Mark Harman (translator)

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Mark Harman (born 1951) is an Irish-American translator, most notably of Franz Kafka's work, and professor emeritus of German and English at Elizabethtown College, Pennsylvania. [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] Harman discusses his translation in a preface to his translation of The Castle. [3]

His translation of Kafka's Amerika: The Missing Person, more widely known as Amerika, was published in 2008. [4] His translation of selected stories by Kafka was published in 2024. [5] [6]

The New York Review of Books wrote that his translation of Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet [7] was "likely to become the standard one".[ citation needed ]

References

  1. ↑ Banville, John. "Kafka: Selected Stories, edited by Mark Harman review — the master who never wasted a word" The Guardian, 9 July 2024.
  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. ↑ Kafka, Franz (1998). The Castle: A New Translation, Based on the Restored Text, Translated with a preface by Mark Harman. New York: Schocken Books. ISBN   0-8052-4118-3.
  4. ↑ Kafka, Franz (2008). Amerika: The Missing Person, trans. Mark Harman. New York: Schocken Books. ISBN   978-0-8052-4211-9.
  5. ↑ Kafka, Franz (2024). Selected Stories, translated and edited by Mark Harman. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. ISBN   978-0674737983.
  6. ↑ Banville, John. "Kafka: Selected Stories, edited by Mark Harman review — the master who never wasted a word" The Guardian, 9 July 2024.
  7. ↑ Letters to a Young Poet — Rainer Maria Rilke. Harvard University Press. 18 April 2011. ISBN   9780674052451.
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