Kafka in translation: what the titles decide

Translating Kafka is difficult, and not only because his sentences are long. The real problem is that Kafka is deliberately ambiguous. The words he chooses carry several meanings in German, and the translator must pick one. Every choice produces a different Kafka and hides the others.

Take the title “Die Verwandlung,” usually rendered in English as “The Metamorphosis.” The English word suggests a biological transformation, even a magical one. The German is plainer: a change, a becoming-different. Kafka never says Gregor became something lower; he says he became something else. The difference is small, and it changes the whole mood of the story.

Three problems

The translator faces three recurring problems. The first is ambiguity: choose a word with multiple meanings, or clarify the one the author probably intended? The second is register: Kafka's sentences sometimes sound like an office report and sometimes like a prayer. Flatten them into one voice and the story goes smooth. The third is comedy: much of Kafka's humor lives in bureaucratic phrasing. Make it natural and the joke disappears.

This is why translations of Kafka differ so much. One reads “The Trial” as a political novel, another as a philosophical one, a third as a novel about language. None is wrong. Each illuminates part of the text and leaves the rest in shadow.

Titles as interpretations

“Der Process” becomes “The Trial” in English, but the German word also means “process.” Kafka capitalized it, as if it were a proper name. The English title chooses the legal meaning and quietly drops the procedural one. A translator who chose “The Process” would push the novel toward bureaucracy; “The Trial” pushes it toward guilt and punishment.

“Das Schloss” has the same problem: castle or palace? A castle is military and cold; a palace is ornate and inhabited. Kafka had both in mind and chose neither. The translator must decide, and the decision shapes the book's landscape before the reader has met a single character.

Reading in translation

The best way to read Kafka in translation is to accept that you are reading an interpretation, not a neutral copy. If you can, compare two translations of the same page. The differences tell you where the original is ambiguous and where the translator made a decision.

And if you do not read German, do not worry. Kafka knew his readers would often meet him in translation; he lived in Prague, a city where at least three languages shared the streets. Perhaps that is why he wrote that literature is, in the end, about something that cannot be said completely in any language.