Paul Reitter in The Hedgehog Review:
When I taught German in graduate school back in the late 1990s, my fellow instructors and I often used a line from Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial to illustrate a point about grammar that was also a point about untranslatability.1 In German, as in English, the regular subjunctive form goes mainly with wishes, counterfactual conditions, statements, and questions, as well as with polite requests. But the German form has an additional function: It can mark speculation—or, really, ambiguity—in a way that’s hard to match in English. Kafka’s line evokes a vivid sense of this gap, which, in the first place, is why we turned to it here. However, we had further reasons for doing that, starting with the fact that untranslatability is one of Kafka’s great themes.
Untranslatability is also one of George Steiner’s great themes—and one of his central concerns in his commentary on Kafka. It would be hard to think of a literary scholar or critic who has done more to draw attention to this aspect of Kafka’s work, to reveal it as a guiding principle. In his essay “K,” for instance, Steiner cites, at length, a previously underexamined diary entry in which Kafka discusses how for him the German words Mutter and Vater fail “to approximate to” Jewish mothers and fathers. Kafka suggests that his psychic life was shaped by this linguistic misalignment; as a result of it, he “did not always love” his mother as “she deserved” to be loved and as he was capable of loving her. Steiner goes on to read “The Burrow,” one of Kafka’s last stories, as “a parable” of “the artist unhoused in his language,” a point he makes to explain nothing less than “the fantastic nakedness and economy” of Kafka’s prose.2
More here.
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