The Muirs' translations from the 1930s created the Kafka that English readers knew for half a century — and embedded choices that later translators would spend decades undoing.
The Translations That Made Kafka
When Max Brod arranged for Kafka's work to appear in English, the task fell to a Scottish couple living in intermittent exile across Europe. Willa and Edwin Muir were poets and critics with a serious investment in German-language modernism; they had already translated Hermann Broch and were working their way through a range of Central European writers whom British and American publishers were only beginning to notice. Their version of Das Schloss (The Castle) appeared in 1930, Der Proceß (The Trial) in 1937, and the stories followed over subsequent years. For the better part of five decades, if you read Kafka in English, you read the Muirs.
That is a remarkable degree of cultural leverage for any two translators to hold. The Kafka most readers encountered — grave, stately, steeped in a slightly archaic diction — was shaped as much by their literary sensibility as by the original German. That is not a criticism; it is simply how translation works, and acknowledging it is the beginning of reading Kafka well.
What the Muirs Did, and What It Costs
The most discussed of their choices is register. Willa Muir, who did most of the actual translating work though the couple took joint credit, tended toward a formal, slightly elevated English. Where Kafka's German is oddly bureaucratic yet also nervous and intimate, the Muir versions can settle into a dignity that smooths the strangeness. The German of Der Proceß, for instance, moves in long, coiling sentences that hold contradictory information in suspension; the Muir translation is readable in a slightly more conventional sense, which means some of the friction — the sense of a mind turning on itself — is reduced.
A second issue is gendered language and the treatment of idiomatic German constructions. Willa Muir was aware of these tensions; her memoir Belonging shows a translator who thought carefully about what she was doing. But conventions of mid-century English publishing pushed toward certain solutions — a smoothed-out surface, readable paragraphs, an avoidance of the uncanny flatness that Kafka's prose can achieve in German — that later translators would identify as precisely the thing needing correction.
The Muirs also worked from Brod's edited texts, which in some cases differed from what manuscript evidence later revealed. That is not a failing attributable to them; those manuscripts were not yet available or fully examined. But it means their versions carry two layers of editorial mediation: Brod's, and their own.
What Remains
None of this diminishes what the Muirs achieved. They introduced Kafka to a generation of English-language readers who had no other means of access, and they did so with genuine literary intelligence. Phrases from their translations lodged in the critical vocabulary. When later translators — working from better texts and with different ideas about what Kafka's German actually sounds like — began to retranslate the same sentences, they were inevitably arguing with the Muirs, even when they didn't say so directly.
The Muirs made Kafka a major writer in English. What they also did, almost necessarily, was make him a particular kind of major writer — one inflected by 1930s literary English, by a Scots Protestant seriousness, by mid-century transatlantic taste. The German original is stranger, more affectless, harder to place. Getting to that version requires, first, knowing what the Muirs gave us.
End of article · Translating Kafka