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]
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
- ↑ Banville, John. "Kafka: Selected Stories, edited by Mark Harman review — the master who never wasted a word" The Guardian, 9 July 2024.
- ↑ 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
- ↑ 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.
- ↑ Kafka, Franz (2008). Amerika: The Missing Person, trans. Mark Harman. New York: Schocken Books. ISBN 978-0-8052-4211-9.
- ↑ Kafka, Franz (2024). Selected Stories, translated and edited by Mark Harman. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0674737983.
- ↑ Banville, John. "Kafka: Selected Stories, edited by Mark Harman review — the master who never wasted a word" The Guardian, 9 July 2024.
- ↑ Letters to a Young Poet — Rainer Maria Rilke. Harvard University Press. 18 April 2011. ISBN 9780674052451.
External links
- Missing Persons: Two Little Riddles About Kafka and Berlin
- Jeremy Adler. "K. Rations: Over the decades, readers have been offered multiple versions of 'The Castle.' Has the definitive one arrived?" Discussion of English translations of The Castle, The New York Times, March 29, 1998.
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