of English at Stanford University, was an American literary critic, translator, and poet. His interests included poetry in various languages, environmental and ecologic poems, literary translation, Vietnam era poetry and Holocaust studies. John Felstiner died in February 2017 at the age of 80. He had been suffering from the effects of progressive aphasia at his time of death, at a hospice near Stanford.

Milan Richter is a Slovak writer, playwright, translator, publisher and a former high-ranking diplomat.

Mark Amerika is an American artist, theorist, novelist and professor of Art and Art History at the University of Colorado. He is a graduate of the Literary Arts program at Brown University, where he received his MFA in creative writing in 1997.

David Pollock Young is an American poet, translator, editor, literary critic and professor. His work includes 11 volumes of poetry, translations from Italian, Chinese, German, Czech, Dutch, and Spanish, critical work on Shakespeare, Yeats, and modernist poets, and landmark anthologies of prose poetry and magical realism. He co-founded and edited the magazine FIELD: Contemporary Poetry and Poetics for its 50 years of publication. Young is also Longman Professor Emeritus of English at Oberlin College, and is the recipient of awards including NEA and Guggenheim fellowships.

References

  1. Dr. Mark Harman, Elizabethtown College, Pennsylvania, USA.
  2. Harman, Mark, Digging the Pit of Babel: Retranslating Franz Kafka's Castle New Literary History, New Literary History , Volume 27, Number 2, pp. 291–311, Spring 1996. doi : 10.1353/nlh.1996.0022
  3. Letters to a Young Poet — Rainer Maria Rilke. Harvard University Press. 18 April 2011. ISBN   9780674052451.