Every retranslation is a reading, not a repair
The common explanation for retranslation is obsolescence: earlier versions age, their idioms curdle, and someone has to update them. That story fits Kafka poorly. Willa and Edwin Muir produced their English versions in the 1930s, and those versions remain readable. What has drawn successive translators — Breon Mitchell, Michael Hofmann, Susan Bernofsky, and others — back to the same pages is not that the Muirs were wrong. It is that Kafka's German contains genuine interpretive pressure that no single English text can fully hold.
The pressure begins at the level of the word. Take Ungeziefer in Die Verwandlung: an archaic collective noun for creatures unfit for domestic use, with no clean English singular. The word Kafka used was not 'insect', and each translator's choice — vermin, creature, some other approximation — commits the English reader to one emphasis and closes off others that the German keeps open. That is not a flaw in prior translations. It is a structural feature of the source: the text is genuinely underdetermined, and retranslation is how English keeps circling a meaning that no single version can nail down.
The same logic operates at the level of register and rhythm. Kafka's prose is formal without being stiff, bureaucratic without being cold, almost ceremonial in its deadpan. Calibrating that tone in a target language is an interpretive act, and the calibration changes as literary culture shifts — what reads as eerie precision in one decade can read as stiff pastiche in another. Retranslators are not correcting their predecessors so much as re-inhabiting a text that keeps asking different questions of whoever sits down with it.
This is why arguments about translation quickly become arguments about meaning. When four published English versions of a single sentence diverge substantially, the divergence reveals something real about the German — that it contains several simultaneously defensible readings. Kafka's syntax, his use of modal verbs, his deliberate narrative distances all resist resolution.
Retranslation, then, is not a sign that anyone failed. It is evidence that the work has not been exhausted — that readers keep bringing their own full attention to a text that gives back something different each time.
End of article · Translating Kafka